But this employment of the faculty of judgement, which makes us feel
our own cognitive powers, is not yet the interest in actions and in
their morality itself. It merely causes us to take pleasure in
engaging in such criticism, and it gives to virtue or the
disposition that conforms to moral laws a form of beauty, which is
admired, but not on that account sought after (laudatur et alget);
as everything the contemplation of which produces a consciousness of
the harmony of our powers of conception, and in which we feel the
whole of our faculty of knowledge (understanding and imagination)
strengthened, produces a satisfaction, which may also be
communicated to others, while nevertheless the existence of the object
remains indifferent to us, being only regarded as the occasion of
our becoming aware of the capacities in us which are elevated above
mere animal nature. Now, however, the second exercise comes in, the
living exhibition of morality of character by examples, in which
attention is directed to purity of will, first only as a negative
perfection, in so far as in an action done from duty no motives of
inclination have any influence in determining it. By this the
pupil's attention is fixed upon the consciousness of his freedom,
and although this renunciation at first excites a feeling of pain,
nevertheless, by its withdrawing the pupil from the constraint of even
real wants, there is proclaimed to him at the same time a
deliverance from the manifold dissatisfaction in which all these wants
entangle him, and the mind is made capable of receiving the
sensation of satisfaction from other sources. The heart is freed and
lightened of a burden that always secretly presses on it, when
instances of pure moral resolutions reveal to the man an inner faculty
of which otherwise he has no right knowledge, the inward freedom to
release himself from the boisterous importunity of inclinations, to
such a degree that none of them, not even the dearest, shall have
any influence on a resolution, for which we are now to employ our
reason. Suppose a case where I alone know that the wrong is on my
side, and although a free confession of it and the offer of
satisfaction are so strongly opposed by vanity, selfishness, and
even an otherwise not illegitimate antipathy to the man whose rights
are impaired by me, I am nevertheless able to discard all these
considerations; in this there is implied a consciousness of
independence on inclinations and circumstances, and of the possibility
of being sufficient for myself, which is salutary to me in general for
other purposes also. And now the law of duty, in consequence of the
positive worth which obedience to it makes us feel, finds easier
access through the respect for ourselves in the consciousness of our
freedom. When this is well established, when a man dreads nothing more
than to find himself, on self-examination, worthless and
contemptible in his own eyes, then every good moral disposition can be