Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/82

 64 of selfishness, the strong law of duty, and the weaker one of benevolence. Both of these wring from us many a sacrifice, and although selfish inclinations now and then preponderate over both, these still never fail to assert their reality in human nature. Thus we recognize that, in our most secret motives, we are dependent upon the rule of the will of all, and thence arises in the community of all thinking beings a moral unity, and a systematic constitution according to purely spiritual laws. If we want to call the fact that we feel forced to adapt our will to the will of all, the sense of morality, we thereby describe only a manifestation of that which actually takes place in us, without settling upon its causes. Thus Newton called the established law that all particles of matter have the tendency to approach each other, gravitation, because he did not want to have his mathematical demonstrations mixed up with possible philosophical disputes over the causes of gravitation. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to treat gravitation as the true effect of a general interaction of matter, and therefore gave to it also the name of attraction. Should it not be possible to conceive the phenomenon of moral impulses in the mutual relations of thinking creatures as the consequence of an actual force, consisting in the fact that spiritual natures flow into each other? The sense of morality then would be the sensation of this dependence of the individual will upon the will of all, and would be a consequence of the natural and universal interaction whereby the immaterial