Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/159

143 of this life, and if possible even to that of the future." But if happiness is entirely annihilated as a moral motive, if moral worth is denied to the whole sentient side of man, how can reason act in its interest? For reason to acknowledge the function of sentiency in the moral life would be essentially an irrational procedure noon [sic] Kant's premises, on which happiness should have no ethical value in the eyes of reason. According to his fundamental principles, morality consists in acting from duty, or in accordance with the abstract universal law, and the test of moral conduct is rational, or rather conceptual consistency. Evil, therefore, consists in acting from inclination, and the test of evil conduct is conceptual contradiction. Action from desire would be heteronomous, and no maxim of conduct, derived from it, could be universalized as reason demands. But as we have to act partly from desire at any rate, Kant was led to the paradoxical conclusion that, from the nature of the case, we cannot be sure that any really moral action has ever been performed. According to his primary position, the whole content of morality and all the determining rules of conduct should have been deduced from the abstract law of duty, the test all along being the capability of the maxim to be made universal without conceptual contradiction. Such a position assigns to reason, not only supreme, but exclusive, value, and precludes all prudential considerations from moral action. The logical result of such a system of ethics is purely rationalistic. From such premises it would be impossible for reason to assume the task of working in the interest of sensibility. When, however, Kant turns from his formal law and endeavors to formulate and give content to the end or good of man, the notion of which he explicitly refused to adopt as the starting point of his ethical system, he is forced to the admission of the value of happiness. In this connection, he tells us "that it does not follow that this distinction, between the principle of happiness and that of morality is an opposition between them, and pure practical reason does not require that we should renounce all claim to happiness, but only that the moment duty is in question we should take no account of happiness." But