This is also the ground of repentance for a
long past action at every recollection of it; a painful feeling
produced by the moral sentiment, and which is practically void in so
far as it cannot serve to undo what has been done. (Hence Priestley,
as a true and consistent fatalist, declares it absurd, and he deserves
to be commended for this candour more than those who, while they
maintain the mechanism of the will in fact, and its freedom in words
only, yet wish it to be thought that they include it in their system
of compromise, although they do not explain the possibility of such
moral imputation.) But the pain is quite legitimate, because when
the law of our intelligible [supersensible] existence (the moral
law) is in question, reason recognizes no distinction of time, and
only asks whether the event belongs to me, as my act, and then
always morally connects the same feeling with it, whether it has
happened just now or long ago. For in reference to the supersensible
consciousness of its existence (i.e., freedom) the life of sense is
but a single phenomenon, which, inasmuch as it contains merely
manifestations of the mental disposition with regard to the moral
law (i.
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