But to
postpone everything to the holiness of duty alone, and to be conscious
that we can because our own reason recognises this as its command
and says that we ought to do it, this is, as it were, to raise
ourselves altogether above the world of sense, and there is
inseparably involved in the same a consciousness of the law, as a
spring of a faculty that controls the sensibility; and although this
is not always attended with effect, yet frequent engagement with
this spring, and the at first minor attempts at using it, give hope
that this effect may be wrought, and that by degrees the greatest, and
that a purely moral interest in it may be produced in us.
{PART_2|METHODOLOGY ^paragraph 25}
The method then takes the following course. At first we are only
concerned to make the judging of actions by moral laws a natural
employment accompanying all our own free actions, as well as the
observation of those of others, and to make it as it were a habit, and
to sharpen this judgement, asking first whether the action conforms
objectively to the moral law, and to what law; and we distinguish
the law that merely furnishes a principle of obligation from that
which is really obligatory (leges obligandi a legibus obligantibus);
as, for instance, the law of what men's wants require from me, as
contrasted with that which their rights demand, the latter of which
prescribes essential, the former only non-essential duties; and thus
we teach how to distinguish different kinds of duties which meet in
the same action.
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