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.
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