The question next arises—what impels the will to act conformably to this highest moral law? Kant answers: the moral law itself, apprehended and revered, must be the only moving spring of the human will. If an act which in itself might be conformable to the moral law, be done only through some impulse to happiness arising simply from an inclination of the sense, if it be not done purely for the sake of the law, then have we simply _legality_ and not _morality_. That which is included in every inclination of the sense is self-love and self-conceit, and of these the former is restricted by the moral law, and the latter wholly stricken down. But that which strikes down our self-conceit and humbles us must appear to us in the highest degree worthy of esteem. But this is done by the moral law. Consequently the positive feeling which we shall cherish in respect of the moral law will be reverence. This reverence, though a feeling, is neither sensuous nor pathological, for it stands opposed to these; but is rather an intellectual feeling, since it arises from the notion of the practical law of the reason. On the one side as subordination to law, the reverence includes pain; on the other side, since the coercion can only be exercised through the proper reason, it includes pleasure. Reverence is the single sensation befitting man in reference to the moral law. Man, as creature of sense, cannot rest on any inner inclination to the moral law, for he has ever inclinations within him which resist the law; love to the law can only be considered as something ideal.—Thus the moral purism of Kant, or his effort to separate every impulse of the sense from the motives to action, merges into rigorism, or the dark view that duty can never be done except with resistance. A similar exaggeration belongs to the well-known epigram of Schiller, who answers the following scruple of conscience—
The friends whom I love, I gladly would serve, But to this inclination incites me; And so I am forced from virtue to swerve Since my act, through affection, delights me—
The friends whom thou lov’st, thou must first seek to scorn, For to no other way can I guide thee: ’Tis alone with disgust thou canst rightly perform The acts to which duty would lead thee.