taught him reverence for mankind, to ascribe a certain dignity to all men which is not merely based on the degree of their intellectual culture. He had previously been an optimist whose basis was an intellectual and spiritual aristocracy. And in addition to Rousseau, Shaftesbury, Hume and especially Hutcheson likewise influenced him at this period. During the sixties Kant bases his ethics on the sentiment of beauty and the dignity of human nature. (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und des Erhabenen, 1764.) Even here Kant already emphasizes the necessity of fundamental principles of morality; they are however only the intellectual expressions of the content of the sentiments: "The fundamental principles are not abstract laws, but the consciousness of an affection that dwells in every human breast … of the beauty and dignity of human nature."
Kant afterwards abandoned this identification of ethics with the psychology of the affections. In his Essay of 1770 he declared that it is utterly impossible to base moral principles on sentiment, i.e. empirically. It is also evident, from a fragment discovered by Reicke, that at the period during which he was engaged with the Critique of Pure Reason he based the ethical impulse on the self- activity which we exercise in our striving for happiness. The matter of happiness is empirical, but its form is intellectual, and the only possibility of realizing our freedom and independence rests upon maintaining the constant harmony of our will with itself. Morality is liberty under a universal law which expresses our self-consistency. Even here Kant's ethics attains that purely formal character which is so peculiar to it. In ethics as in epistemology he regards the form as the constant factor in contrast with its ever-varying content.
