THE MORAL MOTIVES. 387 on the other hand, an official inclined to extravagance faithfully manages the funds intrusted to him, or one who is oppressed by hopeless misery preserves his life, although he does not love it, then I may ascribe the abstinence from wrongdoing to moral principles. This, too, may be ad- mitted. We are certain of the morality of a resolution only when it can be shown that no inclination was involved along with the maxim. The cases where the right action is performed in opposition to inclination are the only ones in which we may be certain that the moral quality of the action is unmixed — are they, then, the only ones in which a moral disposition is present ? [Kant rightly maintains that the admixture of egoistic motives beclouds the purity of the disposition, and consequently diminishes its moral worth. ^With equal correctness he draws attention to the possibil/ty that, even when we believe that we are acting from pure principles, a hidden sensuous impulse may be involved. But he leaves unconsidered the possibility that, even when the inclinations are favorable to right action, the action may be performed, not from inclination, but because of the consciousness of duty. Given that a man is naturally industrious, does this happy predisposition protect him from fits of idleness? And if he resists them, must it always be his inclination to activity and never moral principle which overcomes the temptation ? In yielding to the danger of confounding the limits of our certain knowledge of the purity of motives with the limits of moral action, and in admitting true morality only where action proceeds from principle in opposition to the inclinations, Kant really deserves the reproach of rigorism or exagger- ated purism — sometimes groundlessly extended to the justifiable strictness of his views — and the ridicule of the well-known lines of Schiller (" Scruples of Conscience " and "Decision" at the conclusion of his distich-group "The Philosophers"):
- 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 affec- tion, delights me.
