and surveying the whole of our life, thought, and action,
in continual connection, and therefore of acting according to general
maxims, whether those maxims originate in the understanding as
prudential rules, or in the better consciousness as moral laws.

[Footnote 1: _Epistles_, 56.]

If any desire or passion is aroused in us, we, and in the same way the
lower animals, are for the moment filled with this desire; we are all
anger, all lust, all fear; and in such moments neither the better
consciousness can speak, nor the understanding consider the
consequences. But in our case reason allows us even at that moment
to see our actions and our life as an unbroken chain,--a chain
which connects our earlier resolutions, or, it may be, the future
consequences of our action, with the moment of passion which now fills
our whole consciousness. It shows us the identity of our person, even
when that person is exposed to influences of the most varied kind, and
thereby we are enabled to act according to maxims. The lower animal
is wanting in this faculty; the passion which seizes it completely
dominates it, and can be checked only by another passion--anger, for
instance, or lust, by fear; even though the vision that terrifies does
not appeal to the senses, but is present in the animal only as a dim
memory and imagination. Men, therefore, may be called irrational, if,
like the lower animals, they allow themselves to be determined by the
moment.

So far, however, is reason from being the source of morality that it
is reason alone which makes us capable of being rascals, which the
lower animals cannot be. It is reason which enables us to form an evil
resolution and to keep it when the provocation to evil is removed; it
enables us, for example, to nurse vengeance. Although at the moment
that we have an opportunity of fulfilling our resolution the better
consciousness may manifest itself as love or charity, it is by force
of reason, in pursuance of some evil maxim, that we act against it.
Thus Goethe says that a man may use his reason only for the purpose of
being more bestial than any beast:

_Er hat Vernunft, doch braucht er sie allein
Um theirischer als jedes Thier zu sein_.

For not only do we, like the beasts, satisfy the desires of the
moment, but we refine upon them and stimulate them in order to prepare
the desire for the satisfaction.

Whenever we think that we perceive a trace of reason in the lower
animals, it fill