g 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 exaggerated 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 affection,
delights me.
The friends whom thou lovest 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."

If we return from this necessary limitation of a groundless inference
(that true morality is present only when duty is performed against our
inclinations, when it is difficult for us, when a conflict with sensuous
motives has preceded), to the development of the fundamental ethical
conceptions, we find that important conclusions concerning the origin and
content of the moral law result from the principle obtained by the analysis
of moral judgment: this law commands with _unconditional authority_--for
every rational being and under all circumstances--what has _unconditioned
worth_--the disposition which corresponds to it. The universality and
necessity (_unconditionalness_) of the categorical imperative proves that
it springs from no other source than reason itself. Those who derive
the moral law from the will of God subject it to a condition, viz., the
immutability of the divine will. Those who find the source of moral
legislation in the pursuit of happiness make rational will dependent on a
natural law