That duty should be done for duty's sake we have seen to be really implied in the very notion of duty. But it does not follow that the desire to do one's duty must always be the sole and exclusive motive of right conduct, or that conduct not consciously inspired by respect for the Moral Law as such must possess no moral value at all. Yet such was the assumption of Kant himself. To Kant the most unselfish^[94] devotion to wife or child, the most ardent patriotism, the most comprehensive philanthropy, possessed no more moral value than the purest avarice or the most unmitigated selfishness. Unless the man loves, or rather behaves as though he loved (since love, he holds, cannot be commanded) wife, or country, or humanity simply from an actual conscious respect for the Moral Law, his conduct is worthless--not necessarily wrong (for it is not a crime to promote one's own happiness when duty does not forbid), but entirely without moral value. The will that wills from pure love of the brethren is morally on a level with the will that wills from pure love of self. It is of no more value than the behaviour of an animal. Such is the revolting and inhuman Stoicism to which Kant's ideal logically leads. It is, as Schopenhauer puts it, the apotheosis of lovelessness, the exact opposite, as it is, of the Christian doctrine of Morals^[95]. In well-known lines the poet Schiller makes the disciple of Kant complain:(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 3 ¶ 1)

in reply to which the answer given is:

Nor can it be alleged that Kant has any desire to conceal this result. He holds ex professo that all desire is bad. The inclinations themselves being sources of want, are so far from having an absolute worth for which they should be desired, that on the contrary it must be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them^[97]. We might ask in what, according to Kant, happiness is to consist? Happiness, as we know it, arises entirely from the satisfaction of desires^[98], and happiness is admitted to be a rational end of action; how then can the desires be consistently treated as a mere encumbrance which the rational man would fain be without? But it is enough to point out the utter discrepancy between the Kantian dogma and the strongest moral convictions of mankind. The common-sense philosophy of Bishop Butler is here a far better exponent of the moral consciousness. Insisting as strongly as Kant upon the claims of Conscience, he yet recognizes that Conscience does not prescribe this total suppression of all other passions, propensions, or affections. It rather pronounces that some of the desires ought to be encouraged, some suppressed, others moderated or controlled, and all subordinated to Benevolence and self-love--the two great rational impulses which make for the good of ourselves and our fellow men^[99]. And in this teaching Butler was only developing the principles of Aristotle who (amid many retrogressions) advanced beyond Plato just by his recognition of the fact that desire is as essential an element of human nature as Reason; that the raw material (so to speak) of the sublimest virtue and of the coarsest vice is the same, that natural impulses are good or evil just according as they are or are not controlled by the ideals which Reason sets up^[100]. Granted fully that an act may be done from the bare sense of duty, from a desire which is created solely by our conviction that a certain course is intrinsically right or reasonable, this is not in most cases an adequate analysis of a good man's motives. In most of his acts the good man is doing something towards which he has some inclination apart from the consideration that it is his duty. He works for wife and children because he loves them: he speaks the truth because he feels an instinctive repulsion for a lie: he relieves suffering because he cannot bear to see another man in pain. It is rather in the selection of the right one from among the many impulses by which his will is from time to time solicited, and in the reinforcement of it when it is absolutely or relatively too weak, that the sense of duty need come into play^[101]. It is only perhaps at rare crises in the moral life, when duty calls for some great sacrifice or commands resistance to some great temptation, that the sense of duty becomes the one all-sufficient motive present to the consciousness. It is no doubt eminently desirable that the sense of duty should be always present in the background, or, as the Psychologists have called it, the fringe of consciousness^[102]; that Reason should be (so to speak) a consenting party to all our actions, however strongly prompted by natural impulses, and be ready to inhibit even the noblest and most generous of them when it threatens to oppose itself to duty's call. But, even when this is not the case, even when in a particular act or in the general tenour of a man's life conscious and deliberate respect for the Moral Law as such cannot be said to occupy this paramount and predominant position, we do not in fact regard the act or the character of such a man as entirely destitute of moral value. We may regard his defective sense of duty as a moral defect shortcoming, but we do not regard him as on a level with the selfish pleasure-seeker. It would be a violent perversion of psychological fact to represent that every man who works hard and resists temptations to self-indulgence from love for his wife and children, or from a zeal for his profession, is inspired by pure respect for the abstract Moral Law; it would be a perversion of moral fact (attested in the only way in which moral fact can be attested, by the evidence of consciousness) to say that such conduct is morally worthless^[103]. To do so would involve the denial of moral value not only to much of the normally good conduct of average civilized men, and to all the more elementary morality of children or savages (to whom the idea of a Moral Law or an abstract duty can hardly be said to have occurred), but also to some of the very noblest acts of generous but one-sided and imperfect characters.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 3 ¶ 2)

The source of Kant's ethical mistake must be sought in his defective Psychology. He assumed, as completely as Hobbes or Locke, that the motive of every action is pleasure except in one case. Reason had, he thought, the power of arbitrarily interposing, and acting directly upon the man's will, by laying upon him a categorical command to do this or abstain from that: but, except when and in so far as the man was influenced by pure respect for such injunctions, his will was always under the influence of pleasure and pain. Apart from the power of interposition accorded to this deus ex machina, the categorical imperative, Kant was a psychological Hedonist. Moreover, he assumed that an action determined by self-interest was completely natural, that the motives of the calculating pleasure-seeker were the same in kind as the mere animal impulses of the savage or even the beast. He would probably have explained the behaviour of animals as due to the pursuit of pleasure. He did not recognize the high degree of abstraction, the high intellectual and moral development, which is implied in the deliberate pursuit of so ideal an object as maximum pleasure or happiness in general. Regarding all desire as desire for pleasure, and the desire of pleasure as merely natural, he was obviously unable to recognize any difference in moral value between one kind of desire and another. Benevolence and malevolence were simply different forms of pleasure-seeking. From the point of view which we have adopted we are able to recognize that the value of the desire depends upon the nature of the objects desired. We can pronounce, and as a matter of fact the moral consciousness does pronounce, that devotion to the family or the tribe is a higher and nobler motive of action than devotion to one's own good, love of knowledge better than love of sensual indulgence, indignation against cruelty or injustice better than resentment provoked by jealousy. We may, therefore, ascribe moral value to a man's acts in proportion as they are inspired by a desire of objects which Reason pronounces intrinsically good, although the man may not pursue them consciously because Reason pronounces those objects to be good--still less because Reason pronounces the acts to be right apart from their tendency to gratify a desire for the objects. In proportion as the moral consciousness is developed, or at all events in proportion as the man's intellectual development allows his morality to become self-conscious and reflective, the intrinsic value of the objects which he pursues is recognized with increasing distinctness and abstractness; and this recognition brings with it reinforcement of the higher impulse as against the competing desires which might otherwise take its place. Some degree of the consciousness of value is no doubt necessary to make it a motive which can fairly be described as a higher desire at all. The most rudimentary family affection implies a certain consciousness (wholly unanalysed no doubt) of the claims or rights or intrinsic worth of other persons, and of the consequent superiority of such an impulse to mere sensual desire--a consciousness which is not present in the maternal impulses of the lower animals, in which naturalistic writers have seen realized their highest ideal of conduct. But even in highly developed moral natures, and in some of the highest actions of such natures, it is often impossible to discover the conscious presence in any high degree of respect for the abstract idea of duty or the Moral Law as such. The philanthropist is carried away by an enthusiasm of humanity which does not stop to ask whether to relieve suffering or to fight against oppression is or is not contained in the categorical imperative of Reason. And such zeal for the things contained in the law we certainly pronounce morally good, however little conscious reference there may be to the law which contains them.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 3 ¶ 3)