And from this point of view the thought may occur to us: if good conduct implies only desire for objects which Reason can recognize as good, why do we need the sense of duty or the categorical imperative at all? May we not say with Aristotle that a man is not really good unless he likes the things that another may recognize as constituting his duty, or even go beyond Aristotle (who did insist that in developed Morality there should be a conscious recognition that the things desired were good), and say It is nobler to be so fired by the thought of tyranny and injustice and suffering, so to feel others' wrongs as though they were one's own, that the question never arises at all whether it is a duty to fight against them, or even whether it be καλὸν to do so? Would it not show a positive defect in the man's character if he should decline to make a sacrifice which the good of his family demanded till he had calmly reflected that it was a dutiful or a beautiful thing for him to do? Is it not better to be socially useful because one loves one's neighbours as oneself than to regard them with indifference, and yet to feed or serve them only because it is one's duty?(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 1)

We are here in the presence of something like an antinomy. On the one hand, it does seem nobler to love the things contained in the law than to do good things unwillingly because we feel bound to obey the law as such. On the other hand, it seems difficult to admit that there can be any nobler motive than devotion to duty as such, or that there can be a perfect character, or even a perfect act, in the inspiration of which such devotion has no place.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 2)

The solution of our difficulty seems to lie in a consideration which we have hitherto neglected. It is quite true that an action may be good which is done from the love of some good object. The poor man who shares his scanty dinner with a still poorer friend has certainly done an act possessing moral worth. The scholar who scorns delights, and lives laborious days from sheer love of Learning is not to be treated as on a level with the mere sensualist because he is not habitually inspired by reflection on the duty of research, or even because he may be seriously wanting in devotion to many kinds of social good. But love of any particular good object is always liable to interfere with the promotion of some other, and, it may be, more important good. Love of Learning is good, but the scholar in whom that passion extinguishes all others may become selfish and inhuman, if all social impulses are stifled in its pursuit. Nero's love of Art was a redeeming feature in his character, but the fact (if it be a fact) that he fiddled while Rome was burning was rather an aggravation than an extenuation of his callous indifference to human suffering. Enthusiasm for some particular cause is good, if the cause be a righteous one; but the root of all fanaticism lies in a devotion to some single good which extinguishes all scruple or respect for rules no less essential to human Well-being than Temperance or the influence of the Church or even the conversion of sinners. Unselfish affection or loyalty to particular persons or societies is good; but the morality of the man who surrenders himself to it without restraint may degenerate into mere honour among thieves. Family affection may steel the heart against the claims of a wider humanity. Even a genuine Patriotism may produce absolute blindness to the plainest dictates of Humanity or international Justice. And so on. Now duty means, as we have seen, precisely devotion to the various kinds of good in proportion to their relative value and importance. No one then can be trusted at all times and in all circumstances to attribute to each good precisely its proper degree of worth in whom there is not strong devotion to that supreme good in which all others are summed up. It is not necessary that a man should make the sense of duty the sole motive of all his conduct, provided it is always ready to inhibit an action the moment he sees any reason for believing that it is contrary to his duty. The conscientious man will not seek actually to substitute the sense of duty for other motives of conduct, because he will recognize that many of the commonplace actions of life are better performed from some other impulse, and that the cultivation of altruistic or ideal impulses is actually a part of that ideal of human character which duty bids him promote in himself as in others. He will eat his breakfast from force of habit or because he is hungry; the sense of duty will only be ready, in the background of consciousness, so to speak^[104], to stimulate him when appetite fails or to inhibit him when some call of duty demands the suspension or omission of that meal on a particular morning. He will select things to eat and drink because he likes them, provided that he is always ready to modify his choice when there is reason to believe that what he likes is unwholesome or too expensive. He will labour for the good of his family because he cares about it as much or more than he does for his own good, but the sense of duty will always be ready to remind him of the claims of the workmen or the customers whom his methods of business may prejudice. He will throw himself into the work of a profession, because he likes it, because he is ambitious of success, recognition, opportunities of more interesting or more important work and the like; but he will be ready to listen to the faintest whisper of a suspicion arising in his mind that the path of ambition and the path of real social duty have begun to diverge. The Priest will devote himself heart and soul to the good of his parish simply because he wants to see his flock happier and better. He will do his work all the more effectively the more completely he identifies their well-being with his own, the more he takes delight in his occupation; but the sense of duty will always be ready to press upon his attention the more disagreeable or the more unpopular duty, to suggest the claims of study to the unstudious, the claims of his poor to the man whose heart is in books, the claims of rest or reflection or devotion when absorption in work threatens to dry up the foundations of thought and of feeling. In proportion as a man's habitual desires or interests are identified with some wider form or element of human good, the danger of collisions between various forms of good--the difference, so to speak, between devotion to a particular end and devotion to the good in general--may tend to disappear. The sense of duty may be less needed as check or as spur to the man of ardent temperament, absorbed in self-denying philanthropy, than it is to the average man whose habitual energies are divided by a remunerative profession and an affectionate family. But it is unnecessary to illustrate the possibilities of moral aberration which attend upon devotion to every form of good less than the whole.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 3)

And where there is devotion to the whole of human good, to the matter of the Moral Law, to every kind of good object in due proportion to its intrinsic worth, need there be any thought of the form at all? Is the idea of duty for duty's sake part of the highest ideal of character or is it always a note of imperfection? The question is not an easy one, for every term that we use in speaking of such matters is a more or less ambiguous one: but I would suggest the following outline of an answer:--(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 4)

1. Goodness in the narrower moral sense--the right direction of the will--is itself the greatest of goods, and must always be paramount in the ideal man; but the ideal man will care about many other things besides the right direction of his own and other people's wills--knowledge, beauty, particular persons, social intercourse, various pleasures in proportion to their intrinsic value. It is scarcely possible that he should acquire this habitual right direction of the will without more or less consciously thinking of it; but, in so far as he does come to love the things prescribed by Reason, respect for duty as such will tend to pass into a sense of the relative value of the goods which he loves, and to lose that abstractness, and also that sense of constraint and obligation, which are elements in the sense of duty as understood by Kant and his followers. At bottom the sense of duty is the due appreciation of the proportionate objective value of ends. In this sense alone is the feeling of obligation an ultimate and indispensable element of the moral consciousness^[105].(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 5)

2. Since the various ends the promotion of which constitutes the content of the Moral Law are all resolvable into some state of conscious beings, it may be said that an ideal love of mankind would supersede all sense of duty as such, provided that this love of persons be taken to include a desire of various goods for them in proportion to their relative value, and in particular a predominant desire for their moral Well-being. In this sense it may be said that perfect love casteth out far--even of the Moral Law--and constitutes by itself, in the strictest possible sense, the fulfilment of the law. At its highest the sense of duty is identical with the rational love of persons (including in due measure self-love), and the things which constitute their true good.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 6)

3. For a mind which believes in the existence of a Person whose will is absolutely directed towards the true good, the love of such a Person, the conscious direction of the will towards the end which He wills, absorbs into itself the sense of duty. The love of God is the love of duty with the added intensity both of intellectual clearness and of emotional strength which arises from the conviction that an ideal is also already real. How far and in what sense the belief in such a Person must be considered as involved or implied in the idea of an objective Morality, is a question which must be considered hereafter. Meanwhile I notice merely as a psychological fact that in the religious consciousness the idea of Duty may lose those aspects and associations which often cause a revolt against the idea of a categorical imperative.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 7)

Kant's categorical imperative has been justly (in some of its aspects) ridiculed by Schopenhauer as a mere survival from the lowest form of the servile theological Morality which he professed to have abandoned. Whether he calls his fetich categorical imperative or Fitziputzli, makes no difference^[106]. It was the survival of the drill-sergeant Theology of eighteenth-century Prussia with the drill-sergeant turned into an abstraction. In depersonalizing his imperative and cutting it adrift from its connexion with the real world as a whole, life as a whole, good as a whole, he reduced it to something arbitrary, abstract, almost inhuman. Repersonalize it, regard it as the reflex in the human soul of the Will which wills the supreme good of humanity, and the categorical imperative loses all those features which tend to present it as an emotion incompatible with and inferior to the other impulses or emotions which may inspire men to right conduct. To the Christian or the Theist with a worthy idea of God the love of goodness is no longer distinguishable from the love of the concrete good which forms the content of the divine Will as of all good human wills.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 4 ¶ 8)