Yet, once again, we have him at his inspiring best when, Catherine-like, he tells us: “The supreme Good of those who pursue virtue is common to them all, and all are equally able to rejoice in it”; and “this love towards God is incapable of being stained by the passions of envy and bitterness, but is increased in proportion as we figure to ourselves a larger number of men joined to God by the same bonds of love”; when he declares: “we do not enjoy beatitude because we master our passions; rather, contrariwise, do we master our passions because we enjoy beatitude”; and when he insists, with no doubt too indiscriminating, too Jacopone-like, a simplification, upon what, in its substance, is a profound truth: “the intellectual,” the pure “love of the soul for God is the very love of God, wherewith God loves Himself.”[180]
(2) It was, however, the astonishingly circumspect and many-sided Leibniz who, indefinitely smaller soul though he was, succeeded, perhaps better than any other modern philosopher, in successfully combining the divers constitutive elements of the act and state of Pure Love, when he wrote in 1714: “Since true Pure Love consists in a state of soul which makes me find pleasure in the perfections and the felicity of the object loved by me, this love cannot but give us the greatest pleasure of which we are capable, when God is that object. And, though this love be disinterested, it already constitutes, even thus simply by itself, our greatest-good and deepest interest.”
Or, as he wrote in 1698: “Our love of others cannot be separated from our true good, nor our love of God from our felicity. But it is equally certain that the consideration of our own particular good, as distinguished from the pleasure which we taste in seeing the felicity of another, does not enter into Pure Love.” And earlier still he had defined the act of loving as “the finding one’s pleasure in the felicity of another”; and had concluded thence that Love is for man essentially an enjoyment, although the specific motive of love is not the pleasure or the particular good of him who loves, but the good or the felicity of the beloved object.[181]
(3) Yet it is especially Kant who, with his predominant hostility to all Eudaemonism in Morality and Religion, has, more than all others, renewed the controversy as to the relations between virtue and piety on the one hand, and self-seeking motives on the other, and who is popularly credited with an entirely self-consistent antagonism to even such a wise and necessary attitude as are the amended positions of Fénelon and those of Leibniz. And yet I sincerely doubt whether (if we put aside the question as to the strictly logical consequences of his Critical Idealism, such as that Idealism appears in its greatest purity in the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781; and if we neglect the numerous, often grossly unjust, Spinoza-like sallies against the supposed undiluted mercenariness of ordinary piety, which abound in his Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason, 1793), we could readily find any explicit pronouncement hopelessly antagonistic to the Catholic Pure-Love doctrine.
Certainly the position taken up towards this point in that very pregnant and curious, largely-overlooked little treatise, The Canon of Pure Reason, which (evidently an earlier and complete sketch), has been inserted by him into his later, larger, but materially altered scheme of the Critique of 1781, (where it now forms the Zweite Hauptstück of the Transcendentale Methodenlehre, ed. Kehrbach, Reclam, pp. 603-628), appears to be substantially acceptable.[182] “Happiness consists in the satisfaction of all our inclinations, according to their various character, intensity, and duration. The law of practical action, in so far as it is derived from the motive of happiness, I call Pragmatic, a Rule of Good Sense; the same law, in so far as it has for its motive only the becoming worthy of such happiness, I call Moral, the Moral Law. Now Morality already by itself constitutes a system, but Happiness does not do so, except in so far as Happiness is distributed in exact accordance with Morality. But such a distribution is only possible in the intelligible world,”—the world beyond phenomena which can be reached by our reason alone—“and under a wise Originator and Ruler. Such an One, together with life in such a world—a world which we are obliged to consider as a future one—reason finds itself forced to assume, or else to look upon the moral laws as empty phantoms, since the necessary result of these laws,—a result which that same reason connects with their very idea,—would have to fall away, if that assumption were to go. Hence every one looks upon the moral laws as commandments, a thing which they could not be, if they did not conjoin with their rule consequences of a priori appropriateness, and hence if they did not carry with them promises and threats. But this too they can do only if they lie within the compass of a Single Necessary Being, Itself the Supreme Good, Which alone can render possible such a unity embracing both means and end.—Happiness alone is, for our reason, far from being the Complete Good, for reason does not approve of Happiness unless it be united with the being worthy of Happiness, i.e. Moral Rectitude. But Morality alone, and with it the simple being worthy of happiness, is also far from the Complete Good. Even if reason, free from any consideration of any interest of its own, were to put itself in the position of a being that had to distribute all happiness to others alone, it could not judge otherwise: for, in the complete idea of practical action, both points are in essential conjunction, yet in suchwise that it is the moral disposition which, as condition, first renders possible a sharing in happiness, and not the prospect of happiness which first gives an opening to the moral disposition. For, in this latter case, the disposition would not be moral, and, consequently, would not deserve that complete happiness to which reason can assign no other limitation than such as springs from our own immoral attitude of will.”[183]
In his Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals, 1785, the noble apostrophe to the Good Will no doubt appears formally to proclaim as possible and desirable a complete human disposition, in which no considerations of Happiness play any part: “The good will is good, not through what it effects or produces, not through its utility for the attainment of any intention or end, but it is good through the quality of the volition alone; that is, it is good in itself.…” “If, with its greatest efforts, nothing were to be effected by it, and only the good will itself were to remain, this bare will would yet shine in lonely splendour as a jewel,—as something which has its full value in itself.” But further on he shows us how, after all, “this good will cannot, then, be the only and the whole good, but still it is the highest good and the condition for all the rest, even for our desire of happiness.”[184] Certain exaggerations, which are next developed by him here, shall be considered in a later chapter.
5. Four important points.
Here I will but put together, in conclusion, four positions which I have rejoiced to find in two such utterly, indeed at times recklessly, independent writers as Professor Georg Simmel of Berlin and Professor A. E. Taylor.