[163] I do not myself usually employ the antithesis of Form and Matter in philosophical exposition, as it appears to me open to the charge of obscurity and ambiguity. In the present case we may interpret “formal rightness” as denoting at once a universal and essential, and a subjective or internal condition of the rightness of actions.
[164] It is not, I conceive, commonly held to be indispensable, in order to constitute an act completely right, that a belief that it is right should be actually present in the agent’s mind: it might be completely right, although the agent never actually raised the question of its rightness or wrongness. See p. [225].
[165] The decision would, I think, usually be reached by weighing bad consequences to the agent’s character against bad consequences of a different kind. In extreme cases the latter consideration would certainly prevail in the view of common sense. Thus we should generally approve a statesman who crushed a dangerous rebellion by working on the fear or cupidity of a leading rebel who was rebelling on conscientious grounds. Cf. post, Book iv. chap. iii. § [3].
[166] The antithesis of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ cannot be applied to the condition of right conduct considered in this paragraph: for this formal condition is at once subjective and objective; being, as I argue, involved in our common notion of right conduct, it is, therefore, necessarily judged by us to be of really universal application: and, though it does not secure complete objective rightness, it is an important protection against objective wrongness.
[167] Cf. Book i. chap. iii. § [3].
[168] See the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (pp. 269-273, Hartenstein; Abbott’s transl. [1879] pp. 54-61). Here Kant first says, “There is therefore but one categorical imperative, namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Now, if all imperatives of duty can be deduced from this one imperative as from their principle ... we shall at least be able to show what we understand by [duty] and what this notion means.” He then demonstrates the application of the principle to four cases, selected as representative of “the many actual duties”; and continues: “if now we attend to ourselves on occasion of any transgression of duty, we shall find that we in fact do not will that our maxim should be a universal law, for that is impossible for us” ...: then, summing up the conclusion of this part of his argument, he says, “we have exhibited clearly and definitely for every practical application the content of the categorical imperative which must contain the principle of all duty, if there is such a thing at all.”
[169] I do not mean that I am prepared to accept Kant’s fundamental maxim, in the precise form in which he has stated it: but the qualifications which it seems to me to require will be more conveniently explained later.
[170] See Book i. chap. iii. p. [32].
[171] I cannot doubt that every one of our cognitive faculties,—in short the human mind as a whole,—has been derived and developed, through a gradual process of physical change, out of some lower life in which cognition, properly speaking, had no place. On this view, the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘derived’ reduces itself to that between ‘prior’ and ‘posterior’ in development: and the fact that the moral faculty appears somewhat later in the process of evolution than other faculties can hardly be regarded as an argument against the validity of moral intuition; especially since this process is commonly conceived to be homogeneous throughout. Indeed such a line of reasoning would be suicidal; as the cognition that the moral faculty is developed is certainly later in development than moral cognition, and would therefore, by this reasoning, be less trustworthy.
[172] It is more convenient, for the purpose of expounding the morality of common sense, to understand by Virtue a quality exhibited in right conduct; for then we can use the common notions of the particular virtues as heads for the classification of the most important kinds or aspects of right conduct as generally recognised. And I think that this employment of the term is as much in accordance with ordinary usage as any other equally precise use would be.