Here it must show its purity as absolute
director of its own laws, not the herald of those which are
whispered to it by an implanted sense or who knows what tutelary
nature. Although these may be better than nothing, yet they can
never afford principles dictated by reason, which must have their
source wholly a priori and thence their commanding authority,
expecting everything from the supremacy of the law and the due respect
for it, nothing from inclination, or else condemning the man to
self-contempt and inward abhorrence.
Thus every empirical element is not only quite incapable of being an
aid to the principle of morality, but is even highly prejudicial to
the purity of morals, for the proper and inestimable worth of an
absolutely good will consists just in this, that the principle of
action is free from all influence of contingent grounds, which alone
experience can furnish. We cannot too much or too often repeat our
warning against this lax and even mean habit of thought which seeks
for its principle amongst empirical motives and laws; for human reason
in its weariness is glad to rest on this pillow, and in a dream of
sweet illusions (in which, instead of Juno, it embraces a cloud) it
substitutes for morality a bastard patched up from limbs of various
derivation, which looks like anything one chooses to see in it, only
not like virtue to one who has once beheld her in her true form.
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