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Sharp—The Personal Equation in Ethics. 
principle: “You had better obey the commands of God, or you 
will catch it in the next world. ” He maintains that Kant’s 
ideal man who relieves the distress of a suffering world, not 
from sympathy with the unfortunate, but simply from a 
sense of duty, is a creature that outrages every moral feeling. 
Kant’s statement that the moral law, to have any genuine au¬ 
thority, must be of supersensible origin, he treats with but half 
concealed levity. And of the picture which Kant draws of the 
kingdom of rational spirits in which each one is at once law-giver 
and subject, he writes: “Difficile est, satiram non scribere. ” 
The display of elevation of character seems never to have spe¬ 
cially impressed him and the feeling of obligation meant for him, 
as we have seen, merely the fear of punishment. What then 
does he take to be the moral motive? Sympathy, he tells us, 
is the only conceivable one. He bids us imagine two men 
struggling with the temptation to kill a rival in love. One 
afterwards confesses that he was deterred from the commission 
of the crime because it was incompatible with the laws of the 
transcendental world. The other tells us that when brought 
face to face with his adversary he was seized with sympathy 
for him, he forgot his jealousy, his heart melted and he re¬ 
nounced his design. Which of these two characters, asks Schopen¬ 
hauer, represents the real human being, and which the inven¬ 
tion of a theorist’s brain? He seems to have no doubt that the 
universal feelings of man will look upon the latter of his two 
lovers as the representative of human nature as it is. And yet he 
does not overlook the fact that both Kant and Spinoza do not re¬ 
gard sympathy as a virtue but rather, if anything, as the reverse. 
This circumstance is only one more proof in his eyes of their 
ignorance of the nature of the moral life. 
A third set of examples will conclude what I have to say on 
this part of my subject. It has already been stated that Kant 
regards character, or the good will as he calls it, as the one 
unconditionally good thing in life. He writes: 2 3 “A good 
will is good not because of what it performs or effects. . . . 
Even if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing 
2 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (Abbott’s Trans¬ 
lation;, p. 10. 
