be excusable, rebellion in the subject and disobedience in the soldier all morally justifiable, and every one of them clear breaches of categorical imperatives, in obedience to a higher law.
All that it comes to is this (and it is, we must remember, a very important truth), that you must never break a law of duty to please yourself, never for the sake of an end not duty, but only for the sake of a superior and overruling duty. Any breach of duty, as duty, and not as lower duty, is always and absolutely wrong; but it would be rash to say that any one act must be in all cases absolutely and unconditionally immoral. Circumstances decide, because circumstances determine the manner in which the overruling duty must be realized. This is a simple fact which by the candid observer can not be denied, and which is merely the exposition of the moral consciousness, though I am fully aware that it is an exposition which that consciousness would not accept, simply because it must necessarily misunderstand it in its abstract form. And if moral theory were meant to influence moral practice and to be dabbled in by ‘the vulgar’ (and there are not so many persons who in this respect are not the vulgar), then I grant this is a fact it would be well to keep in the background. None the less it is a fact.[1]
So we see ‘duty for duty’s sake’ says only, ‘do the right for the sake of the right;’ it does not tell us what right is; or ‘realize a good will, do what a good will would do, for the sake of being yourself a good will.’ And that is something; but beyond that it is silent or beside the mark. It tells us to act for the sake of a form, which we saw was a self-contradictory command; and we even saw that in sober sadness the form did exist for form’s sake, and in literal truth remained only a form. We saw that duty’s universal laws are not universal, if that means they can never be
- ↑ We shall come upon this again in Essays V. and VI.
