laws, at once humanly, through the medium of feeling, and divinely and disinterestedly, through the utter absence of all ulterior reference to happiness or misfortune. The feeling of the insufficiency of human strength to the full performance of the moral law, the profound consciousness that the most virtuous is he only who feels most inly how unattainably high the law is exalted above him, tend to inspire awe—a sensation which seems to be no more shrouded in a corporeal veil than is necessary not to dazzle our eyes by the full and immediate splendour. Now, when the moral law obliges us to regard every man as an end to himself, it becomes blended with that feeling for the beautiful which loves to animate the merest clay, that even in it, it may rejoice in an individual existence, and which receives and enfolds man all the more completely and lovingly in that it is independent of conception, and is not therefore limited to the few characteristics, which, though separate and single, are yet all that conception can embrace.
The union with the feeling for the beautiful seems as if it would impair the purity of the moral will, and it might, and indeed would, have this effect, if this feeling itself were to become the sole motive to morality. But it will only claim the duty of discovering those more varied applications of the moral law which would otherwise escape the cold, and hence in such cases, ruder processes of reason; and since we are not forbidden to receive happiness in such intimate union with virtue, but only to barter virtue for this happiness, it will also enjoy the privilege of bestowing on human nature its sweetest and dearest feelings. In general, the more I reflect on this subject, the less does this difference to which I refer appear to be either subtle or fanciful. However eagerly man may strive to grasp at enjoyment—however he may try to represent to himself a constant union subsisting between happiness and virtue, even
