This is the susceptibility for pleasure or displeasure, merely
from the consciousness of the agreement or disagreement of our
action with the law of duty. Now, every determination of the
elective will proceeds from the idea of the possible action through
the feeling of pleasure or displeasure in taking an interest in it
or its effect to the deed; and here the sensitive state (the affection
of the internal sense) is either a pathological or a moral feeling.
The former is the feeling that precedes the idea of the law, the
latter that which may follow it.
{INTRODUCTION ^paragraph 140}
Now it cannot be a duty to have a moral feeling, or to acquire it;
for all consciousness of obligation supposes this feeling in order
that one may become conscious of the necessitation that lies in the
notion of duty; but every man (as a moral being) has it originally
in himself; the obligation, then, can only extend to the cultivation
of it and the strengthening of it even by admiration of its
inscrutable origin; and this is effected by showing how it is just, by
the mere conception of reason, that it is excited most strongly, in
its own purity and apart from every pathological stimulus; and it is
improper to call this feeling a moral sense; for the word sense
generally means a theoretical power of perception directed to an
object; whereas the moral feeling (like pleasure and displeasure in
general) is something merely subjective, which supplies no
knowledge. No man is wholly destitute of moral feeling, for if he were
totally unsusceptible of this sensation he would be morally dead; and,
to speak in the language of physicians, if the moral vital force could
no longer produce any effect on this feeling, then his humanity
would be dissolved (as it were by chemical laws) into mere animality
and be irrevocably confounded with the mass of other physical
beings. But we have no special sense for (moral) good and evil any
more than for truth, although such expressions are often used; but
we have a susceptibility of the free elective will for being moved
by pure practical reason and its law; and it is this that we call
the moral feeling.