If a man feels inclined to commit a bad action and refrains, he is kept back either (1) by fear of punishment or vengeance; or (2) by superstition in other words, fear of punishment in a future life; or (3) by the feeling of sympathy, including general charity; or (4) by the feeling of honour, in other words, the fear of shame; or (5) by the feeling of justice, that is, an objective attachment to fidelity and good-faith, coupled with a resolve to hold them sacred, because they are the foundation of all free intercourse between man and man, and therefore often of advantage to himself as well.  This last thought, not indeed as a thought, but as a mere feeling, influences people very frequently.  It is this that often compels a man of honour, when some great but unjust advantage is offered him, to reject it with contempt and proudly exclaim:  I am an honourable man!  For otherwise how should a poor man, confronted with the property which chance or even some worse agency has bestowed on the rich, whose very existence it is that makes him poor, feel so much sincere respect for this property, that he refuses to touch it even in his need; and although he has a prospect of escaping punishment, what other thought is it that can be at the bottom of such a man’s honesty?  He is resolved not to separate himself from the great community of honourable people who have the earth in possession, and whose laws are recognised everywhere.  He knows that a single dishonest act will ostracise and proscribe him from that society for ever.  No! a man will spend money on any soil that yields him good fruit, and he will make sacrifices for it.

With a good action,—­that, every action in which a man’s own advantage is ostensibly subordinated to another’s,—­the motive is either (1) self-interest, kept in the background; or (2) superstition, in other words, self-interest in the form of reward in another life; or (3) sympathy; or (4) the desire to lend a helping hand, in other words, attachment to the maxim that we should assist one another in need, and the wish to maintain this maxim, in view of the presumption that some day we ourselves may find it serve our turn.  For what Kant calls a good action done from motives of duty and for the sake of duty, there is, as will be seen, no room at all.  Kant himself declares it to be doubtful whether an action was ever determined by pure motives of duty alone.  I affirm most certainly that no action was ever so done; it is mere babble; there is nothing in it that could really act as a motive to any man.  When he shelters himself behind verbiage of that sort, he is always actuated by one of the four motives which I have described.  Among these it is obviously sympathy alone which is quite genuine and sincere.

Good and bad apply to character only a potiori; that is to say, we prefer the good to the bad; but, absolutely, there is no such distinction.  The difference arises at the point which lies between subordinating one’s own advantage to that of another, and not subordinating it.  If a man keeps to the exact middle, he is just.  But most men go an inch in their regard for others’ welfare to twenty yards in regard for their own.