of character are actually more important for us to think about and aim for than the happiness to which they ultimately minister.  But this apotheosis denial of its fundamentally instrumental value.  As with the miser who rates his bank notes more highly than the goods he could purchase with them, an abstract moralist occasionally exalts the means at the expense of the end.  We are told that only goodness counts; that its worth has nothing to do with its relation to happiness; that goodness would command our allegiance even if it brought nothing but misery in its train.

The best-known exponent of this blind worship of goodness is Kant.  He writes, “A Good Will is good, not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition; that is, it is good in itself Its fruitfulness or fruitlessness can neither add nor take away anything from this value ...  Moral worth ... cannot lie anywhere but in the principle of the Will, without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action.” [Footnote:  The Metaphysic of Morality.  To be found in Kant’s Theory of Ethics, trans. by Abbott, pp. 10, 16.]

So far does Kant carry this worship of the idea of goodness that he separates it from the several virtues that make up goodness in the concrete and bows down before the resulting bare abstraction Good Will, the will to do good.  This leads him to a curiously dehumanized position.  Prudential acts, he declares, are obviously good in their consequences; they therefore deserve no praise; whatever one does calculatingly, with view to future results, has no moral worth.  And on the other hand, whatever good acts one does instinctively, pushed on by animal impulses, including love and sympathy, deserve no praise and have no moral worth.  It is only what one does from the single motive of desiring to do the right that awakens Kant’s enthusiasm.  “The preservation of one’s own life, for instance, is a duty; but, as every one has a natural inclination to which most men usually devote to this object has no intrinsic value, nor the maxim from which they act any moral import.” [Footnote:  The Metaphysic of Morality, sec.  I.] What shall we say to this?

(1) Kant’s statements are a mere crystallization of an unanalyzed feeling; their plausibility rests upon our ingrained enthusiasm for goodness.  But if that enthusiasm be challenged, how shall we justify it?  How do we know that good will is good, unless we can see why it is good?  Many other things appeal to our instincts as good; may not this particular judgment be mistaken, or may not all these other things be equally good with good will?  Kant’s Hebraic training is clearly revealed in his exaltation of good will; it reflects the practical Lebensweisheit we have learned from the Bible.  To the Greek it would have been foolishness, fanaticism.  We want not only good will, but wisdom, sympathy, skill, common