sense.  Also we want health, love, wives and children, friends, and congenial work.  All of these things are part of the worth of life.  What would it profit us if we lost all these and had only our good will! [Footnote:  A reduction ad absurdum of the Kantian view may be found in Cardinal Newman’s statement of the Catholic Christian view.  “The Church holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremist agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse.” (Anglican Difficulties, p. 190.)] The valuation that ignores all natural goods but one is unreal, inhuman, fanatical; it leads when unchecked to the emasculated life of the anaemic mediaeval saint or anchorite.  Kant’s eloquent eulogy of good will appeals to one of our noblest impulses; but that impulse is as much in need of justification to the reason as any other, and it is only one of a number of equally healthy and justifiable natural preferences.  Good will, the desire to do right, is perhaps, on the whole, in the emergency, a safer guide to trust than warm-blooded impulse or reasoned calculation.  Moreover, it has a thin, precarious existence in most of us at best, and needs all the encouragement it can get.  Practically, we need Kant’s kind of sermonizing; we need to exalt abstract goodness and resist the appeal of immediate and sensuous goods.  So Kant has been popular with earnest men more interested in right living than in theory.  But as a theorist he is hopelessly inadequate.

(2) It is true that we admire good will without consideration of the effects it produces, and even when it leads to disaster.  But if good will usually led to disaster we should never have come to admire it.  Chance enters into this world’s happenings and often upsets the normal tendencies of acts.  But we have to act in ways that may normally be expected to produce good results.  And we have to admire and cherish that sort of action, in spite of the margin of loss.  The admiration that we have come to feel for goodness is partly the result of social tradition, buttressing the code that in the long run works out to best advantage; and partly, of course, the spontaneous emotion that rises in us at the sight of courage, heroism, self-sacrifice, and the other spectacular virtues.  But however naive or sophisticated a reaction it may be, its psychogenesis is perfectly intelligible, U and its existence is no proof of the supernal nature of the goodness of “good will.”

(3) Kant argues as follows:  “Nothing can possibly be conceived, in the world or out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.” [Footnote:  Op. cit, sec.  I.] He goes on to show that wit, courage, perseverance, etc, are all bad if the will that makes use of them is bad as in the case of a criminal; while health, riches, honor, etc, may inspire pride or presumption, and so not be unmitigated thing that can in every case be called good.