Lecture VI

There you see how in our times we have a parting of the ways! It becomes evident by contrasting the atavistic elements of the older age which play over in many ways into the present with what is living within us like the early flush of dawn. You will often have heard those fine words Kant wrote about duty: “Duty! Sublime and mighty Name, you embrace nothing that charms and require only submission”—and so forth. The sternest terms in which to characterize duty! Here the content of duty stands as a moral intuition imparted from outside, and the human being confronts this moral intuition in such a way that he has to submit to it. The moral experience when he thus submits himself is that no inner satisfaction is gained from obedience to duty; only the cold statement: “I must perform my duty” remains.