Important Quotations Explained
The statement "The human being is evil" cannot mean anything else than that he is conscious of the moral law and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from it. (6:32)
The restoration of the original predisposition to good in us is not therefore the acquisition of a lost incentive for the good, since we were never able to lose the incentive that consists in respect for the moral law … The restoration is therefore only the recovery of the purity of the law, as the supreme ground of all our maxims, according to which the law itself is to be incorporated into the power of choice, not merely bound to other incentives, nor indeed subordinated to them as conditions, but rather in its full purity, as the self-sufficient incentive of that power. (6:46)
To become a morally good human being it is not enough simply to let the germ of the good which lies in our species develop unhindered; there is an active and opposing cause of evil which is also to be combated. (6:57)
There is absolutely no salvation for human beings except in the innermost adoption of genuine moral principles in their disposition, and that to interfere with this adoption is surely not the so often blamed sensibility but a certain self-incurred perversity, or as we might otherwise also call this wickedness, fraud. This is a corruption that lies in all human beings and cannot be overcome except through the idea of the moral good in its absolute purity. (6:83)
The basis for the transition to the new order of things must lie in the principle of the pure religion of reason, as a revelation permanently taking place within all human beings, and this basis, once grasped after mature reflection, will be carried into effect, inasmuch as it is to be a human work, through gradual reform. (6:122)
