but also because morals themselves are liable to all sorts of
corruption, as long as we are without that clue and supreme canon by
which to estimate them correctly. For in order that an action should
be morally good, it is not enough that it conform to the moral law,
but it must also be done for the sake of the law, otherwise that
conformity is only very contingent and uncertain; since a principle
which is not moral, although it may now and then produce actions
conformable to the law, will also often produce actions which
contradict it. Now it is only a pure philosophy that we can look for
the moral law in its purity and genuineness (and, in a practical
matter, this is of the utmost consequence): we must, therefore,
begin with pure philosophy (metaphysic), and without it there cannot
be any moral philosophy at all. That which mingles these pure
principles with the empirical does not deserve the name of
philosophy (for what distinguishes philosophy from common rational
knowledge is that it treats in separate sciences what the latter
only comprehends confusedly); much less does it deserve that of
moral philosophy, since by this confusion it even spoils the purity of
morals themselves, and counteracts its own end.

Let it not be thought, however, that what is here demanded is
already extant in the propaedeutic prefixed by the celebrated Wolf
to his moral philosophy, namely, his so-called general practical
philosophy, and that, therefore, we have not to strike into an
entirely new field. Just because it was to be a general practical
philosophy, it has not taken into consideration a will of any
particular kind- say one which should be determined solely from a
priori principles without any empirical motives, and which we might
call a pure will, but volition in general, with all the actions and
conditions which belong to it in this general signification. By this