supposing any feeling, and consequently without any idea of the
pleasant or unpleasant, which is the matter of the desire, and which
is always an empirical condition of the principles. Then only, when
reason of itself determines the will (not as the servant of the
inclination), it is really a higher desire to which that which is
pathologically determined is subordinate, and is really, and even
specifically, distinct from the latter, so that even the slightest
admixture of the motives of the latter impairs its strength and
superiority; just as in a mathematical demonstration the least
empirical condition would degrade and destroy its force and value.
Reason, with its practical law, determines the will immediately, not
by means of an intervening feeling of pleasure or pain, not even of
pleasure in the law itself, and it is only because it can, as pure
reason, be practical, that it is possible for it to be legislative.



REMARK II.

{BOOK_1|CHAPTER_1 ^paragraph 35}



To be happy is necessarily the wish of every finite rational
being, and this, therefore, is inevitably a determining principle of
its faculty of desire. For we are not in possession originally of
satisfaction with our whole existence- a bliss which would imply a
consciousness of our own independent self-sufficiency this is a
problem imposed upon us by our own finite nature, because we have
wants and these wants regard the matter of our desires, that is,