This is the susceptibility for pleasure or displeasure, merely
from the consciousness of the agreement or disagreement of our
action with the law of duty. Now, every determination of the
elective will proceeds from the idea of the possible action through
the feeling of pleasure or displeasure in taking an interest in it
or its effect to the deed; and here the sensitive state (the affection
of the internal sense) is either a pathological or a moral feeling.
The former is the feeling that precedes the idea of the law, the
latter that which may follow it.

{INTRODUCTION ^paragraph 140}

Now it cannot be a duty to have a moral feeling, or to acquire it;
for all consciousness of obligation supposes this feeling in order
that one may become conscious of the necessitation that lies in the
notion of duty; but every man (as a moral being) has it originally
in himself; the obligation, then, can only extend to the cultivation
of it and the strengthening of it even by admiration of its
inscrutable origin; and this is effected by showing how it is just, by
the mere conception of reason, that it is excited most strongly, in
its own purity and apart from every pathological stimulus; and it is
improper to call this feeling a moral sense; for the word sense
generally means a theoretical power of perception directed to an
object; whereas the moral feeling (like pleasure and displeasure in
general) is something merely subjective, which supplies no
knowledge. No man is wholly destitute of moral feeling, for if he were
totally unsusceptible of this sensation he would be morally dead; and,
to speak in the language of physicians, if the moral vital force could