True, Kant contradicts himself, for after having sternly excluded from his doctrine all utility as the end of Morality, all trace of feeling from moral action, he smuggles blissful happiness in by a back door; the result of submission to the moral law and its dutiful fulfilment, he declares, will be bliss. Bliss, however you interpret it, is a pleasurable emotion. Whether you act morally with the declared intention of attaining the pleasurable emotion of bliss, or whether this pleasurable emotion comes of its own accord as an undesired reward when you have acted morally merely from a feeling of duty, without a thought for such a result, without a wish to attain it, it makes no difference to the fact that moral action actually meets with a reward. Kant does not openly promise this, but with a wink he whispers in your ear that there is a prospect of it.
Nor does it alter the further fact that Kant, having contemptuously expelled Eudæmonism from his system, reinstates it with full honours. Once it has been conceded that moral conduct makes man blissful, in other words gives him a reward, the categorical imperative also has a sanction, albeit a very insufficient one. He who fulfils the moral law attains bliss; that is a spur whether you admit it or not. But he who does not fulfil it loses this advantage, otherwise, however, nothing happens to him. The sanction, therefore, is onesided. A reward is offered for the fulfilment of the moral law, but there is no punishment for its non-fulfilment. For it is no penalty if bliss is withheld from him who has no conception of it and no desire for it. No matter, then, if the moral law be eternal and immutable as the stars above us, if it be categorical, if it be fulfilled, not owing to a conception of its effect, not from liking for this effect, but from an inner necessity, it ceases to be a living force for mankind or to have any practical significance; for the single thread which unites it with human feelings--the whispered, vague promise of bliss--is too thin. Feeling which has no knowledge of this misty bliss, and therefore no yearning for it, is uninfluenced by the categorical moral law. Reason is not necessarily convinced that it is right and valid. The moral law abides like the stars with which it is arbitrarily compared, itself a star in airless space, pursuing its course regardless of humanity, having no relation to it or connexion with it; regard for or disregard of the moral law makes no perceptible difference, and it ceases to have any but a kind of astronomical interest for mankind, a purely theoretical interest for purposes of scientific observation and calculation, and is in no way applicable to the feelings, thoughts and actions of men.