A Palingenesis and Its Consequences 185faculty, that sensations and thoughts were part of one continuum. Some
emphasized the sensitive part of this continuum as basic, though most opted
for the intellectual one; but, and this is most important to remember, all
accepted what may be called the "continuity thesis" concerning sensation
and cognition.^156
It was for this reason that Hutcheson's observations on the "moral sense"
could also form the starting point for Kant; and it was for precisely this
reason that he thought that "the attempts of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and
Hume,... though imperfect and deficient, have nevertheless come fur¬
thest in the collection of the first principles of all morality"; and finally it
is for this reason that he himself engaged in such observations. Because
the principles of morality can be gleaned from empirical observation of
what seems to be a special sense, but might not turn out to be so, we can
start our analysis with it. Given the danger inherent in the rationalist pro¬
cedure of definition, we should start with such evidence. Still, this was
more a procedural point than a foundational one. Kant's position was com¬
patible with the kind of rationalism that Mendelssohn subscribed to. In this
account of human nature, reason played as important a part as the moral
sense. Kant could not make up his mind which was more important. This
does not mean that Kant was confused about his own position. He was wa¬
vering between reason and moral sense as between two radically different
approaches to the foundation of morals. For Kant, like his contemporaries,
subscribed to the "continuity thesis." Indeed, there is nothing in Kant's
pronouncements about moral sense in his published works between 1760
and 1770 that radically distinguished him from his German contemporaries.
He considered observations in the British style very important, and some¬
times he emphasized them. When he said, "under the name of the 'moral
feeling,' Hutcheson and others have provided a start toward some excellent
observations," he did not mean that Hutcheson and the others got it essen¬
tially right.^157 Like Mendelssohn, he thought that they had made a good
start, but that their principles need to be reduced to "the highest degree
of philosophical evidence." Accordingly, he could argue in the Observations
on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime of the same year that
true virtue can be grafted only upon principles such that the more general they are,
the more sublime and nobler it becomes. These principles are not speculative rules, but
the consciousness of a feeling that lives in every human breast and extends itself much
further than over particular grounds of compassion and complaisance. I believe that I
sum it all up when I say that it is the feeling of the beauty and the dignity of human nature.
The first is a ground of universal affection, the second of universal esteem.^158