Oyonale - 3D art and graphic experiments
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Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.
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But this standard is the idea of virtue, in relation to which all possible objects of experience are indeed serviceable as examples--proofs of the practicability in a certain degree of that which the conception of virtue demands--but certainly not as archetypes. Accordingly we find, that many religious declaimers decry those virtues as purely pagan and natural, and represent to us the excellency of the Christian religion, which places humility in the rank of virtues, and corrects the judgment of the world, and even of philosophers, who so generally admire all the efforts of pride and ambition. We have happily attained experiments in the artificial virtues, where the tendency of qualities to the good of society, is the sole cause of our approbation, without any suspicion of the concurrence of another principle. It follows that it is only because we subject the sequence of phenomena, and consequently all change, to the law of causality, that experience itself, that is, empirical cognition of phenomena, becomes possible; and consequently, that phenomena themselves, as objects of experience, are possible only by virtue of this law. We come now to the examination of such virtues and vices as are entirely natural, and have no dependance on the artifice and contrivance of men. An action must be virtuous, before we can have a regard to its virtue. But that reason, according to this hypothesis, discovers also vice and virtue.