For one's own happiness is, no doubt, an end that all men have (by
virtue of the impulse of their nature), but this end cannot without
contradiction be regarded as a duty. What a man of himself
inevitably wills does not come under the notion of duty, for this is a
constraint to an end reluctantly adopted. It is, therefore, a
contradiction to say that a man is in duty bound to advance his own
happiness with all his power.
It is likewise a contradiction to make the perfection of another
my end, and to regard myself as in duty bound to promote it. For it is
just in this that the perfection of another man as a person
consists, namely, that he is able of himself to set before him his own
end according to his own notions of duty; and it is a contradiction to
require (to make it a duty for me) that I should do something which no
other but himself can do.
V. Explanation of these two Notions
A. OUR OWN PERFECTION
The word perfection is liable to many misconceptions. It is
sometimes understood as a notion belonging to transcendental
philosophy; viz., the notion of the totality of the manifold which
taken together constitutes a thing; sometimes, again, it is understood
as belonging to teleology, so that it signifies the correspondence
of the properties of a thing to an end. Perfection in the former sense
might be called quantitative (material), in the latter qualitative
(formal) perfection.
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