This morning at seven, before it was light, I went out with a shovel and did the front steps of the woman across the road. Snow on the Tuesday night in a town in Scotland, and at seven the next morning, before it was light, a man goes out with a shovel and clears the front steps of the woman across the road, who is a good bit older than him and walks with a stick. He does the three steps and the two yards at the foot of them where she turns, leaves the long path down to her gate, tells nobody, and she never learns who did it. By nine, putting his shoes on in the hall, he has said out loud that he did it to be the sort of man who does that, and whatever he had at half past seven is gone. The companion brings Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, of 1785, which sets an action that accords with duty against an action done from duty and puts the worth in the second, and which calls the distinction much harder to make where a direct inclination runs alongside. It takes him through the dealer who keeps one price so that a child buys of him as well as any other, the man who finds a pleasure in spreading joy around him and is granted neither vanity nor self-interest, Kant’s own reason for the verdict on that man, the love seated in the will rather than in the propensions of sense, and a later work of 1797 that makes cultivating the feelings a duty at one remove. Then it takes the morning as he gave it and sorts it in Kant’s vocabulary. He answers with the part of her ground he left white.
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2026/10/3010 分