This procedure, however, cannot possibly occur to him of itself; at best it could only be after another moral; stimulus had supplied the first impulse and motive thereto; and such a stimulus would have to be positively operative, and real; and show itself to be such, as well as spontaneously influence, indeed force its presence upon, the mind. But anything of this sort would run counter to Kant's assumption, which, according to the chain of reasoning above described, is to be regarded as itself the origin of all moral conceptions — in fact, the punctum saliens of Morality. Consequently, as long as there is no such antecedent incentive (because, ex hypothesi, there exists no other moral stimulus but the process of thought already explained), so long Egoism alone must remain as the plumb-line of human