Virtue, Reward, Self

In his attempt to systematize the Rationalism and Empiricism of the Modern era, Kant's most formidable predecessor is not Descartes or Hume, but the one with the thesis that eludes his appropriation--Spinoza.  Spinoza's thesis, 'Virtue is self-rewarding', is antithetical to Kant's thesis that Virtue is, in itself, an incomplete Good, thereby preempting Kant's claim of the  Necessity of the existence of a deity who can complete Virtue by rewarding it.  The unavailability to Kant of an adequate counter to Spinoza's thesis is implicit in the weakness of the one that he does present--a merely a posteriori Utilitarian argument as to which principle offers the greater Happiness.  A potentially more effective counter on a priori grounds is unavailable to him because his system cannot accommodate the two fundamental components of Spinoza's thesis-- the existence of an immanent deity, and a faculty of Intuition via which one can know the deity, the experience that Spinoza characterizes as both virtuous and joyous.  Now, this Intuition consists, more precisely, in the knowledge that one is a part of the divine substance.  So, Spinoza systematically joins a concept of I with one of Self-Interest, in contrast with, notably, Hume, who, as has been previously discussed, seems to not address a significant apparent discrepancy between his versions of those two concepts, i. e. that one is compound and the other is simple.