The infinity of the universe is only the “thought-picture” of the infinity of the moral volition.
This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles that mighty magician.
Γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ’ ὕδωρ, Αἰθέρι δ’ αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον, Στοργῇ δὲ στοργήν, νεῖχος δέ τε νείχεϊ λυγρῷ.
And Plotinus;
Οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἴδεν
ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος,
which Goethe imitated in the famous verse:
“Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Die Sonne könnt’ es nie erblicken; Läg’ nicht in uns des Gottes eig’ne Kraft, Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?”
Man is the only creature, he is the creature in Nature, that has in himself a relation to every thing.
He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things, the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius. He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.
The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. The man of genius lives in a state of complete understanding, an understanding of the whole; the whole world is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can become creative. The one lives in conscious active relation with the whole, the other in an unconscious relation; the man of genius is the actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. The genius is the complete man; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other parts; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws, but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is unconditioned. The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose consciousness of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that is within him and all that is outside him. He is the freest and the wisest and the most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him.
How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to other men? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which morality can assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And certainly in this respect, great men have displayed the most dubious qualities. Have they not laid themselves open to accusations of base ingratitude, extreme harshness, and much worse faults?
It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philosopher may be, the more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very way often disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in contact in every-day life; these cannot follow his higher flights and so try to bind the eagle to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way many great men have been branded as immoral.
Goethe, fortunately for himself, preserved a silence about himself so complete that modern people who think that they understand him completely as the light-living Olympian, only know a few specks of him taken from his marvellous delineation of Faust; we may be certain, none the less, that he judged himself severely, and suffered in full measure for the guilt he found in himself. And when an envious Nörgler, who never grasped Schopenhauer’s doctrine of detachment and the meaning of his Nirwana, throws the reproach at the latter that he got the last value out of his property, such a mean yelping requires no answer.
The statement that a great man is most moral towards himself stands on sure ground; he will not allow alien views to be imposed on him, so obscuring the judgment of his own ego; he will not passively accept the interpretation of another, of an alien ego, quite different from his own, and if ever he has allowed himself to be influenced, the thought will always be painful to him. A conscious lie that he has told will harass him throughout his life, and he will be unable to shake off the memory in Dionysian fashion. But men of genius will suffer most when they become aware afterwards that they have unconsciously helped to spread a lie in their talk or conduct with others. Other men, who do not possess this organic thirst for truth, are always deeply involved in lies and errors, and so do not understand the bitter revolt of great men against the “lies of life.”
The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by time, is dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of his intelligible ego by his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride is towards himself; there is the desire in him to impress his own self by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is the pride peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a higher tribunal. Soft and ascetic natures (Pascal is an example) sometimes suffer from this self-pride, and yet try in vain to shake it off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride before others, but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.
Can it be said that this strong adaptation to duty towards oneself prejudices the sense of duty towards one’s neighbours? Do not the two stand as alternatives, so that he who always keeps faith with himself must break it with others? By no means. As there is only one truth, so there can be only one desire for truth—what Carlyle called sincerity—that a man has or has not with regard both to himself and to the world; it is never one of two, a view of the world differing from a view of oneself, a self-study without a world-study; there is only one duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if he is moral towards himself he is moral towards others.
There are few regions of thought, however, so full of false ideas, as the conception of moral duty towards one’s neighbours and how it is to be fulfilled. Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, the theoretical systems of morality which are based on the maintenance of human society, and which attach less importance to the concrete feelings and motives at the moment of action than to the effect on the general system of morality, we come at once to the popular idea which defines the morality of a man by his “goodness,” the degree to which his compassionate disposition is developed. From the philosophical point of view, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith saw in sympathy the nature and source of all ethical conduct, and this view received a very strong support from Schopenhauer’s sympathetic morality. Schopenhauer’s “Essay on the Foundations of Morality” shows in its motto “It is easy to preach morality, difficult to find a basis for it,” the fundamental error of the sympathetic ethics which always fails to recognise that the science of ethics is not merely an explanation and description of conduct, but a search for a guide to it. Whoever will be at the pains diligently to listen to the inner voice of man, in order to establish what he ought to do, will certainly reject every system of ethics, the aim of which is to be a doctrine of the requirements which man has invented for himself and others instead of being a relation of what he actually does in furthering these requirements or in stifling them. The object of all moral science is not what is happening but what ought to happen.
All attempts to explain ethics by psychology overlook the fact that every psychic event in man is appraised by man himself, and the appraiser of the psychic event cannot be a psychic event. This standard can only be an idea, or a value which is never fully realised, and which cannot be altered by any experience because it remains constant, even if all experience is in opposition to it. Moral conduct can be only conduct controlled by an idea. And so we can choose only from systems of morality which set up some idea or maxim for the regulation of conduct, and there are only two to choose from, the ethical socialism or social ethics, founded by Bentham and Mill, but imported to the Continent and diligently propagated in Germany and Norway, and ethical individualism such as is taught by Christianity and German idealism.
The second failure of all the systems of ethics founded on sympathy is that they attempt to find a foundation
