Human, All Too Human Volume Ii Part 8

MAKING PLANS.-Making plans and conceiving projects involves many agreeable sentiments. He that had the strength to be nothing but a contriver of plans all his life would be a happy man. But one must occasionally have a rest from this activity by carrying a plan into execution, and then comes anger and sobriety.

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WHEREWITH WE SEE THE IDEAL.-Every efficient man is blocked by his efficiency and cannot look out freely from its prison. Had he not also a goodly share of imperfection, he could, by reason of his virtue, never arrive at an intellectual or moral freedom. Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal.

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DISHONEST PRAISE.-Dishonest praise causes many more twinges of conscience than dishonest blame, probably only because we have exposed our capacity for judgment far more completely through excessive praise than through excessive and unjust blame.

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HOW ONE DIES IS INDIFFERENT.-The whole way in which a man thinks of death during the prime of his life and strength is very expressive and significant for what we call his character. But the hour of death itself, his behaviour on the death-bed, is almost indifferent. The exhaustion of waning life, especially when old people die, the irregular or insufficient nourishment of the brain during this last period, the occasionally violent pain, the novel and untried nature of the whole position, and only too often the ebb and flow of superst.i.tious impressions and fears, as if dying were of much consequence and meant the crossing of bridges of the most terrible kind-all this forbids our using death as a testimony concerning the living. Nor is it true that the dying man is generally more honest than the living. On the contrary, through the solemn att.i.tude of the bystanders, the repressed or flowing streams of tears and emotions, every one is inveigled into a comedy of vanity, now conscious, now unconscious.

The serious way in which every dying man is treated must have been to many a poor despised devil the highest joy of his whole life and a sort of compensation and repayment for many privations.

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MORALITY AND ITS SACRIFICE.-The origin of morality may be traced to two ideas: "The community is of more value than the individual," and "The permanent interest is to be preferred to the temporary." The conclusion drawn is that the permanent interest of the community is unconditionally to be set above the temporary interest of the individual, especially his momentary well-being, but also his permanent interest and even the prolongation of his existence. Even if the individual suffers by an arrangement that suits the ma.s.s, even if he is depressed and ruined by it, morality must be maintained and the victim brought to the sacrifice. Such a trend of thought arises, however, only in those who are _not_ the victims-for in the victim's case it enforces the claim that the individual might be worth more than the many, and that the present enjoyment, the "moment in paradise,"(7) should perhaps be rated higher than a tame succession of untroubled or comfortable circ.u.mstances. But the philosophy of the sacrificial victim always finds voice too late, and so victory remains with morals and morality: which are really nothing more than the sentiment for the whole concept of morals under which one lives and has been reared-and reared not as an individual but as a member of the whole, as a cipher in a majority. Hence it constantly happens that the individual makes himself into a majority by means of his morality.

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THE GOOD AND THE GOOD CONSCIENCE.-You hold that all good things have at all times had a good conscience? Science, which is certainly a very good thing, has come into the world without such a conscience and quite free from all pathos, rather clandestinely, by roundabout ways, walking with shrouded or masked face like a sinner, and always with the feeling at least of being a smuggler. Good conscience has bad conscience for its stepping-stone, not for its opposite. For all that is good has at one time been new and consequently strange, against morals, immoral, and has gnawed like a worm at the heart of the fortunate discoverer.

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SUCCESS SANCTIFIES THE INTENTIONS.-We should not shrink from treading the road to a virtue, even when we see clearly that nothing but egotism, and accordingly utility, personal comfort, fear, considerations of health, reputation, or glory, are the impelling motives. These motives are styled ign.o.ble and selfish. Very well, but if they stimulate us to some virtue-for example, self-denial, dutifulness, order, thrift, measure, and moderation-let us listen to them, whatever their epithets may be! For if we reach the goal to which they summon us, then the virtue we have attained, by means of the pure air it makes us breathe and the spiritual well-being it communicates, enn.o.bles the remoter impulses of our action, and afterwards we no longer perform those actions from the same coa.r.s.e motives that inspired us before.-Education should therefore force the virtues on the pupil, as far as possible, according to his disposition.

Then virtue, the suns.h.i.+ne and summer atmosphere of the soul, can contribute her own share of work and add mellowness and sweetness.

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DABBLERS IN CHRISTIANITY, NOT CHRISTIANS.-So that is your Christianity!-To annoy humanity you praise "G.o.d and His Saints," and again when you want to praise humanity you go so far that G.o.d and His Saints must be annoyed.-I wish you would at least learn Christian manners, as you are so deficient in the civility of the Christian heart.

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THE RELIGIOUS AND IRRELIGIOUS IMPRESSION OF NATURE.-A true believer must be to us an object of veneration, but the same holds good of a true, sincere, convinced unbeliever. With men of the latter stamp we are near to the high mountains where mighty rivers have their source, and with believers we are under vigorous, shady, restful trees.

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JUDICIAL MURDER.-The two greatest judicial murders(8) in the world's history are, to speak without exaggeration, concealed and well-concealed suicide. In both cases a man _willed_ to die, and in both cases he let his breast be pierced by the sword in the hand of human injustice.

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"LOVE."-The finest artistic conception wherein Christianity had the advantage over other religious systems lay in one word-Love. Hence it became the _lyric_ religion (whereas in its two other creations Semitism bestowed heroico-epical religions upon the world). In the word "love"

there is so much meaning, so much that stimulates and appeals to memory and hope, that even the meanest intelligence and the coldest heart feel some glimmering of its sense. The cleverest woman and the lowest man think of the comparatively unselfish moments of their whole life, even if with them Eros never soared high: and the vast number of beings who _miss_ love from their parents or children or sweethearts, especially those whose s.e.xual instincts have been refined away, have found their heart's desire in Christianity.

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THE FULFILMENT OF CHRISTIANITY.-In Christianity there is also an Epicurean trend of thought, starting from the idea that G.o.d can only demand of man, his creation and his image, what it is possible for man to fulfil, and accordingly that Christian virtue and perfection are attainable and often attained. Now, for instance, the belief in loving one's enemies-even if it is only a belief or fancy, and by no means a psychological reality (a real love)-gives unalloyed happiness, so long as it is genuinely believed. (As to the reason of this, psychologist and Christian might well differ.) Hence earthly life, through the belief, I mean the fancy, that it satisfies not only the injunction to love our enemies, but all the other injunctions of Christianity, and that it has really a.s.similated and embodied in itself the Divine perfection according to the command, "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," might actually become a holy life. Thus error can make Christ's promise come true.

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