132

The echo of Christianity in morality.  'On n'est bon que par la pitié: il faut donc qu'il y ait quelque pitié dans tous nos sentiments'⁶¹  thus says morality today! And why is that?  That men today feel the sympathetic, disinterested, generally useful social actions to be the moral actions  this is perhaps the most general effect and conversion which Christianity has produced in Europe: although it was not its intention nor contained in its teaching. But it was the residuum of Christian states of mind left when the very much antithetical, strictly egoistic fundamental belief in the 'one thing needful', in the absolute importance of eternal personal salvation, together with the dogmas upon which it rested, gradually retreated and the subsidiary belief in 'love', in 'love of one's neighbour', in concert with the tremendous practical effect of ecclesiastical charity, was thereby pushed into the foreground. The more one liberated oneself from the dogmas, the more one sought as it were a justification of this liberation in a cult of philanthropy: not to fall short of the Christian ideal in this, but where possible to outdo it, was a secret spur with all French freethinkers from Voltaire⁶² up to Auguste Comte⁶³: and the latter did in fact, with his moral formula vivre pour autrui, outchristian Christianity. In Germany it was Schopenhauer, in England John Stuart Mill who gave the widest currency to the teaching of the sympathetic affects and of pity or the advantage of others as the principle of behaviour: but they themselves were no more than an echo  those teachings have shot up with a mighty impetus everywhere and in the crudest and subtlest forms together from about the time of the French Revolution onwards, every socialist system has placed itself as if involuntarily on the common ground of these teachings. There is today perhaps no more firmly credited prejudice than this: that one knows what really constitutes the moral. Today it seems to do everyone good when they hear that society is on the way to adapting the individual to general requirements, and that the happiness and at the same time the sacrifice of the individual lies in feeling himself to be a useful member and instrument of the whole: except that one is at present very uncertain as to where this whole is to be sought, whether in an existing state or one still to be created, or in the nation, or in a brotherhood of peoples, or in new little economic communalities. At present there is much reflection, doubt, controversy over this subject, and much excitement and passion; but there is also a wonderful and fair-sounding unanimity in the demand that the ego has to deny itself until, in the form of adaptation to the whole, it again acquires its firmly set circle of rights and duties  until it has become something quite novel and different. What is wanted  whether this is admitted or not  is nothing less than a fundamental remoulding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicting all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members. Everything that in any way corresponds to this body- and membership-building drive and its ancillary drives is felt to be good, this is the moral undercurrent of our age; individual empathy and social feeling here play into one another's hands. (Kant still stands outside this movement: he expressly teaches that we must be insensible towards the suffering of others if our beneficence is to possess moral value  which Schopenhauer, in a wrath easy to comprehend, calls Kantian insipidity.)