George Santayana

“ The protest of Max Stirner against sham ideals and aims forced upon us by social pressure should not then have extended to ideals congenial to the natural man and founded on his instincts. Since the seat of our enthusiasms must be personal, their appeal should be so too, if they are to inspire us efficaciously; but every art and science shows that they may be utterly impersonal in their object. It was not in proposing ideal aims that the German philosophers were wrong: that was the noble and heroic side of their doctrine, as well as a point in which their psychology was correct. ”

“ The indomitable individual should shake off those chains, which were only cobwebs, and come into his own.
Egotism thus becomes individualism, and threatens to become selfishness. The logic of these positions does not seem to have been clear to Max Stirner. That the individual must possess all his wishes and aspirations, even the most self-denying and suicidal, is obvious; he is the seat of those very obsessions and superstitions which Max Stirner deplored. The same thing is true of knowledge: a man can know only what he knows and what his faculties make him capable of knowing. ”

“ A reasonable morality terminates instead in the arts, by which human ideals and passions are compounded with experience and adapted to the materials they must work in. The immaturity of the German moralists appears in their conception that the good is life, which is what an irrational animal might say: whereas for a rational being the good is only the good part of life, that healthy, stable, wise, kind, and beautiful sort of life which he calls happiness. ”

“ They have not taken the trouble to decipher human nature, which is an endowment, something many-sided, unconscious, with a margin of variation, and have started instead with the will, which is only an attitude, something casual, conscious, and narrowly absolute. ”

“ Nor have they learned to respect sufficiently the external conditions under which human nature operates and to which it must conform—God, the material world, the nature and will of other men. Their morality consequently terminates in ideals, casual, conscious, and absolute expressions of the passions, or else expires in a mysticism which renounces all moral judgment. ”

“ But if our souls abhor those things, it is because they love something else; and this other thing they love for its own sake, so that the very refusal to sacrifice to those idols is a proof of faith in a true God. ”

“ This fact is the excuse for transcendentalism, and the element of truth in it. But the fact that volition and knowledge must have their seat in some person prejudges nothing about the scope of their objects. ”