Menshevism

“ The German Mensheviks believe neither in God nor the devil. They imagine they are some kind of nurses and governesses appointed to the working class. But in fact they only hinder the progress of the working class. They imagine that the workers are simpletons, and unless the wise Menshevik aunt keeps them out of mischief, they will get themselves into an awful state.
One should have seen those venerable intellectual "leaders" at Halle. They were at a loss for words, these enlightened, experienced leaders, as they thought themselves when they were suddenly turned out by the workers! ”

“ If the German bourgeoisie says, "Martov is our man, let us embrace him," they surely know what they are about. And, indeed, the Mensheviks are bound to fall on the neck of the European bourgeoisie. A bird will always espy his mate at a distance. ”

“ But apart from tangible loss, I regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of sentiment. In this old tongue our fathers played as children, bought and sold as men, prayed, preached, gossiped, quarrelled, and made love. It was their language at Tynwald; they sang their grim carvals in it, and their wailing, woful ballads.
* The Rev. T. E. Brown.
When it is dead more than half of all that makes us Manxmen will be gone. Our individuality will be lost, the greater barrier that separates us from other peoples will be broken down. ”

“ Finally, Paul Elmer More, the American, taking the cue from Fouillée, finds the germs of many of Nietzsche's doctrines in Hobbes, and then proceeds to a somewhat elaborate discussion of the mutations of ethical theory during the past two centuries, showing how Hume superimposed the idea of sympathy as a motive upon Hobbes' idea of self-interest, and how this sympathy theory prevailed over that of self-interest, and degenerated into sentimentalism, and so opened the way for Socialism and other such delusions, and how Nietzsche instituted a sort of Hobbesian revival. ”

“ To the moralist, the egoism which Nietzsche believes himself to have discovered at the base of all unselfishness, is the knowledge of what is useful not alone to the individual, but to the species as well; to the moralist, the creator of the knowledge of the useful is not the individual, but the whole species; to the moralist also egoism is morality, but it is a collective egoism of the species, an egoism of humanity in face of the non-human co-habitants of the earth, and in the face of Nature. ”

“ He believed that superior men, by which he meant alert and restless men, were held in chains by the illusions and inertia of the mass—that their impulse to move forward and upward, at whatever cost to those below, was restrained by false notions of duty and responsibility. It was his effort to break down those false notions, to show that the progress of the race was more important than the comfort of the herd, to combat and destroy the lingering spectre of sin—in his own phrase, to make man innocent. But when he said man he always meant the higher man, the man of tomorrow, and not mere men. ”

“ In the days of the cave men, a man gave his will to power free exercise. Any act which increased his power over his environment, no matter how much it damaged other men, seemed to him good. He knew nothing of morality. Things appeared to him, not as good or evil, but as good or bad—beneficial or harmful. But when civilization was born, there arose a necessity for controlling and regulating this will power. The individual had to submit to the desire of the majority and to conform to nascent codes of morality. ”

“ Herr von Michalowitz, believe me, I am not superstitious, not even a believer--I believe in actually nothing--do you hear! in actually nothing, but Mannsfield and mine own good sword.--I am not weak, I would not yield to any presentiment, but one presentiment does haunt me with all the strength of truth, as clear, as life-like as if I saw it with my own bodily eyes, my name will not live in history.... Mannsfield, Thurn, Boucquoi, Tilly, Waldstein, all the heroes that fight with us or against us, have lived for eternity, but my name will perish, will leave no trace behind it.... ”

“ Kao Tzŭ said, “Human nature may be compared with a block of wood; duty towards one's neighbour, with a wooden bowl. To develop charity and duty towards one's neighbour out of human nature is like making a bowl out of a block of wood.”
To this Mencius replied, “Can you without interfering with the natural constitution of the wood, make out of it a bowl? Surely you must do violence to that constitution in the process of making your bowl. And by parity of reasoning you would do violence to human nature in the process of developing charity and duty towards one’s neighbour. ”

“ Manxmen have not yet taken the poetry out of the moon and the stars, and the mist of the mountains and the wail of the sea. Of course we are ashamed of the survival of our old beliefs and try to hide them, but let nobody say that as a people we believe no longer in charms, and the evil eye, and good spirits and bad. I know we do. It would be easy to give you a hundred illustrations. I remember an ill-tempered old body living on the Curragh, who was supposed to possess the evil eye. If a cow died at calving, she had witched it. ”

“ Those who think that the adventure of young Nemovetsky is a slice of life and characterizes certain psychological states, have, without a doubt, the right to judge this story as an indiscretion, and to reproach the author with a deviation from morality; but Andreyev has not taken his hero from reality; he has not tried to give us a picture of manners, but has expressed an idea, born in his brain under the influence of the philosophy of Nietzsche. It illustrates the terrible power and the brutality of a dormant instinct lurking in the purest minds. ”

“ Nietzsche found that all existing moral ideas might be divided into two broad classes, corresponding to the two broad varieties of human beings—the masters and the slaves. Every man is either a master or a slave, and the same is true of every race. Either it rules some other race or it is itself ruled by some other race. It is impossible to think of a man or of a people as being utterly isolated, and even were this last possible, it is obvious that the community would be divided into those who ruled and those who obeyed. The masters are strong and are capable of doing as they please ”

“ This survival of ideas we call morality. By its operation the human race is frequently saddled with the notions of generations long dead and forgotten. Thus we modern Christians still subscribe to the apollonian morality of the ancient Jews—our moral forebears—despite the fact that their ideas were evolved under conditions vastly different from those which confront us today. Thus the expressions of the life instinct, by obtaining an artificial and unnatural permanence, turn upon the instinct itself and defeat its beneficent purpose. ”

“ He had shown that many things held to be utterly and unquestionably good or bad by modern civilization were once given quite different values—that the ancient Greeks considered hope a sign of weakness, and mercy the attribute of a fool, and that the Jews, in their royal days, looked upon wrath, not as a sin, but as a virtue—and in general he had demonstrated, by countless instances and arguments, that all notions of good and evil were mutable and that no man could ever say, with utter certainty, that one thing was right and another wrong. ”

“ The working classes of other countries have to go through that period now, and their difficulties are greater, because their bourgeoisie is clever, more cunning, and more skilful than ours, and their Mensheviks display their artfulness in subtly deceiving the workers. ”

“ But is this not ultimately some degrees too witty to be true, and has our system of prescientific psychology the right to open the door to such glittering epigrams which are uttered simply to tickle or to whip the vanity of man? Or what psychologist would believe Lichtenberg when he claims: “All men are equal in their mental aptitudes, and only their surroundings are responsible for their differences”? He observes better when he says: “An insolent man can look modest when he will, but a modest man can never make himself look insolent” ”

“ The psychologist, I am convinced, must here stand on the unpopular side. To be sure, he is not unaccustomed to such an unfortunate position in the camp of the disfavoured minority. Whenever a great movement sweeps through the civilized world, it generally starts from the recognition of a great social wrong and from the enthusiasm for a thorough change. But these wrongs, whether they have political or social, economic or moral character, are always the products of both physical and psychical causes. The public thinks first of all of the physical ones. ”

“ This is the great trick of nature in its incessant service to the conservation of the animal race. Monogamic civilization strives to regulate and organize these race instincts and to raise culture above the mere lure of nature. But that surely cannot be done by merely ignoring that automatic mechanism of nature. On the contrary, the first demand of civilization must be to make use of this inborn psychophysical apparatus for its own ideal human purposes, and to adjust the social behaviour most delicately to the unchangeable mechanism. ”

“ In order that crime may develop, it is necessary that anthropological, social and telluric factors should act together.
We generally forget the conditions of the physical environment in which we live, because supernatural prejudice tells us that the body is a beast which we must forget in order to elevate ourselves into a spiritual life. Manzoni could designate the Middle Ages by the term "dirty." because they neglected the demands of elementary hygiene, and thus of human morality. For where the requirements of our physical body are neglected or offended, there no flower can bloom. ”

“ He played with his clergy as long as they had anything to lose, and then he played with a deemster and lost five hundred pounds himself. Poor little island, that had two such men for its masters, the one its master in the things of this world, the other its master in the things of the world to come! If anything is needful to complete the picture of wretchedness in which the poor Manx people must have existed then, it is the knowledge of what manner of man a deemster was in those days, what his powers were, and how he exercised them. ”

“ A strength and self-denial more than human seemed necessary if he would turn his back coldly on the splendid prospect that opened before him as his country's avenger and deliverer. What words can do justice to the conflicting emotions which Manasseh experienced in that hour of trial? His comrades in arms and many of his dearest friends, he felt convinced, would turn upon him with mockery and reviling if he should now still cling to his principles and refuse to disobey the commandment of his God,—"Thou shalt not kill." ”

“ In the last analysis, all ideas are judged among us by moral standards; moral values are our only permanent tests of worth, whether in the arts, in politics, in philosophy or in life itself. Even the instincts of man, so intrinsically immoral, so innocent, are fitted with moral false-faces. That bedevilment by sex ideas which punishes continence, so abhorrent to nature, is converted into a moral frenzy, pathological in the end. The impulse to cavort and kick up one’s legs, so healthy, so universal, is hedged in by incomprehensible taboos ”

“ The sufferings of the evidently innocent Menshoff seemed terrible, and not so much his physical suffering as the perplexity, the distrust in the good and in God which he must feel, seeing the cruelty of the people who tormented him without any reason. ”

“ While demonstrating my madness do you know what I have perceived? That I am not mad—that is what I have perceived. I will explain.
The leading fact behind my hereditary impulses and my fits is degeneracy. I am of the degenerate, whose like can be found in large numbers if only sought for more diligently, even amongst you, gentlemen experts. This gives a substantial key to the rest. My moral views you may attribute not to conscious reflection, but to degeneracy. Truly, moral instincts are lodged so deeply that only in some deviation from the normal type is complete freedom from them possible. ”

“ He hesitates to demonstrate his superiority by such banal means, and he shrinks from confessing an inferiority that he doesn't believe in.
Nevertheless, the popular morality of the world, which is the creation, not of its superior men but of its botches and half-men—in brief, of its majorities—puts a high value on gratitude and denounces the with-holding of it as an offense against the proprieties. To be noticeably ungrateful for benefits—that is, for the by-products of the egotism of others—is to be disliked. ”

“ A similar question of psychology presents itself in a practice intended as a preservative against the evil eye rather than as a cure. I allude to what I have heard about two maiden ladies living in a Manx village which I know very well: they are natives of a neighbouring parish, and I am assured that whenever a stranger enters their house they proceed, as soon as he goes away, to strew a little dust or sand over the spot where he stood. ”