Negative

“ But to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity,—strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,—prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth. ”

“ For that which is purely negative is generally flat and stale and leaves us consequently either void or drives us back, whether it be used as the motive force of an action or merely as a means to promote a reaction in another. ”

“ It is obvious that when no other deeper motives interfere—as in the case of all those people whom I call negative, and whose physiological or bodily promptings are hardly audible—vanity very soon becomes the only mainspring of action. ”

“ I know what's bad. And when they change it and make it really bad, something that should be positive -- sometimes something that should be very positive, they'll make OK. They'll even make it negative. ”

“ Such negatives, and in fact all negatives, besides saving life from the narrowness of its various forms, do this positive thing: they open the door of life's wider, nay, of life's infinite opportunity or possibility, and at the same time they render those various definite forms really mediative or instrumental, making them parts in an essentially purposive existence. ”

“ Besides, the majority of defects are pri [229] vational in character and not positive, like for example darkness, poverty, ignorance, and so on, which are not things, but the negations of light, wealth, wisdom, respectively. Being negative, not positive, they are not made by any body. ”

“ Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural, and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. ”

“ But I realized that the evil, or the good—for why call love an evil?—had penetrated into the most remote regions of my being, and I realized the energy of my struggle like a person entombed who tries to extricate himself. ”

“ Here every other man is, to the individual, hostile, inconsiderate, greedy, inhuman, avaricious, be he noble or servile; bad is the characteristic term for man, for every living being, indeed, that is recognized at all, even for a god: human, divine, these notions are tantamount to devilish, bad. Manifestations of goodness, sympathy, helpfulness, are regarded with anxiety as trickiness, preludes to an evil end, deception, subtlety, in short, as refined badness. ”

“ We look too much at the consequences of vice,—too little at the vice itself. It is vice which is the chief weight of what we call its consequences,—vice, which is the bitterness in the cup of human woe. ”

“ With the devils of human nature—the vanities, the greeds, the follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas—how do you see such a world...? ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ There are, to be sure, the mystical optimisms and pessimisms to be reckoned with, the sweeping assertions of certain schools and individuals that everything is equally good or equally bad. Such undiscriminating formulas are either the mere objectification of a mood, of some unusual period of ecstasy or sorrow, a blind outcry of thanksgiving or of bitterness, or they are the clumsy expression of some practical truth, as, the wisdom of acquiescence, and the futility of preoccupation with evil. ”

“ When and where the career of these germs of being, starting from points so wide asunder, are to meet, and how the balances of good and evil, of suffering and enjoyment of sinning and retribution, are to be adjusted at last? ”

“ It is the steady presentation of one aspect of human life, and that the lowest, that slowly jaundices our view and that produces either a rank pessimism or else an indignation against evil so strong as to efface judgment and to paralyze reason. Day after day we see human nature presented in its worst aspects and only in its worst aspects. ”

“ But is, then, the contemplation of a bad condition itself a good condition? Is he not so much the worse that he bears this consciousness, and so much the weaker that he sees an incurable cancer-sore growing upon him? The highest thing he has, at all events, lost,—innocence. ”

“ But no possible good, but incalculable evil may and does arise from the too common practice of placing all conduct, the source of which we do not fully understand, to the worst of intentions. How often is the gentle, timid soul discouraged, and driven perhaps to despondency, by finding its 'good evil spoken of;' and a well-meant but mistaken action loaded with an evil design! ”

“ The low ideals, the open boasting of shame, the matter-of-course conviction that all men and most women were as bad as themselves, filled him with a deep boiling rage, and he would close his book or throw down the paper with which he was trying to while the hour, and fling forth into the cold air for a solitary ride or walk. ”

“ This irrepressible delight and interest in the active life of the world, what could it be but the tendency to evil, most strongly developed? These heart-burnings whenever she witnessed men and women rejoicing in the exercise of their natural affections, what could that be but the proneness to evil in its grossest form? ”

“ I repeat, this depressing and infectious instinct thwarts those instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the value life: by multiplying misery quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable, it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,—pity exhorts people to nothing, to nonentity! ”

“ Not only is this so with the right and proper life, but the greater portion of those acts we call vice draw their stimulus and pleasure from the impulses that subserve this sustaining fact of our being, and they are vicious only because they evade or spoil their proper end. ”

“ It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things--perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. ”

“ All these motives, however, whatever fine names we may give them, have grown from the same roots in which we believe the baneful poisons lurk. Between good and bad actions there is no difference in kind but, at most, in degree. Good acts are sublimated evil. Bad acts are degraded, imbruted good. ”

“ You want to be right in our eyes as well as in yours, and especially in yours !—and an irritable and subtle evil conscience so often incites and urges you on against your very enthusiasm. How ingenious you then grow in the outwitting and soothing of this conscience! How much you hate the honest, simple, clean souls ”

“ We varnish over or seek to conceal vice, and it loses half its grossness—it becomes attractive perhaps, or fashionable; but if we strip it of its veil, any soul, not wholly smirched, will recoil with horror. ”

“ The more open we are to these enjoyments, the happier do we feel ourselves; out if the changes in these phenomena roll up and down before us without our taking interest in them, if we are insensible to such beautiful offers, then comes on the greatest evil, the heaviest disease—we regard life as a disgusting burden. ”

“ But what do we call good? What pleases us. What evil? That which harms us. And we are to judge the world by this narrow egotistic scale of morals? Oh, what folly! Creative and destructive forces--are they not alike necessary agents in nature's great workshop? ”

“ And now appears the first ray of relief, of recovery, and one of its first effects is that we turn against the preponderance of our pride: we call ourselves foolish and vain, as if we had undergone some unique experience. ”

“ Shewing that all the mutability of our tempers, the disorders of our passions, the corruption of our hearts, all the reveries of the imagination, all the contradictions and absurdities that are to be found in human life, and human opinions, are in effect the mutability, disorders, corruption, and absurdities of human reason. ”

“ So, when the gilded baits of vice
Are placed before our longing eyes.
With greedy haste we snatch our fill
And swallow down the latent ill:
But when experience opes our eyes,
Away the fancied pleasure flies. ”

“ Fire his conscience, and he blushes; check his circulation, and he thinks tardily or not at all; impair his secretions, and the moral sense is dulled, discolored, or depraved, his aspirations flag, his hope and love both reel; impair them still more, and he becomes a brute. ”

“ We prefer that which no longer reminds us of good and evil. Our moral sensibility and tenderness seem to be relieved in the heart of terrible and happy Nature, in the fatalism of the senses and forces. Life without goodness. ”

“ All these conditions of mind are rightly called “evil,” for they are the efforts of the soul to subvert, in its ignorance, the law, an they, therefore, lead to chaos and confusion within, and are sooner or later actualized in the outward circumstances as disease, failure, and misfortune, coupled with grief, pain, and despair. ”

“ By day and by night, at all times and every where, he is the victim of an energetic and comprehensive system of measures, which blot out his senses, paralyze his mind, degrade and brutify his nature, and suppress the instinctive workings of truth, generosity, and manhood in his breast. ”

“ When first we throw ourselves forth, and meet burs and briars on every side, which stick in our very hearts;—and fair tempting fruits which turn to bitter ashes in the taste, then we exclaim with impatience, all things are evil. But at length comes the calm [Pg 16] hour, when they who look beyond the superficies of things begin to discern their true bearings; when the perception of evil, or sorrow, or sin, brings also the perception of some opposite good, which awakens our indulgence, or the knowledge of the cause which excites our pity. ”

“ For neither disease, nor poverty, nor any thing else of this kind is evil; but the depravity of the soul, intemperance, timidity, and every vice. Of these things, however, we are the causes to ourselves. ”

“ Permit me to exhibit in their genuine deformity the [Pg 298] errors which are seducing you to destruction. State to me with candour the train of sophisms by which the evil spirit has deluded your understanding. Confess the secret motives of your disbelief; suffer me to administer a remedy to your intellectual disease. I fear not the contagion of such revolting sentiments: I fear only lest patience should desert me before you have finished the detail of your presumptuous credulity. ”

“ How degenerate in taste, how servile before dignities, rank, dress, pomp, and parade must a people have been that estimated the simple and plain as the bad (das Schlichte als das Schlechte) , the simple and plain man as the bad man! ”

“ The effect may, indeed, react upon its cause and increase it; the disordered external condition which first sprang from the selfishness and evil within, may and in all probability does react and increase that selfishness. ”

“ What a real voluptuous feeling they had for dirt and gloom and sordidness and boredom, and all the horrors of vice. They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. ”

“ In order to illustrate the nature of evils of this class, I may take two instances—cruelty and lasciviousness. That these are great intrinsic evils, we may, I think, easily assure ourselves, by imagining the state of a man, whose mind is solely occupied by either of these passions, in their worst form. ”

“ The best in wrong setting becomes the worst.” Upon such bases these older accounts of evil undertook to make the presence of evil in the world consistent with the well known thesis, Omne Ens est bonum, — a thesis whose historical relation to our own conception of Being I am far from attempting to deny. ”

“ And all these instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on the man himself—feelings of enmity, cruelty, delight in change, in hazard, violence, persecution, destruction—and thus the bad conscience originated. ”

“ They stalk about in our midst as living reproaches, as warnings to us—as though health, fitness, strength, pride, the sensation of power, were really vicious things in themselves, for which one would have some day to do penance, bitter penance. ”