Negativity

“ This shows at least a disturbance, an implicit dissatisfaction in vice. If we inquire into the grounds of it, we shall find it proceeds partly from an immediate sense of having done evil, and, partly, from an apprehension, that this inward sense shall, one time or other, be seconded by a higher judgment, upon which our whole being depends. Now, to suspend and drown this sense, and these apprehensions, be it by the hurry of business or of pleasure, or by superstition, or moral equivocations, this is in a manner one and the same, and makes no alteration at all in the nature of our case. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is quite possible that a negative may yet cost me my life. But your adjective 'morbid' is quite out of place, apart from being commonplace. I simply want to make a collection of examples of every conceivable human emotion as betrayed by the human countenance. And, as I said, I do not exhibit the results. As regards the photographs which | have taken of you——”
“Of me!”
“——I promise to destroy prints as well as negatives after I have analysed them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In order to be able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of life—that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval—the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Belief in Inebriation.—Those men who have moments of sublime ecstasy, and who, on ordinary occasions, on account of the contrast and the excessive wearing away of their nervous forces, usually feel miserable and desolate, come to consider such moments as the true manifestation of their real selves, of their “ego,” and their misery and dejection, on the other hand, as the effect of the “non-ego”. This is why they think of their environment, the age in which they live, and the whole world in which they have their being, with feelings of vindictiveness. ”

“ 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 ”

“ For no vice is so bad as one that has exploded, and the weaknesses which we can regard with complacency while they are current, cause strong emotions of disgust when, their day being over, we look back upon them, and wonder how people could have been so extremely wicked. ”

“ This is not that habit which incorporates us into vice, and conforms even our understanding itself to it; nor is it that impetuous whirlwind that by gusts troubles and blinds our souls, and for the time precipitates us, judgment and all, into the power of vice. ”

“ Let us hope that the refinement, falsely so called, which is only another name for vanity, laziness, and selfishness, may soon give way to the true refinement of heart and mind which considers nothing too menial which will benefit others; nothing too common that will add to the happiness of our fellow-creatures. ”

“ The objective ones speak.—“Nothing comes more easily to us, than to be wise, patient, superior. We are soaked in the oil of indulgence and of sympathy, we are absurdly just, we forgive everything. Precisely on that account we should be severe with ourselves; for that very reason we ought from time to time to go in for a little emotion, a little emotional vice. It may seem bitter to us; and between ourselves we may even laugh at the figure which it makes us cut But what does it matter? We have no other kind of self-control left. This is our asceticism, our manner of performing penance.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ But whatever a man was, he couldn't make me so used to the idea of wickedness that I could find comforting oblivion in it. That way of misery is shut off from me with an iron gate of natural instinct. ”

“ What afflicted and terrified him far more than all this, was the perversion of all ideas, this fearful evil, the corrupting of all notions; vice, in truth, is taken for virtue, virtue counted for vice. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Yes! it is secret evil in our hearts, which produces this habit of speaking harshly, uncharitably, ill of our neighbor; and if we watch ourselves closely, we shall find it to be so. Let us observe our feelings, note our thoughts carefully, when we are saying or about to say something to the prejudice of another. Let us observe if we do not discover a hidden feeling of dislike, or, envy, rivalry, bitterness, or petty revenge, which prompts us to speak. ”

“ 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? ”

“ How weak and intolerably foolish to imagine evil where perhaps none was! Why should his thoughts fly to terrible reasons for the postponement of his joy, when in truth they could as well be of the simplest? ”

“ 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...? ”

“ 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! ”

“ It will immediately appear, that vice cannot be the happiness, but must, upon the whole, be the misery, of such a creature as man—a moral, an accountable agent. Superstitious observances, self-conceit, though of a more refined sort, will not, in reality, at all amend matters with us. ”

“ And for whom do I (the oratio obliqua is dropped, and the directa used in its place; or perhaps with this meaning does this ego) toil, and depriving my soul (with the usual meaning, ‘myself’) of good? (abstract.) Also this is a vanity and an anxiety which an evil is (emphatic) ‘indeed’ (equivalent to ‘an evil and nothing else,’ or ‘is simply an evil’; other anxieties may be beneficial, this cannot be. This is the reason why we have רע, and not רעה, the abstract, as we should have expected) .
9 ¶ Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. ”

“ This may seem a paradox, and you may say to me, are there no men who make parade and ostentation of vice? I answer yes, but not of all their vices. They endeavour by their boasting to hide their confusion, and discover that part of their soul which they are unable to conceal. They place a crown on the image of vice, in order to give dignity to the figure; and although arrogant wickedness is worse than timid, the last is despised, and the first feared. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The strong inclination he has to do mischief. His very soul desires evil, desires that evil may be done and that he may have the pleasure, not only of seeing it, but of having a hand in it. The root of wickedness lies in the soul; the desire that men have to do evil, that is the lust which conceives and brings forth sin. 2. The strong aversion he has to do good: His neighbour, his friend, his nearest relation, finds no favour in his eyes, cannot gain from him the least kindness, though he be in the greatest need of it. ”

“ Of things some are good, others bad, and yet others indifferent. Now the virtues and everything that shares in them are good, while vices and everything that shares in vice are evil, and what falls in between these, namely, wealth, health, life, death, pleasures, pain, are indifferent. ”

“ Then let us in befitting detail, and by a series of questions that ask no loud, and are secure against any false, answer, urge home the proof of the position, that to be vicious is to be wretched: adding the fearful corollary, that if even in the body, which as long as life is in it can never be wholly bereaved of pleasurable sensations, vice is found to be misery, what must it not be in the world to come? ”

“ As soon as you are happy these demons of envy, spite, and malicious intention attack you for evil ends, and ruin your happiness to get hold of your body and soul. Never practise or interest yourself in these matters, and debar them from your house by prayer and absolute non-hearing or seeing them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the vices mentioned are not the worst, the traces of which we see stamped upon the faces of hundreds of boys, some of whom, too, would scorn to commit any one of the sins named. There is another vice, still more terrible, more blighting in its effects, a vice which defiles, diseases, and destroys the body, enervates, degrades, and finally dethrones the mind, debases and ruins the soul. It is to this vice that we wish especially to call attention. ”

“ In bodies that are predisposed to vice, the stimulus of cheerful, but much more of profane society and conversation, upon the animal spirits, becomes an exciting cause, and, like the stroke of the flint upon the steel, renders the sparks of vice both active and visible. By removing men out of the reach of this exciting cause, they are often reformed, especially if they are confined long enough to produce a sufficient chasm in their habits of vice. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Come, let’s hear what you’ve got to say to that?”
“We never hate ourselves,” I said. “We despise and pity ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although—I must add this—we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”