The conclusion of Max Stirner, that because those idols are false, and the worship of them is cruel and superstitious, therefore we must worship nothing and merely enjoy in a piggish way what we may call our own, is a conclusion that misreads human nature. It overlooks the fact that man lives by the imagination, that the imagination--when not chaotic and futile--is exercised in the arts of life, that the objects [Pg 103] of these arts are impersonal, and that to achieve these objects brings us a natural happiness. The Germans are by nature a good stolid people, and it is curious that their moralists, of every school, are so fantastic and bad. The trouble lies perhaps in this, that they are all precipitate. 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. 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. [Pg 104] CHAPTER X THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY