The fact so often observed, that man in many cases does that which he
passionately desires to leave undone, and refrains from doing that which
all his instincts urge him to do--this phenomenon of Morality is a
generalization upon a huge scale of the above experiment on animals with
the pane of glass in a tank.
Jean Jacques Rousseau thought out a theoretical human being who was by
nature good. Such a human being does not exist and has never existed.
From sheer annoyance at the provoking obliquity of vision which led the
enthusiast of Geneva to develop such a theory, one is sorely tempted to
go to the opposite extreme and declare that man is by nature
fundamentally bad; but such an assertion is just as naïve as Rousseau's
contention. Good and bad are values which we can only learn to
appreciate when we have felt the effect of the phenomenon of Morality.
The concepts of good and evil are of much later origin than mankind, and
can therefore no more constitute a fundamental characteristic of man's
original nature than, for instance, the cut and colour of his clothes;
though it is open to wiseacres to maintain that man's nature to some
extent actually finds expression in the cut and colour of his
clothes--that is, in his choice of them. Anyone contemplating primitive
man, man as he emerges from the hands of Nature, stripped of all the
additions which he has acquired in the course of his historical
development, is bound to admit that man is neither good nor bad; he is a
living being acting according to the instincts implanted in his nature;
just like the pike. But in most contingencies he does not obey these
instincts, and if he reflects upon himself and his actions, he is
astounded at realizing this, and asks: "Why do I refrain from revelling
in the gratification of my desires?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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