Though the race be irresistibly, and perhaps justly, unjust, though
even the crowd appear possessed of rights denied to the isolated man,
and commit on occasions great, inevitable, and salutary crimes, it is
still the duty of each individual of the race, of every member of the
crowd, to remain just, while ever adding to and sustaining the
consciousness within him. Nor shall we be entitled to abandon this
duty till all the reasons of the great apparent injustice be known to
us; and those that are given us now, preservation of the species,
reproduction and selection of the strongest, ablest, "fittest," are not
sufficient to warrant so frightful a change. Let each one try by all
means to become the strongest, most skilful, the best adapted to the
necessities of the life that he cannot transform; but, so far, the
qualities that shall enable him to conquer, that shall give the fullest
play to his moral power and his intelligence, and shall truly make him
the happiest, most skilful, the strongest, and "fittest"--these
qualities are precisely the ones that are the most human, the most
honourable, and the most just.
23
"Within me there is more," runs the fine device inscribed on the beams
and pediment of an old patrician mansion at Bruges, which every
traveller visits; filling a corner of one of those tender and
melancholy quays, that are as forlorn and lifeless as though they
existed only on canvas. And so too might man exclaim, "Within me there
is more;" every law of morality, every intelligible mystery. There may
be many others, above us and below us; but if these are to remain for
ever unknown, they become for us as though they were not; and should
their existence one day be revealed to us; it can only be because they
already are in us, already are ours. "Within me there is more;" and we
are entitled to add, perhaps, "I have nothing to fear from that which
is in me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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