the joy in the cruelty is no longer felt: but only pleasure in the habit
as such. _This_ joy, however, is the first degree of the “good.”
31.
PRIDE IN SPIRIT.—The pride of man, which strives to oppose the theory of
our own descent from animals and establishes a wide gulf between nature
and man himself—this pride is founded upon a prejudice as to what the mind
is; and this prejudice is relatively recent. In the long prehistorical
period of humanity it was supposed that the mind was everywhere, and men
did not look upon it as a particular characteristic of their own. Since,
on the contrary, everything spiritual (including all impulses,
maliciousness, and inclinations) was regarded as common property, and
consequently accessible to everybody, primitive mankind was not ashamed of
being descended from animals or trees (the noble races thought themselves
honoured by such legends), and saw in the spiritual that which unites us
with nature, and not that which severs us from her. Thus man was brought
up in modesty—and this likewise was the result of a prejudice.
32.
THE BRAKE.—To suffer morally, and then to learn afterwards that this kind
of suffering was founded upon an error, shocks us. For there is a unique
consolation in acknowledging, by our suffering, a “deeper world of truth”
than any other world, and we would much rather suffer and feel ourselves
above reality by doing so (through the feeling that, in this way, we
approach nearer to that “deeper world of truth”), than live without
suffering and hence without this feeling of the sublime. Thus it is pride,
and the habitual fashion of satisfying it, which opposes this new
interpretation of morality. What power, then, must we bring into operation
to get rid of this brake? Greater pride? A new pride?
33.