traditional distinctions regarding good and bad were thus discarded
at the same time that discredit was cast on the keen analysis with
which it would have been possible to build up new distinctions--all
in favor of an indiscriminate emotionalism. This discomfiture of both
tradition and analysis in the field of the human law would not have
been so easy if at the same time man’s active attention and effort had
not been concentrated more and more on the field of the natural law.
In that field imagination and the analytical intellect were actually
pulling together in the service of perception with the result that man
was constantly gaining in power and utility. Emotional romanticists and
scientific utilitarians have thus, in spite of their surface clashes,
cooperated during the past century in the dehumanizing of man.
It is not enough to say of the representatives of both sides of this
great naturalistic movement that they eliminate the veto power from
human nature while continuing to use the old words, like virtue and
conscience, that imply a veto power. We have seen that they actually
attack the veto power as synonymous with evil. The devil is conceived
as the spirit that always says no. A purely affirmative morality
is almost necessarily an emotional morality. If there is no region
of insight above the reason which is felt by the natural man as an
element of vital control, and if cold reason, reason unsupported by
insight, never has done anything illustrious, as Rousseau truly says,
it follows that the only way to put driving power behind reason is to
turn virtue into a passion,--a passion that differs from other passions
merely in its greater imperiousness. For the beautiful soul virtue,
as we have seen in the case of Robespierre, is not only a tender,
imperious and voluptuous passion but even an intoxication. “I was,
if not virtuous,” says Rousseau, “at least intoxicated with virtue.”
In its extreme manifestations romantic morality is indeed only one
aspect, and surely the most singular aspect, of the romantic cult of
intoxication. No student of romanticism can fail to be struck by its
pursuit of delirium, vertigo and intoxication for their own sake. It
is important to see how all these things are closely related to one
another and how they all derive from the attempt to put life on an
emotional basis. To rest conscience, for example, on emotion is to rest
it on what is always changing, not only from man to man but from moment
to moment in the same man. “If,” as Shelley says, “nought is, but that
it feels itself to be,” it will feel itself to be very different things
at different times. No part of man is exempt from the region of flux
and change. There is, as James himself points out, a kinship between
such a philosophy of pure motion and vertigo. Faust after all is only
consistent when having identified the spirit that says no, which is
the true voice of conscience, with the devil, he proceeds to dedicate