The ideal of romantic morality, as was seen in the last chapter,
is altruism. The real, it should be clear from the examples I have
been citing, is always egoism. But egoism may assume very different
forms. As to the main forms of egoism in men who have repudiated
outer control without acquiring self-control we may perhaps revive
profitably the old Christian classification of the three lusts--the
lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.
Goethe indeed may be said to have treated these three main ways of
being temperamental in three of his early characters--the lust of
knowledge in “Faust,” the lust of sensation in “Werther,” and the
lust of power in “Götz.” If we view life solely from the naturalistic
level and concern ourselves solely with the world of action, we are
justified in neglecting, like Hobbes, the other lusts and putting
supreme emphasis on the lust for power.[122] Professor F.J. Mather,
Jr., has distinguished between “hard” and “soft” sentimentalists.[123]
His distinction might perhaps be brought more closely into line with
my own distinctions if I ventured to coin a word and to speak of hard
and soft temperamentalists. The soft temperamentalist will prove unable
to cope in the actual world with the hard temperamentalist, and is
very likely to become his tool. Balzac has very appropriately made
Lucien de Rubempré, the romantic poet and a perfect type of a soft
temperamentalism, the tool of Vautrin, the superman.
Here indeed is the supreme opposition between the ideal and the real
in romantic morality. The ideal to which Rousseau invites us is either
the primitivistic anarchy of the “Second Discourse,” in which egoism is
tempered by “natural pity,” or else a state such as is depicted in the
“Social Contract,” in which egoism is held in check by a disinterested
“general will.” The preliminary to achieving either of these ideals is
that the traditional checks on human nature should be removed. But in
exact proportion as this programme of emancipation is carried out what
emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood, but
the ego and its fundamental will to power. Give a bootblack half the
universe, according to Carlyle, and he will soon be quarreling with
the owner of the other half. He will if he is a very temperamental
bootblack. Perhaps indeed all other evils in life may be reduced to the
failure to check that something in man that is reaching out for more
and ever for more. In a society in which the traditional inhibitions
are constantly growing weaker, the conflict I have just sketched
between the ideal and the real is becoming more and more acute. The
soft temperamentalists are overflowing with beautiful professions
of brotherly love, and at the same time the hard temperamentalists
are reaching out for everything in sight; and inasmuch as the hard
temperamentalists operate not in dreamland, but in the real world,
they are only too plainly setting the tone. Very often, of course,