I do not believe in utter human depravity, nor have I any faith in great
virtue, nor in the notion that the affairs of life may be removed beyond
good and evil. We shall outgrow, we have already outgrown, the
conception of sin, but we shall never pass beyond the idea of good and
evil; that would be equivalent to skipping the cardinal points in
geography. Nietzsche, an eminent poet and an extraordinary psychologist,
convinced himself that we should be able to leap over good and evil with
the help of a springboard of his manufacture.
Not with this springboard, nor with any other, shall we escape from the
polar North and South of the moral life.
Nietzsche, a product of the fiercest pessimism, was at heart a good man,
being in this respect the direct opposite of Rousseau, who, despite the
fact that he is forever talking about virtue, about sensibility, the
heart, and the sublimity of the soul, was in reality a low, sordid
creature.
The philanthropist of Geneva shows the cloven hoof now and then. He
asks: "If all that it were necessary for us to do in order to inherit
the riches of a man whom we had never seen, of whom we had never even
heard, and who lived in the furthermost confines of China, were to press
a button and cause his death, what man living would not press that
button?"
Rousseau is convinced that we should all press the button, and he is
mistaken, because the majority of men who are civilized would do nothing
of the kind. This, to my mind, is not to say that men are good; it is
merely to say that Rousseau, in his enthusiasm for humanity, as well as
in his aversion to it, is wide of the mark. The evil in man is not evil
of this active sort, so theatrical, so self-interested; it is a passive,
torpid evil which lies latent in the depths of the human animal, it is
an evil which can scarcely be called evil.