The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,
embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges
himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with
which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as
a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient
necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it
can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many at
last.
TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY
The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not
deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false
innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution,
who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormous
expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of
peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the
necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deep
and continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is like
everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before
we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that
we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are
contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to
simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always
sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as
if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and,
suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and
staring face.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80