Thoughts on Aristotles Virtues

My interpretation of Aristotle’s virtue based on my readings and lectures it that since there seems to be a happy mean in achieving good performance, the performance of virtue must also be a happy medium (the myth of Icarus comes to mind, fly to low and you’ll fall, fly too high and your wings will melt and you’ll also fall, one can assume this inspired Aristotle’s virtues). Virtue is then a habit, we do something for a while, are accustom at doing it and get better, and then we intuitive do it. There is some science to back this up, in hopes of not becoming overly simplistic:

 

The brain can be said to operate in two systems. System 1 is our conscious system, system 2 is our subconscious. A novice chess player will function in system one, where the frontal lobe and cerebral cortex is working hard to understand the game and the options. Overtime “memory chunks” are produced where the chess player memorizes certain pattern, sometimes even in a tacit level. The grand-master getting a brain scan shows that his cerebral cortex isn’t having as big as a role as with the novice, but areas focused on long-term memory lighten up like a Christmas tree. This means that he’s no longer applying conscious effort, has built a habit for chess so to speak, and can perform with easy and high performance.

 

This is essentially what Aristotle says of habits, and applies it to moralities, which are a half way between two hazardous extremes. Just like Icarus, you shouldn’t fly too low nor too high. Since this rule works outside morality, it should work with morality. The exact range can’t be known for certain beforehand, so no recipe rule-book can be made since different contexts require different degree between the vices, and thus we need to be able to judge each situation and adapt to said context, to have prudence.

 

Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield summarized Aristotelian virtue in his book “Machiavellian Virtu” as follows:

 

• Moral nature is a habit, it’s not given by nature.
• Moral virtue depends on intellectual virtue.
• Moral virtue doesn’t exist for the sake of anything outside or beyond itself.
• A virtuous deed is praised for the sake of being virtuous, as opposed to personal advantage.
• From the standpoint of moral virtue, man seems to be the cause of its own actions.
• One becomes morally virtuous by habit, does the action and then learns the reason.
• Thus there is a virtuous circle, the morally virtuous learn from the morally virtuous. It’s not inherited but passed down as if it had no beginning.
• Moral virtue is a habit, but is it natural to us or a product of our faculties? We do not know.
• Prudence needs to be used to guide the virtues, but it must be moral, free from immoral or amoral cleverness, least it manipulates virtue.

 

If any of the above statements from Mansfield repeat themselves below, they originated with Mansfield. The rest are my original view unless stated otherwise.

 

I do like Aristotle a lot, but I don’t believe his interpretation is entirely correct despite having many good points. And even the errors he makes aren’t to be condemned, since he was a pioneer that raised several important questions, had others analyze said questions, and correct them. This is the case on both his natural science and ethics. That is to say, even if Aristotle can be found to have made a mistake, one can’t help but love and admire the man setting the course for a future better understanding of the world. A stepping stone to a better place.

 

As a whole I much prefer Xenophon (who claims is an contemporary of Socrates and consulted with him) and Thucydides than Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. Xenophon in particular has a type of “political virtue” so to speak, that seems closer to the original sense of Greek Arete that focuses on excellence with amoral elements (such as being a good runner or speaker) but not devoid of morality. Machiavelli himself highly praised Xenophon’s Cyropaedia despite discarding the Greeks in general in favor of Roman virtue. His rejection of Greek classical virtue and all “halfway measures” implies a rejection of Aristotle.

 

One of the things Aristotle did get right is a rejection of strict rules and correctly equation there isn’t a fit all solution similar to a mathematical equation. This is something was forgotten or ignored by many during the enlightenment and even the Soviet Union. Jomini based his military writings on hindsight he took from studying Napoleon and created mathematical formulas based on the mechanical, logical worldview he had of the world. Clausewitz was a reader of German Romanticism and did a brilliant job of adding elements of chance, genius and character into a complex world that couldn’t be discovered through deductive logic. The Soviets became obsessed with engineering for several decades, and believed there were universal best practices that could be enforced into society, and treated their population as cogs in a machine in the name of “science” with the enforcement of best practices for social situations while ironically claiming their system would make the average man as brilliant as Aristotle.

 

Aristotle was did not fall into this trap and had a theory that did actually apply into many contexts, but in my opinion isn’t universal. This despite the moderns over two thousand years later having been explicit of reading him.

 

Epistemological and Ontological Flaws

 

Point: I have a preference for ideation based cultures

 

One way Anthropologists divide society is between two categories where morality and rules are explicitly stated (ruled based) and another where they’re tacitly understood and hard or incapable of being made explicit (ideation based). Greek society was mostly an ideation based culture and morality was imparted through social customs, myths and histories. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle saw this as a flaw, and attempted to apply logic in order to make society logical and attacking the existing culture (which Xenophon and Thucydides so masterly describes and are the descendants of Homer). Now, this is not to say nothing should be questioned, but it doesn’t justify destroying an ideation culture and replacing it with a rule based culture.

 

Machiavelli is an example of properly criticizing modern and ancient cultures, providing a new systematic understanding of society which still remained ideation. Essentially Machiavelli was calling for a rebirth of Roman Republican virtue, which was Ideation (think of the works of Plutarch and Livy). An example of this can be seen with the concept of manliness: The Romans worshiped the temple of Mars and ascribed Manliness to be virtue and their manly virtue the reason they defeated their enemies and expanded their territory. Xenophon also ascribes manliness to their victory. There is a tacit understanding of what manliness is, but modern intellectuals attempt to explicitly define it, use rhetoric and mock and discard it.

 

For this reason I agree with Cato warning against Greek philosophy and disagree with Cicero encouraging it. In my view Socrates and his followers were corrupts of youth, but of that too much. But my conclusion is that since ideation cultures win against rule based cultures (be it nations, corporations and sports teams) then his attempts to create a rule based culture is a hazard to society. Think of this as Aristotle against Xenophon.

 

Point: The miss application of inductive logic and Social Atomism

 

1) The foundation of logic is to organize an argument with premise and conclusion. If the premise is shown to be false, then the conclusion must naturally be false.

 

The first thing that stuck out from book 2 was Aristotle’s misunderstanding of the operations of the physical world:

 

Premise: “For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another.”

 

Conclusion: “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.”

 

From this opening statement I see three issues:

 

1. It must be acknowledge that the logic of Aristotle is flawed since the premise was flawed. Now, there are many who overlook this and claim Aristotle might still be right on his interpretation, but it must be acknowledged then that Aristotle is now making mere statements (which may or may not be right) instead of sound logical conclusions since his premises aren’t valid.
2. The overall analogy method of Aristotle is misapplied deductive logic. When you’re using deductive logic you have to focus on the same context or domain and not use premises from other contexts or domains when making a conclusion. Example: You could use a beehive or ant colony as a metaphor for human society, but you wouldn’t study a beehive or an ant colony and use this as evidence to explain how human societies work. To understand human societies you must specifically study human societies. Even studying one group of humans isn’t going to tell you much about another, you need to be very specific with your premises in order to be accurate. Both Plato and Aristotle make this same misuse of deductive logic again and again, which discredits their work. But this neither proves that the conclusion of Aristotle is wrong, but just like I stated in point one: It means it’s a statement, not a sound logical conclusion.
3. It shows a serious flaw in Aristotle thinking. He can’t attribute the causes of a stone rolling down hill to anything beyond the characteristics outside the particular stone. This is to say, his focus is entirely on the individual object, not any force beyond it (ahem, gravity). The problem arises that of we know that Aristotle is using natural science as premises for his conclusions through deductive logic, and not only is using analogies from different domains an error in deductive logic, his premises were incorrect!

 

Now I can use inductive logic as follows to determine that Aristotle was most likely a Social Atomist: A) Aristotle is using natural science as premises for his social science, his ethics B) We know that Aristotle praised Democritus and the atomistic view of the world, than C) We can induce that he most likely believes that human society is arranged in a similar fashion to the theorized concepts of atoms popular in his days.

 

As far as I’m aware, there are two basic conflicts in the views political science holds on the nature of human societies: Social Atomism vs Communitarianism.

 

• Social Atomism views society as a collection of individuals who operate as atoms in the natural world. Groups of people come together and society is like a molecule being formed of these different atoms.
• Communitarianism states that the individuals do have degrees of individuality, but their identities and worldviews are largely formed by the social relationships in their community. This means they’re not necessarily guided by reason (which doesn’t mean they can’t reason) or a fix nature, but by invisible social influences they are unaware of having an influence on them.

 

While not going into details and distracting oneself from the main subject, it’s worthy to point out that research on implicit learning (a way our brain subconsciously rewires itself through art, stories and social interactions through memory lanes for tacit knowledge) indicate that communitarianism has won the argument. While I do not recall anyone associating Aristotle to Social Atomism, his view with the hyper-focus on the individual, and the way he describes society, not to mention his use of using natural science such as stone movement to explain the human condition, should be a safe bet to attribute him as such. And if his views are Atomistic, we can safely discard them, but acknowledge that some good points could possibly be raised, but his views overall are incoherent.

 

Point: The Ontological nature of the system we are in determines what epistemological process (type of logic) we should use

 

The natural sciences have advanced much since Aristotle, and in fact the last ten years have seen a giant leap. One of these consist in our understanding of systems, and how these affect reality, including nature and human society. A basic premise:

 

Closed/linear Systems: These can be either simple or complicated. A simple systems would be a water pump, a complicated would be an airplane (you can arm, disarm, and arm again). A general example of a linear system is a factory, we have certain inputs and certain outputs come out. We can use deductive logic to determine the most efficient way to operate, and thus the term “best practices.” We have a fairly strict set of rules to follow and these work great in this system.

 

Open Systems: An example of this can be a sales rep. He makes his pitch and will get a reaction, but it’s most likely a similar reaction he’s seen countless times before. In turn, based on these reactions he has a set of questions and statements that will help him influence the sale. There is a range of behaviors between the sales rep and the propositioned party, while there is no exact set of rules to follow, judgement should be applied and general rules of thumb exist. Inductive logic is used in these systems.

 

Complex Systems: These systems aren’t causal, but dispositional. This means that the drivers causing change in this system are multiple and sometimes unknown. We can’t have a regular premise and conclusion here, because even if we knew the proper drivers and used these as premises, these are subject to quickly change. The systems are characteristic by having the agents (ex people) influence the system, but also having the system influence the agents (like the Communitarianism example mentioned before). These systems use abductive logic. An example would be an anthropologist going into a new environment and attempting to understand a culture.

 

Therefore, how you make decisions in the real world must depend on the type of system you’re in. The problem with Aristotle is that he’s offering us good practice solutions to be applied into a complex system. He’s offering inductive logic with his claim of use of judgement/prudence. The problem is that we can’t use inductive logic to know what will work in complex systems. Sure, if we have a routine and have established patterns than we can predict certain behaviors inside certain contexts, but WE CAN NOT do this outside our understood contexts.

 

Think of an anthropologist: it’s only in living and studying with a new culture that he can understand that culture.Aristotle works in certain contexts, but he can’t tell us what to do and his virtues aren’t always virtues and his vices aren’t always vices, and in fact they should be put on an equal footing. Alexander the Great did not win the Persian Empire through moderation, despite the cries of Parmenion to be moderate.

 

Machiavelli is an antidote to this. Having been involved in both the military and politics of Florence, he has direct experience with complex systems, and thus his solutions are in accordance to modern notions of engaging in complex systems. As far as I know Aristotle didn’t hold any military or political power (which is also why I admire Xenophon over the philosophers, he had real world experience). Aristotle has an over simplistic formula with charity for example, Machiavelli gives

 

“A prince … cannot observe all those things for which men are held good, since he is often under a necessity, to maintain his state, of acting against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion. And so he needs to … not depart from good, when possible, but know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity.”

—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch. XVIII

 

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Aristotle would be completely wrong, only that he has gone too far in the application of his virtue in claiming a universal rule, through a miss application of prudence from his part. And here I have my dilemma: I seem to need to borrow Aristotle’s reasoning for virtue being a nice medium whose choice is controlled by prudence to claim that Aristotle was wrong. And if I need to borrow his reasoning to reason against his reasoning would that not put me in a cycle of circular reasoning without a conclusive outcome? I can’t help but laugh and love the Hellenic philosopher.

 

Point: One must know how to both be beast and man

 

Baltasar Gracian stated in his book The Art of Worldly Wisdom that it’s good people that suffer the most due to their goodness. I have a serious issue with the idea that “goodness” will bring the best life since I’m of also the belief that it’s good people who suffer the most. The advice of Machiavelli to appear to be good, while maintaining realism and maintaining your cunning seems to be far better advice than Aristotle’s claims to achieve the good.

 

“Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.” – Machiavelli, The Prince

 

This profession of “being good” becomes even more problematic since we know for a fact it has been manipulated by history to subdue the masses. The Russian Orthodox church claims that only the poor are good and worthy of going to heaven, most likely as a method devised from the rich maintain the peasants from slaughtering them as Napoleon suggested religion in general is.

 

“Loyal servants remain servants, and good men are always poor.” – Machiavelli, The Art of War

 

Aristotle himself claims that in order to attain virtue a man needs to achieve a certain level of wealth to be able to achieve this goal. The problem with Aristotle is an ontological one, for I don’t believe that we ever escape the grinding nature of primitive man. Now, this must be my own view from having lived in Mexico, where a stupid mistake can easily end your life, and people will rob, kidnap you or kill you if you’re a good person and don’t have a level of cunning and strength. If society is good, and we could rely in the kindness of God and nature, than I wouldn’t have much of a problem, but I can’t help but see in Aristotle a deep sense of naivety in the goodness of the world, and wishful thinking isn’t going to make it thus.

 

For this reason Aristotle frightens me. I believe that if I had applied his virtue to my life, I might have quite literally be dead. Machiavelli on the other hand is telling me how the real world works. Machiavelli made a profession of making the world a better place with his work (he advice for the creation of free republics as the best for of government even in The Prince), and he criticizes Agathocles for causing ruin to his people, sadistic cruelty for no good reason and the betrayal of his close and loyal friends. Machiavelli is telling the rules of the game and how best to survive, Aristotle has an idealistic fantasy: We can’t always be good because people aren’t good and to make a profession of goodness would be our ruin. We can’t depend on the kindness of God or nature, but must obey necessity like a god and use prudence to protect ourselves from this world and do our best to get Fortuna on our side.

 

“You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second. It is therefore necessary to know well how to use both the beast and the man. This was covertly taught to princes by ancient writers, who relate how Achilles and many others of those princes were given to Chiron the centaur to be brought up, who kept them under his discipline; this system of having for teacher one who was half beast and half man is meant to indicate that a prince must know how to use both natures, and that the one without the other is not durable. A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from snares, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise snares, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those that wish to be only lions do not understand this. Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them. …those that have been best able to imitate the fox have succeeded best. But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler.”

 

Point: Virtue for its own sake?

 

Aristotle claims that virtue is for its own sake. In my eyes this makes the pursuit rather pointless. Not to mention he pushes his moderation too far, as is with the example of having moderate wealth. A man can’t rely on his inheritance, or the kindness of God or nature. What if I decide what a moderate income should be today and live by this. In a few years I discover I have a medical condition that prevents me from working: Not only am I know not earning an income, but my expenses have skyrocketed. Machiavelli places no limit to acquisition, Aristotle foolishly assumes that the necessities of primitive man have disappeared, they have not. What primitive man did to scratch an existence modern man must do to stay ahead of his rivals. This is more true today than ever with globalization and mass migration which allows companies to hold the power and the employee fight harder for a smaller salary.

 

But this isn’t a concern for myself either, my Aristotelian virtue would be of no use if my family and friends needed me. This point reminds me to the beginning of the Godfather. The book introduces us to an Italian immigrant that sees the rapists of his daughter, who disfigured her face after she refused to engage sexually with them, walk away scott free from the court. He goes to Don Corleone and asks for justice, to which Corleone points out that the man never came to visit him before or invited him for a cup of coffee. The Don understands, he didn’t want to be associated with the likes of him, but now that he needs a favor here he is before the Don begging for it.

 

It’s the man of power and wealth that can help in the worst of times. As Nietzsche said: To be a true friend you must know how to be an enemy, for when that friend needs you for a fight you must know how to fight with him. A profession of goodness is ruin in a world with people who aren’t good, and the accumulation of wealth and power are more useful to our loved ones and ourselves than our Aristotelian virtues, and since we can’t predict the future, it’s foolish to place any restrictions to acquisition.

 

Virtue must be for the sake of acquisition. Like the Homeric heroes, their heroic traits and accompanied psychology was all centered in competence. The Romans described by Livy were the same, Roman virtue was manliness, and manliness gave them their empire. So is Machiavellian virtu. You can’t rely in the kindness of God or nature, necessities don’t disappear as Aristotle implies. A virtue for its own sake is no virtue at all, but a lie that will only lead you to ruin.

 

“Virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin.” – Machiavelli, Florentine Histories

 

Point: Circular Logic with the Morality of Prudence

 

I believe to find a circular reasoning in Aristotle. Prudence is to guide moral virtue, but the prudence must also be moral. This is a point Mansfield originally made and I agree.

 

I much rather Machiavelli’s prudence of “measuring one’s arms.” That is to say, what are we capable, what do we have at our disposal, and from this how can we move  forward from what our reality is. Machiavelli doesn’t ask to state an ideal future first, and then breach the gap, but to look at the means of our disposal first, and then judge what we are capable of achieving it. This is one of my favorite central ideas of Machiavelli, and goes in hand with how to operate in Complex Systems.

 

Aristotle simply assumes that what he calls virtue will benefit the person and gives a pre-defined. Aristotle is right in certain contexts, but it’s not a universal view and it doesn’t work in a complex system.

 

Not only that but we see that world class performers have an obsession for what they’re doing. They can spend periods where this is all they think about and do, be it an athlete, entrepreneur, artist, musician, etc. A doctrine of moderation in these cases isn’t the best result if we are looking at competence. A more Homeric like obsession with the accompanies psychological traits of the Iliad (very similar to those of sports psychology) has a better result in the real world if we are in a hypercompetitive environment, which we are and it’s only increasing with globalization and competition with AI. A previously mentioned quote of Machiavelli is worth mentioning:

 

“Virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin.” – Machiavelli, Florentine Histories

 

I need Homeric Arete, Machiavellian virtu, Roman virtue, not Aristotelian virtue. Now, we can say that Aristotle’s rules do say that the degree can apply, and even excess could be useful, but Homer, Xenophon, Plutarch, Thucydides, Livy and Machiavelli are not Aristotelian virtues and Machiavelli explicitly speaks against aiming a middle ways.

 

Point: Even if Aristotle could be proven right, I’ll still reject him

 

“If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life?” – Aristotle

 

Ha! As if there’s a consensus of what’s good. Achilles decided to win his glory at Troy and end his life young for the promise of everlasting glory and his name forever being remembered. Odysseus shunned immortality and being the partner of a goddess more beautiful than any other mortal to be able to be with his wife and end his life in a few decades. What do men desire? What do they consider to be good? What is the “good life”? There is no consensus!

 

I don’t believe Aristotle captures the true essence of humanity. In book two of his ethics Aristotle says that a person should love the good above all else and thus naturally pursue it with his rules.

 

There is a German word with no direct translation to English which I really enjoy: Wecheselwirkung. The meaning means something like “mutually altering.” It means that

 

For example: you have a plan to do X, and X will probably be a good idea if the environment stays the same. But your competitor sees the move you’ve just made and base on this move they change their behavior and your move that had been a good strategy if the competitor had not changed is now a bad option, and your competitor only changed as a reaction to your move, otherwise would have remained the same.

 

Even if Aristotle or anyone else could prove through logic that his way was the true pursuit of goodness, I and many other would reject it just because we refuse to be told what to do. Not to mention it seems a rather boring and quiet life. I despise the saintly types and see them as a hazardous to humanity. I do believe Dostoevsky better captures the nature of humanity in Notes of the Underground and the rebellion that would ensue even if the best life or goodness could logically be proven without a doubt. Huxley seems to be an overall rejection of the Aristotelian ideal of “The good life” in favor of something that would be worthy of a great drama.

 

Ultimately it’s the choice Achilles made: To live a good long life and be forgotten, or live a short one in strife and be retold forever. It’s the same choice Alexander the Great, a pupil of Aristotle. A life worth reading about.

 

Huxley:

 

Quote One:

 

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

Quote Two:

 

“All right then,” said the savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

Dostoevsky

 

It’s absurd that men would do what is in their best interest, and even if you proved them to you they would not follow to prove their autonomy and dominance over their own life.

 

Quote One:

 

“Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself–as though that were so necessary–that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object–that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated–chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know?

You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic.

Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!”

Quote Two:

 

“But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness.”

 

Quote Three

 

“They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls’ breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man (though to my mind it’s a superfluous luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.”