As mighty glaciers hollow out valleys and in time leave meadows and woods and brooks in their track, so frightful human energies—what we commonly sum up as evil (das Böse)—may be cyclopean architects and road-builders of humanity.[1] Even deception, violence, ruthless self-interest may play a part—and a genius of culture might employ them with so sure a hand that he would seem like an evil demon, and yet his aims, now and then shining through, be great and good, and he himself have angel wings.[2] We cannot build good "on good alone," as Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior" does—at least on what is commonly called good. A spirit of contradiction may lie at the basis of one man's virtue; a readiness to agree at the basis of another's; a third may draw all his morality out of his lonely pride, and a fourth out of a social impulse. That is, what is called evil, as well as what is called good, may be the basis of good, and the most inept teacher of the four types of individuals mentioned would be the moral fanatic who failed to bear this in mind.[3]
The very ideas of what is good or evil may vary. A lonely man may console himself by thinking that he is ahead of his time; but the world may not go his way.[4] Even a good conscience does not necessarily attend a good man. Science is something good, and yet it has often come into the world stealthily, in roundabout ways, feeling like a criminal, or at least like a smuggler. Good conscience has as its first stage bad conscience—for everything good is sometime new, i.e., unusual, against use and custom, unmoral [in the primitive sense of that term—the German here is wider die Sitte, unsittlich], and gnaws at the heart of its discoverer.[5] In other words, good conscience is a late fruit of bad conscience.
III
All this, however, does not mean that there is nothing constant in morality—that in a broad way it is not a tolerably distinct and recognizable phenomenon in history. What is
