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Updated: May 22, 2025
This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought.
As egoism restricts concern for welfare to a single individual, viz., the man's own self, the counter-principle would have to extend it to all other individuals. It is only because the will is above and beyond time that the stings of conscience are ineradicable, and do not, like other pains, gradually wear away.
And, under those circumstances, the public jealousy must have operated against the free movement of early Christianity: nothing could have disarmed it, except some counter-principle so managed, as to insure that freedom of public meetings which opened the sine qua non channel for the free propagation of religious truth.
"I am born for the end of revolutions," he exclaimed when arriving at power, and he judged himself well; but he estimated less correctly the general state of society: the Revolution was much further from its end than he believed; it was continually reviving round him, excited and strengthened by the alternately proclaimed and concealed attempts of the counter-principle.
Whereas the truth is that the original difference between individuals in intellect and morality is immeasurable. The question as to whether morality is something real is the question whether a well-grounded counter-principle to egoism actually exists.
Thus, as will be observed, from the material basis of being as conceived by Thales, with only a very vague conception of the counter-principle of movement, philosophy has wheeled round in Heraclitus to the other extreme; he finds his permanent element in the negation of permanence; being or reality consists in never 'being' but always 'becoming, not in stability but in change.
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