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Has not Nietzsche himself been counted, in his own playful phrase, an "immoralist"? Yet the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, in the true sense trivial path which all the world has trodden.
Men look to the ballot box for their meat in due season. They want all the privileges of citizenship without the responsibilities. The sects of to-day in teaching that the historic Christ took all our sins upon His shoulder have produced a type of sentimental immoralist who creeps under the shelter of the Cross, content that Christ should suffer in his place.
He was aglow with animal spirits, and his conversation naively brilliant and of uncommon import. This radiantly-vicious child was the embodiment of the joy of life, the perfect immoralist. There was no cynicism in his nature, no cruelty, no obliquity, no remorse; nothing but sunshine with a few clouds sailing across the fathomless blue spaces the sky of Hellas.
Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the waterline, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie?
The sermon ended as it began: "And the Seven Deadly Sins, beloved brethren, are: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. Oremus!" "Amen," fervently responded Baldur the Immoralist. Lo, this is that Aholibah Whose name was blown among strange seas.... When the last breakfast guests had gone the waiters of the café began their most disagreeable daily task.
A citizen of such a state, his nose buried in Nietzsche, "Man and Superman," and other such advanced literature, may caress himself with the notion that he is an immoralist, that his soul is full of soothing sin, that he has cut himself loose from the revelation of God. But all the while there is a part of him that remains a sound Christian, a moralist, a right thinking and forward-looking man.
When he calls himself "an immoralist," he means that he is the true moralist; that he is going to substitute for a decayed, outworn, conventional, and stupid morality, a morality based upon a rational human principle a morality that will make society better and more tolerable.
But Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a book of grammatical puzzles?" Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha.
Just what that has been it is more difficult to determine than would be the case in a writer more systematic and scientific. But he makes it very clear that he repudiates the morals which have been accepted heretofore by moralists and communities of men generally. He confesses himself an "immoralist."
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