The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 605 pages of information about The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05.

The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 605 pages of information about The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05.

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In this only true State, all temptation to evil in general, and even the possibility of deliberately determining upon an evil act, will be cut off, and man be persuaded as powerfully as he can be to direct his will toward good.  There is no man who loves evil because it is evil.  He loves in it only the advantages and enjoyments which it promises, and which, in the present state of Humanity, it, for the most part, actually affords.  As long as this state continues, as long as a price is set upon vice, a thorough reformation of mankind, in the whole, is scarcely to be hoped for.  But in such a civil Polity as should exist, such as reason demands, and such as the thinker easily describes, although as yet he nowhere finds it, and such as will necessarily shape itself with the first nation that is truly disenthralled—­in such a Polity evil will offer no advantages, but, on the contrary, the most certain disadvantages; and the aberration of self-love into acts of injustice will be suppressed by self-love itself.  According to infallible regulations, in such a State, all taking advantage of and oppressing others, every act of self-aggrandizement at another’s expense is not only sure to be in vain—­labor lost—­but it reacts upon the author, and he himself inevitably incurs the evil which he would inflict upon others.  Within his own State and outside of it, on the whole face of the earth, he finds no one whom he can injure with impunity.  It is not, however, to be expected that any one will resolve upon evil merely for evil’s sake, notwithstanding he cannot accomplish it and nothing but his own injury can result from the attempt.  The use of liberty for evil ends is done away.  Man must either resolve to renounce his liberty entirely—­to become, with patience, a passive wheel in the great machine of the whole—­or he must apply his liberty to that which is good.

And thus, then, in a soil so prepared, the good will easily flourish.  When selfish aims no longer divide mankind, and their powers can no longer be exercised in destroying one another in battle, nothing will remain to them but to turn their united force against the common and only adversary which yet remains—­resisting, uncultivated Nature.  No longer separated by private ends, they will necessarily unite in one common end, and there will grow up a body everywhere animated by one spirit and one love.  Every disadvantage of the individual, since it can no longer be a benefit to any one, becomes an injury to the whole and to each particular member of the same, and is felt in each member with equal pain, and with equal activity redressed.  Every advance which one man makes, human nature, in its entirety, makes with him.

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The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.