Youth and Egolatry | Page 7

indicate that my geographical parallel lies
somewhere between the Alps and the Pyrenees. Sometimes I am
inclined to think that the Alps and the Pyrenees are all that is European
in Europe. Beyond them I seem to see Asia; below them, Africa.
In the riparian Navarrese, as in the Catalans and the Genovese, one
already notes the African; in the Gaul of central France, as well as in
the Austrian, there is a suggestion of the Chinese.
Clutching the Pyrenees and grafted upon the Alps, I am conscious of
being an Arch-European.

DIONYSIAN OR APOLLONIAN?
Formerly, when I believed that I was both humble and a wanderer, I
was convinced that I was a Dionysian. I was impelled toward
turbulence, the dynamic, the theatric. Naturally, I was an anarchist. Am
I today? I believe I still am. In those days I used to enthuse about the
future, and I hated the past.

Little by little, this turbulence has calmed down--perhaps it was never
very great. Little by little I have come to realize that if following
Dionysus induces the will to bound and leap, devotion to Apollo has a
tendency to throw the mind back until it rests upon the harmony of
eternal form. There is great attraction in both gods.

EPICURI DE GREGE PORCUM
I am also a swine of the herd of Epicurus; I, too, wax eloquent over this
ancient philosopher, who conversed with his pupils in his garden. The
very epithet of Horace, upon detaching himself from the Epicureans,
"Epicuri de grege porcum," is full of charm.
All noble minds have hymned Epicurus. "Hail Epicurus, thou honour of
Greece!" Lucretius exclaims in the third book of his poem.
"I have sought to avenge Epicurus, that truly holy philosopher, that
divine genius," Lucian tells us in his _Alexander, or the False Prophet_.
Lange, in his History of Materialism, sets down Epicurus as a disciple
and imitator of Democritus.
I am not a man of sufficient classical culture to be able to form an
authoritative opinion of the merits of Epicurus as a philosopher. All my
knowledge of him, as well as of the other ancient philosophers, is
derived from the book of Diogenes Laertius.
Concerning Epicurus, I have read Bayle's magnificent article in his
Historical and Critical Dictionary, and Gassendi's work, De Vita et
Moribus Epicuri. With this equipment, I have become one of the
disciples of the master.
Scholars may say that I have no right to enrol myself as one of the
disciples of Epicurus, but when I think of myself, spontaneously there
comes to my mind the grotesque epithet which Horace applied to the
Epicureans in his Epistles, a characterization which for my part I accept
and regard as an honour: "Swine of the herd of Epicurus, Epicuri de
grege porcum."

EVIL AND ROUSSEAU'S CHINAMAN
I do not believe in utter human depravity, nor have I any faith in great
virtue, nor in the notion that the affairs of life may be removed beyond
good and evil. We shall outgrow, we have already outgrown, the
conception of sin, but we shall never pass beyond the idea of good and
evil; that would be equivalent to skipping the cardinal points in
geography. Nietzsche, an eminent poet and an extraordinary
psychologist, convinced himself that we should be able to leap over
good and evil with the help of a springboard of his manufacture.
Not with this springboard, nor with any other, shall we escape from the
polar North and South of the moral life.
Nietzsche, a product of the fiercest pessimism, was at heart a good man,
being in this respect the direct opposite of Rousseau, who, despite the
fact that he is forever talking about virtue, about sensibility, the heart,
and the sublimity of the soul, was in reality a low, sordid creature.
The philanthropist of Geneva shows the cloven hoof now and then. He
asks: "If all that it were necessary for us to do in order to inherit the
riches of a man whom we had never seen, of whom we had never even
heard, and who lived in the furthermost confines of China, were to
press a button and cause his death, what man living would not press
that button?"
Rousseau is convinced that we should all press the button, and he is
mistaken, because the majority of men who are civilized would do
nothing of the kind. This, to my mind, is not to say that men are good;
it is merely to say that Rousseau, in his enthusiasm for humanity, as
well as in his aversion to it, is wide of the mark. The evil in man is not
evil of this active sort, so theatrical, so self-interested; it is a passive,
torpid evil which lies latent in the depths of