its own action has not to bring about. This result is a mere continuation of the process which drops everything subjective, everything which concerns only me in particular, out of the content of the end, and subordinates my aims to general heads, until on the one hand the mere objective content of the ends, apart from the idea of my activity, is felt as the affirmation of my will, and on the other hand those ends are brought into a harmony, over which presides what, for shortness’ sake, we may call the ideal. At this point the understood success or failure of causes and pursuits, which have nothing sensible about them, immediately and in itself asserts or negates my will; and instead of, as at first, taking pleasure in the cause for persons’ sakes, I at last am interested in persons for the sake of the cause. The man’s self is now wrapped up in the general progress of good, his will is so far by habituation become one with the ideal; and in the realization of that, whether by himself or others, he finds a permanent and everlasting source of pleasure; a cause which brings indeed its own pains with it and, in the absence of faith, can do much to sadden, but in which alone he finds his true self affirmed, and affirmed apart from his private success or failure. After all that has gone before, I will not put the question whether this too is selfish?
The above is a sketch, fragmentary and imperfect, of the growth of the will for good; but, as we said before, good is not moral until it knows itself; and it knows itself only in its opposition to evil. It is true in our account we long since passed the stage where the self is conscious of its will as good and as bad, but that was to avoid confused repetition. We must suppose the child at present to have its will made one with the good, but not to know the good as such, never knowingly to have willed the good as its good will against evil, or evil as its bad will against the good. But, before we pass from unconscious to conscious good, and, with that, to morality, we must trace the growth of the bad self (not known as such), in order to see how the knowledge of good and bad arises from their collision in the self-conscious subject.
What is the origin of the bad self? It is a question that might well make us pause, for it leads directly to the problem of the origin of evil and sin; and that problem leads to innumerable
