not have the first without the second, nor the second without the first, nor either without the third. Evil implies knowledge of good, else it can not be known as opposite to good; and, where it is not known, there is no morality proper: and the same with good. If a subject does not know what evil is, the words moral goodness are devoid of meaning to it. You can not define moral goodness without bringing in evil: if you leave that out, you have a natural or a superhuman subject; in either case morality as such goes, because the ‘ought’ means nothing.[1] And the next point, on which we must insist, is that to know moral good and evil without willing them is simply impossible. These ideas are not ideas of anything external, nor of anything that can by any process of analogy be gathered from the external: their originals are in the subject, and, if he does not know them there first, he will never know them at all. Knowledge of morality is knowledge of specific forms of the will, and, just as will can be known only because we know our will, so these forms of will demand personal and immediate knowledge. Hatred of evil means feeling of evil, and you can not be brought to feel what is not inside you, or has nothing analogous within you. Moral perception must rest on moral experience.
And, lastly, for morality is required self-conscious volition. It will not do for the subject merely to be identified with good on the one side, bad on the other, to perceive their incompatibility and feel their discrepancy. He can not know them, unless he knows them against each other; and for that he must have them both before him at once. He must have before his mind himself as desiring two things in opposition to each other at one moment, each being seen to belong to a certain class; he stands above them, and in his conscious identification of his whole self in act with one or the other arises the knowledge of himself, as asserting himself as the good or bad will. This is the condition
- ↑ The question of the exact extent to which evil must go in order to awake conscience has of course (though here again evil takes the form of sin) a considerable interest for theology, but it does not concern us here. It is discussed by Vatke, pp. 275-6.
