24

I conclude with three queries, as you will see. “Is an ideal actually set up here, or is one pulled down?” I am perhaps asked.⁠ ⁠… But have ye sufficiently asked yourselves how dear a payment has the setting up of every ideal in the world exacted? To achieve that consummation how much truth must always be traduced and misunderstood, how many lies must be sanctified, how much conscience has got to be disturbed, how many pounds of “God” have got to be sacrificed every time? To enable a sanctuary to be set up a sanctuary has got to be destroyed : that is a law⁠—show me an instance where it has not been fulfilled!⁠ ⁠… We modern men, we inherit the immemorial tradition of vivisecting the conscience, and practising cruelty to our animal selves. That is the sphere of our most protracted training, perhaps of our artistic prowess, at any rate of our dilettantism and our perverted taste. Man has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an “evil eye,” so that eventually they have become in his system affiliated to a bad conscience. A converse endeavour would be intrinsically feasible⁠—but who is strong enough to attempt it?⁠—namely, to affiliate to the “bad conscience” all those