"
"But," I said, "in the lives of some of the greatest moralists, one so
often sees, or at all events hears it said, that their morality is
useless because it is unpractical, too much out of the reach of the
ordinary man, too contemptuous of simple human faculties. What is one to
make of that?"
"It is a difficult matter," he replied; "one does indeed, in the lives
of great moralists, see sometimes that their work is vitiated by
perverse and fantastic preferences, which they exalt out of all
proportion to their real value. But for all that, it is better to be on
the side of the saints; for they are gifted with the sort of instinctive
appreciation of the beauty of high morality of which I spoke.
Unselfishness, purity, peacefulness seem to them so beautiful and
desirable that they are constrained to practise them. While controversy,
bitterness, cruelty, meanness, vice, seem so utterly ugly and repulsive
that they cannot for an instant entertain even so much as a thought of
them."
"But if a man sees that he is wanting in this kind of perception," I
said, "what can he do? How is he to learn to love what he does not
admire and to abhor what he does not hate? It all seems so fatalistic,
so irresistible.
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