Of this
every dialogue of Plato's furnishes abundant examples. The greatest
and worst confusion of this kind is that between ethics and politics.
The State and the Kingdom of God, or the Moral Law, are so entirely
different in their character that the former is a parody of the
latter, a bitter mockery at the absence of it. Compared with the Moral
Law the State is a crutch instead of a limb, an automaton instead of a
man.

* * * * *

The _principle of honour_ stands in close connection with human
freedom. It is, as it were, an abuse of that freedom. Instead of
using his freedom to fulfil the moral law, a man employs his power
of voluntarily undergoing any feeling of pain, of overcoming any
momentary impression, in order that he may assert his self-will,
whatever be the object to which he directs it. As he thereby shows
that, unlike the lower animals, he has thoughts which go beyond the
welfare of his body and whatever makes for that welfare, it has come
about that the principle of honour is often confused with virtue. They
are regarded as if they were twins. But wrongly; for although the
principle of honour is something which distinguishes man from the
lower animals, it is not, in itself, anything that raises him above
them. Taken as an end and aim, it is as dark a delusion as any other
aim that springs from self. Used as a means, or casually, it may be
productive of good; but even that is good which is vain and frivolous.
It is the misuse of freedom, the employment of it as a weapon for
overcoming the world of feeling, that makes man so infinitely more
terrible than the lower animals; for they do only what momentary
instinct bids them; while man acts by ideas, and his ideas may entail
universal ruin before they are satisfied.

There is another circumstance which helps to promote the notion that
honour and virtue are connected. A man who can do what he wants to do
shows that he can also do it if what he wants to do is a virtuous act.
But that those of our actions which we are ourselves obliged to regard
with contempt are also regarded with contempt by other people serves
more than anything that I have here mentioned to establish the
connection. Thus it often happens that a man who is not afraid of the
one kind of contempt is unwilling to undergo the other. But when we
are called upon to choose between our own approval and the world's
censure, as may occur in complicated and mistaken ci