AE MUNDI

PROLOGUE

THE AUTHOR HOLDS FORTH IN REGARD TO THE CHARACTER OF HIS HERO

MORE OR LESS TRANSCENDENTAL DIGRESSIONS

The individual is the only real thing in nature and in life.

Neither the species, the genus, nor the race, actually exists; they are
abstractions, terminologies, scientific devices, useful as syntheses
but not entirely exact. By means of these devices we can discuss and
compare; they constitute a measure for our minds to use, but have no
external reality.

Only the individual exists through himself and for himself. I am, I
live, is the sole thing a man can affirm.

The categories and divisions arranged for classification are like the
series of squares an artist places over a drawing to copy it by. The
lines of the squares may cut the lines of the sketch; but they will cut
them, not in reality but only in the artist's eye.

In humanity, as in all of nature, the individual is the one thing. Only
individuality exists in the realm of life and in the realm of spirit.

Individuality is not to be grouped or classified. Individuality simply
cannot fit into a pigeon-hole, and it is all the further from fitting if
the pigeon-hole is shaped according to an ethical principle. Ethics is a
poor tailor to clothe the body of reality.

The ideas of the good, the logical, the just, the consistent, are too
generic to be completely represented in nature.

The individual is not logical, or good, or just; nor is he any other
distinct thing; and this through the force of his own fatal actions,
through the influence of the deviation in the earth's axis, or for
whatsoever other equally amusing cause. Everything individual is
always found mixed, full of absurdities of perspective and picturesque
contradictions,--contradictions and absurdities that shock us, because
we insist on submitting individuals to principles which are not
applicable to them.

If instead of wearing a cravat and a bowler hat, we wore feathers and a
ring in our nose, all our moral notions would change.

People of today, remote from nature and nasal rings, live in an
artificial moral harmony which does not exist except in the imagination
of those ridiculous priests of optimism who preach from the columns
of the newspapers. This imaginary harmony makes us abhor the
contradictions, the incongruities of individuality, at least it forces
us not to understand them.

Only when the individual discord ceases, when the attributes of an
e