ir limitation they take immediate
and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade
themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have
found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are
at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you
know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of
doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest?
Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my
foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in
reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws
after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That
is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection. It
must be a case of the laws of nature again. What is the result of it
in the end? Why, just the same. Remember I spoke just now of
vengeance. (I am sure you did not take it in.) I said that a man
revenges himself because he sees justice in it. Therefore he has found
a primary cause, that is, justice. And so he is at rest on all sides,
and consequently he carries out his revenge calmly and successfully,
being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest thing. But I see no
justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and consequently
if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite. Spite, of
course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve
quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is
not a cause. But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began
with that just now, you know). In consequence again of those accursed
laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical
disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your
reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes
not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no
one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left
again--that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up
with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause.
And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly,
without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at
least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands
folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin
despising you