Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/129

Rh for our generally availing ourselves of his valuation, to proceed from us, to be our own choice? Certainly, but we desire it in our childhood, and rarely change our conceptions; all our lifetime we are for the greater part the dupes of childish, habitual judgments in the mode of judging our fellow-creatures (their intellect, rank, morality, good example, reprehensibility), in yielding to the necessity of endorsing their views.

‘’Pseudo-egotism.’’—The great majority—whatever they my think and say about their "selfishness"—as long as they live, do nothing for their ego, but only for the phantom of this ego, which has grown up in the 'hcads of their friends and been transmitted to them; consequently they all live in a mist of impersonal, half-personal opinions, and of arbitrary, so to speak poetic valuations, the one for ever in the head of somebody else, and this one again in other heads: an odd world of phantasms, which knows how to give itself a matter-of-fact appearances! This mist of opinions and habits grows and lives on, almost independently from the people which it envelopes—its outcome is the extensive effect of the general judgments on “man"; all these people, un-known to themselves, believe in the bloodless abstract idea "man," that is, in a fiction; and every change which, through the judgments of some powerful men (such as princes and philosophers) occurs in this abstract