Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/40

4 kind for whole thousands of years, we people of the present day are living in very immoral times. The authority of custom is marvellously enfeebled, and so highly refined and sublimated in the notion of morality, that we might just as well describe it as volatilised. This we, the late-born, find it difficult to gain a fundamental insight into the origin of morality: and even when we have succeeded in discovering it, we shall be afraid of translating our thoughts into words, because these would sound course. Or, because they would appear as a slur upon morality. Thus, for instance, the principal law: "Morality is nothing else but (and, above all, nothing more than) obedience to customs, of whatever kind these may be." And customs are the conventional way of acting and valuing. There is morality in matters in which no observance exists. The circle of morality ever shrinks, in proportion as life is less regulated by observance. The free man is immoral because he is determined in everything to depend upon himself and not upon observance. In every primitive state of mankind the word "evil" signifies as much as “individual," "free," "arbitrary," "unwonted," "unforeseen," "incalculable”. If measured by the standard of such conditions, anything done--not because it is ordered by observance but from other motives (as, for instance, for one's own advantage), nay, from the very motives which formerly had established observance is called immoral, and is felt to be so by the doer himself.