Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/50

14 for instance, forbidding the snow to be scraped off the shoes with a knife; a coal to be stuck on a knife; an iron to be put into the fire—and enacting that every one trespassing in these matters shall suffer capital punishment.) Yet they bring home to them the continual presence of the custom and the perpetual necessity of adhering to it: they do so in support of that that great rule which is the commencement of civilisation: any custom is better than no custom. Good and evil nature.—At first men grafted their own personalities on nature, seeing everywhere them-selves and their kin—namely their own evil and capricious minds—hidden, as it were, among the clouds, thunder-storms, wild beasts, trees and herbs: it was at this stage that they invented "evil nature." After that there came a time, the time of Roussean, when they fancied their personalities to have outgrown nature: being so weary of each other's company, that they insisted upon having a hiding-place, where man and his misery could not enter: then they invented "good nature." The morals of voluntary suffering.—Which is the highest enjoyment for people living in the state of war of that small community, whose existence is ever in jeopardy, and in which the most stringent morality