Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/54

18 useful or detrimental; but the sense for custom (morality) has no reference to these experiences as such, but rather to the age, the sanctity and indiscutable authority of custom. Hence this sentiment is opposed to our gaining new experiences and amending customs: i.e., morality is opposed to the formation of new and better morals: it renders people stupid.

Free-doers and free-thinkers.—Free-doers are at a disadvantage as compared with free-thinkers, because mankind suffer more manifestly from the consequences of actions than of ideas. Yet if we consider that both eagerly seek satisfaction, and that the very contemplation and utterance of forbidden things afford this satisfaction to free-thinkers, in regard to motives there is no difference; as regards consequences, however, the case—unless we judge like the world generally, from mere outside appearances will go very much against the free-thinker. We have to make good a great deal of the contumely which has fallen on all those who, by their actions, have broken through the conventionality of some custom—such people generally have been called criminals. Everybody who overthrew the existing moral law has hitherto, at least in the beginning, been considered a wicked man; but when afterwards, as some-times happened, the old law could not be re-established and had to be abandoned, the epithet was gradually