Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/284

270 III

Before examining what qualities the modern industrial system requires of free producers, we must analyse the component parts of morality. The philosophers always have a certain amount of difficulty in seeing clearly into these ethical problems, because they feel the impossibility of harmonising the ideas which are current at a given time in a class, and yet imagine it to be their duty to reduce everything to a unity. To conceal from themselves the fundamental heterogeneity of all this civilised morality, they have recourse to a great number of subterfuges, sometimes relegating to the rank of exceptions, importations, or survivals, everything which embarrasses them—sometimes drowning reality in an ocean of vague phrases and, most often, employing both methods the better to obscure the problem. My view, on the contrary, is that the best way of understanding any group of ideas in the history of thought is to bring all the contradictions into sharp relief. I shall adopt this method and take for a starting-point the celebrated opposition which Nietzsche has established between two groups of moral values, an opposition about which much has been written, but which has never been properly studied.

A. We know with what force Nietzsche praised the values constructed by the masters, by a superior class of warriors who, in their expeditions, enjoying to the full freedom from all social constraint, return to the simplicity of mind of a wild beast, become once more triumphant monsters who continually bring to mind "the superb blond beast, prowling in search of prey and bloodshed," in whom "a basis of hidden bestiality needs from time to time a purgative." To understand this thesis properly, we must not attach too much importance to formulas which have at times been intentionally exaggerated, but should examine the historical facts; the author tells us