Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/224

Rh appeared so to discerning people, and yet knew it not. And therefore now, through all the pang of the discovery, runs the feeling that I would not if I could, no, not for any delight of complacency, return to that state of hollow, delicious, detestable ignorance. It was a fool’s paradise; but I have escaped from it. I know my nakedness, and I prefer the fruit of the tree of knowledge, with bitter exile, to the whole of the delights of that wretched place. It is a contradictory state, this. My knowledge is torture to my foolish, sensitive self; yet while I writhe with the vainest of pangs, I despise utterly the thought of escaping it by illusion, or by forgetfulness, or by any means save the actual removal or conquest of the defect. And this I feel even when the defect is seen to be utterly irremovable without the destruction of myself. Better go on despising myself, and feeling the contempt of others, than return to the delights of foolishness; or, if the pain of knowing what I am is insupportable, then it were better to die, than to live in despicable ignorance. Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?

Is all this mere emotion? or is it insight? In fact it is a growing, though still imperfect insight, a form of the moral insight. The pangs of this wounded self-love are themselves in truth also vanity, like the complacent self-love that they mourn; but only through the gateway of this pain can most people get beyond these vanities of individualism. For this wounded self-love, that refuses to be comforted by any deliberate return to its old illusions, is, as Adam Smith long since pointed out, an emo-