Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/235

210 our petty lives, how must he regard this self-seeking loneliness of disposition? What is this heroic life but an overflow from the great stream of universal life, a pool, that, left to itself by some subsiding flood, slowly dries away in its shallow stagnancy, until it becomes a mud-puddle? And as for the proof of this, what becomes of your hero if you take him at his word, and leave him to himself like a rhinoceros? Then indeed he soon sinks to the level of a peevish animal. His admirable character is what it is by reason of his conflicts with his fellows, and by reason of the respect that he excites in others. Stop talking about him, cease admiring him, do not even fight with him, ignore him utterly; and with these external supports see his inner heroism vanish. He exists as hero, in fact, only because he is in organic relation to the world about him. His boasted loneliness is an illusion. Could not Mephistopheles have his laugh here too?

But the Titan is often properly the hero not only of a comedy, but also of a tragedy; and a tragedy, as we know, always discovers to us the gloomy worthlessness of this individual life as such. Mortal man, once brought to possess the moral insight, finds his destiny not in himself, but in the life about him, or in the ideal life of God. And the tragedy expresses one way of getting this insight.

In short, just what the Heresy of Prometheus asserts to be the perfect, namely, the complete and all-sided development of life, just that can belong only to the general, not to the individual life. Hence Titanism always contradicts itself. It says that I,