II
The old riddles and perplexities now resolve themselves. There are as many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. Just as every painter and every musician has something in him which, by force of inward necessity, never emerges into consciousness but dominates a priori the form-language of his work and differentiates that work from the work of every other Culture, so every conception of Life held by a Culture-man possesses a priori (in the very strictest Kantian sense of the phrase) a constitution that is deeper than all momentary judgments and strivings and impresses the style of these with the hall-mark of the particular Culture. The individual may act morally or immorally, may do “good” or “evil” with respect to the primary feeling of his Culture, but the theory of his actions is not a result but a datum. Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no general morale of humanity.
It follows that there is not and cannot be any true “conversion” in the deeper sense. Conscious behaviour of any kind that rests upon convictions is a primary phenomenon, the basic tendency of an existence developed into a “timeless truth.” It matters little what words or pictures are employed to express it, whether it appears as the predication of a deity or as the issue of philosophic meditation, as proposition or as symbol, as proclamation of proper or confutation of alien convictions. It is enough that it is there. It can be wakened and it can be put theoretically in the form of doctrine, it can change or improve its intellectual vehicle but it cannot be begotten. Just as we are incapable of altering our world-feeling—so incapable that even in trying to alter it we have to follow the old lines and confirm instead of overthrowing it—so also we are powerless to alter the ethical basis of our waking being. A certain verbal distinction has sometimes been drawn between ethics the science and morale the duty, but, as we understand it, the point of duty does not arise. We are no more capable of converting a man to a morale alien to his being than the Renaissance was capable of reviving the Classical or of making anything but a Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of Apollinian motives. We may talk to-day of transvaluing all our values; we may, as Megalopolitans, “go back to” Buddhism or Paganism or a romantic Catholicism; we may champion as Anarchists an individualist or as Socialists a collectivist ethic—but in spite of all we do, will and feel the same. A conversion to Theosophy or Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a supposed Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an alteration of words and notions, of the religious or intellectual surface, no more. None of our “movements” have changed man.
A strict morphology of all the morales is a task for the future. Here, too, Nietzsche has taken the first and essential step towards the new standpoint. But he has failed to observe his own condition that the thinker shall place himself “beyond good and evil.” He tried to be at once sceptic and prophet, moral critic and moral gospeller. It cannot be done. One cannot be a first-class psychologist as long as one is still a Romantic. And so here, as in all his crucial penetrations, he got as far as the door—and stood outside it. And so far, no one has done any better. We have been blind and uncomprehending before the immense wealth that there is in the moral as in other form-languages. Even the sceptic has not understood his task; at bottom he, like others, sets up his own notion of morale, drawn from his particular disposition and private taste, as standard by which to measure others. The modern revolutionaires—Stirner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw—are just the same; they have only managed to hide the facts (from themselves as well as from others) behind new formulæ and catchwords.
But a morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum, fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity. It is ever true within its historical circle, ever untrue outside it. As we have seen already,[[431]] what his several works are to the poet or musician or painter, that its several art-genera are for the higher individual that we call the Culture, viz., organic units; and that oil-painting as a whole, act-sculpture as a whole and contrapuntal music as a whole, and rhymed lyric and so on are all epoch-making, and as such take rank as major symbols of Life. In the history of the Culture as in that of the individual existence, we are dealing with the actualization of the possible; it is the story of an inner spirituality becoming the style of a world. By the side of these great form-units, which grow and fulfil themselves and close down within a predeterminate series of human generations, which endure for a few centuries and pass irrevocably into death, we see the group of Faustian morals and the sum of Apollinian morals also as individuals of the higher order. That they are, is Destiny. They are data, and revelation (or scientific insight, as the case may be) only put them into shape for the consciousness.
There is something, hardly to be described, that assembles all the theories from Hesiod and Sophocles to Plato and the Stoa and opposes them collectively to all that was taught from Francis of Assisi and Abelard to Ibsen and Nietzsche, and even the morale of Jesus is only the noblest expression of a general morale that was put into other forms by Marcion and Mani, by Philo and Plotinus, by Epictetus, Augustine and Proclus. All Classical ethic is an ethic of attitude, all Western an ethic of deed. And, likewise, the sum of all Indian and the sum of all Chinese systems forms each a world of its own.