False doctrines as to the connection of virtues and vices.
Various theories are also erroneous, in which it has been sought to establish the relation between the passions and the will, temperament and character, passions and temperament being understood as vicious passions and evil temperament; that is, not in themselves, but in their antithesis to the rational will: hence the vain and paradoxical attempts to join together and harmonize virtue and vice. Thus it has been maintained that in certain vices are foreshadowed the virtues which will or can be developed from them; for instance, military valour in ferocity, industrial capacity in greed; whereas ferocity and greed are wilful acts and contradictions incapable of generating any virtue, as is seen in the customary cowardice of the ferocious and the ineptitude of the greedy and covetous. Such a connection of virtues and vices has on other occasions been presented as a mixture or co-temperament, and it has been affirmed that the vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as do poisons into the composition of medicines. Finally, virtue and vice have been placed in causal relation, and the causes of civil progress have been found in human vices. But the vices, as they are not the antecedents, so are they neither the ingredients nor the causes of the virtues. These are strength, those the lack of strength. It is generally affirmed that in every individual the virtues are accompanied by their correlative vices, but if this possess some approximate value as an empirical observation, strictly speaking it has none, because men can be conceived and are actually found, whose virtue, far from yielding to excesses and to vices, is eurythmic and temperate. But perhaps that common saying aims at something else that it fails of explaining well; namely, that every power has its impotence and every individual his limit; but this does not mean vice or defect; it is nothing but the tautological affirmation that the part is not the whole and the individual not the universal.
The universal in the individual and education.
But if the individual do not exhaust the universal, the universal lives in individuals; Reality in each of its particular manifestations. Therefore the affirmation of the right of individuality does not deny the right of universality; or it denies it only in that abstract form in which, to tell the truth, it is by itself denied. The individual is under the obligation to seek himself, but in order to do this he has also the obligation of cultivating himself as man in universal. A school that represented simply a cultivation of individual aptitudes, would be a training, not an education, a manufactory of utensils, not a nursery of spiritual and creative activities. The true specialism is universalism, and inversely, which means that if the universal do not act without specializing itself, yet specialization is not really specialization if it do not contain universality. If the two terms that are by nature indissoluble be divided, there remains only fruitless generalization or stupid particularization, and if our times have sinned in this latter respect, other times have sinned in the opposite. He is well-balanced who between these two forms of degeneration both knows and fills his own proper and individual mission so perfectly that he fulfils at the same time with it and through it the universal mission of man.
V.
DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS
Multiplicity and unity: development.
The demonstration hitherto developed, that evil is negativity or contradiction, and that this contradiction takes place owing to the multiplicity of the desires in respect to the singleness of character of the volitional act, gives rise to the further question: Why should there be such a multiplicity, concurrent with the demand for unity, and thus be generated strife and contradiction? Here it would be fitting to observe that we must have filled our mouths very uselessly for a century with the word evolution, if such a question as this be renewed, or we remain bewildered and embarrassed before it. For the reason of that fact, which seems without a reason, is to be found precisely in the concept of "evolution." This concept resumes most ancient views, and has been substituted in modern times for that of an immovable Reality, of a God who exists perfect and satisfied in himself, and creates a world for his own transitory pleasure; or for a complex of beings, eternally the same, with variations that are only apparent. The concept of evolution has entered so profoundly into the blood and bones of modern man that even those repeat it who would be incapable of analyzing and understanding it; even the least acute of all, the positivist philosophers who like to call themselves "philosophers of evolution."