“No.” “And do you want to start your career by deceiving people?”
“I cannot choose my means. Politics are like this: doing something with nothing, doing a great deal with a little, erecting a castle on a grain of sand.”
“And do you, who have so many moral prejudices, wish to begin in that way?”
“Who told you that accepting every means is not moral?”
“I don’t understand how it could be,” replied Laura.
“I do,” answered her brother. “What is individual morality today? Almost nothing. It almost doesn’t exist. Individual morality can come to be collective only by contagion, by enthusiasm. And such things do not happen nowadays; every one has his own morality; but we have not arrived at a scientific moral code. Years ago notable men accepted the moral code of the categoric imperative, in lieu of the moral code based on sin; but the categorical imperative is a stoical morality, a wise man’s morality which has not the sentimental value necessary to make it popular.”
“I do not understand these things,” she replied, displeased.
“The doctor understands me, don’t you?” he said.
“Yes, I believe I do.”
“For me,” Cæsar went on, “individual morality consists in adapting one’s life to a thought, to a preconceived plan. The man who proposes to be a scientist and puts all his powers into achieving that, is a moral man, even though he steals and is a blackguard in other things.”