ARE there such things as “sick souls”—souls that are unsound, evil, perverse—as opposed to “souls” that are “healthy”? We must answer at the outset, No; for the Spirit is always healthy, and the concept of spiritual disease (of evil, of madness, of perversity) is included and subordinated in the concept of spiritual health.

Evil and error are not “forms of reality,” as people sometimes doggedly assert, but nothing more nor less than the transition from one form of reality to another, and from one form of the Spirit to another of its forms—the Spirit, in its effort to attain the higher coming to regard the lower as irrational, erroneous, evil. We have evidence of this in the fact that wrongdoing is always attended by a consciousness of doing wrong, by an effort, that is—it may be a faint one—to overcome evil; and this effort constitutes the true definition of “good.” In accepting this point of view we are in no danger of slipping into a crass optimism, or worse still, into brute determinism; for here we are denying the reality of evil by making it implicit in the good, an aspect, therefore, a constituent, of the good, as eternal as the good itself; and the process we affirm is a process of liberation, of freedom.

Against this affirmation of the unreality of evil (equivalent to a negation of evil as a form of reality) it is unavailing to adduce in evidence the judgments whereby we are forever characterising actions of ourselves or others as “good” or “evil.” Such judgments (judgments of values), considered in their two forms of approval or disapproval, are not true judgments (logical judgments), but expressions of emotion which accompany and, one might almost say, assist the effort we make in passing from evil to good, disentangling ourselves from the past to embrace the present, progressing over ourselves, or exhorting, inciting, encouraging others to progress over themselves.

Nevertheless, this negation of evil, logically unassailable though it be, seems to stand in open conflict with the observable facts of everyday life. There we are being constantly annoyed by evil actions and silly words, and we have literally to elbow our way through crowds of sinners and crowds of fools. If we look first at the world as it is and then at the philosopher who persists in denying the existence of evil, our lips have to curl with a smile of pity for that clown of a Doctor Pangloss! To be sure, nothing is easier than to demolish a philosophy by caricature and satire: such is the resort of people, even when they are named Voltaire, who lack the keenness of vision to detect the weak spot in the inner logic of a system of thought. But Doctor Pangloss (or the philosophy of Leibnitz which he was made to impersonate) made a mistake too: the mistake of stopping at the generality and the abstraction. When we have denied evil as a form of reality and recognised it as an aspect of progression, or of passage, from one spiritual form to another, we must not overlook the precise limitations of this notion of progression—all the more since these limitations account for the apparent contradiction between theory and fact which arises when theory is made abstract and fact is elevated to theory, when, that is, we add to the mistake of Doctor Pangloss the mistake of his critic, Voltaire.

Progression (becoming, development), which is “history” really, creates for its own purposes the general manners in which human beings act: it creates “institutions”; and among these the ones actually so-called in the restricted circle of social or political life are relatively few in number and far less important than we think they are. Institutions are simply “specifications,” or “specialisations,” and not such specifications only as appear in differences of nationality, habits and customs, or character, but also and primarily (as the foundation of all others) such as develop according to the dialectic differentiations made by the mind itself. It is as though the Spirit were able to project its distinctions into space on a grand scale, making actual existences out of them.

Of this Schelling and Hegel were more or less aware in their much abused Philosophies of Nature and History—so true is it that all error has some foundation in fact! They thought of categories as actually existing and built existences up into categories, conceiving of nature as “petrified thought” and of history as a “sequence of categories,” each category, in its turn, growing to a climax and then degenerating. But Schelling and Hegel looked at the situation from a naturalistic or, what amounts to the same thing, from a metaphysical point of view, and they brought up, accordingly, in symbolism or mythology. They were too ready to fabricate schemes and systems in which pure imagination had a very large share. In fact, there is no occasion for detaching the various forms of the Spirit from other forms and transmuting them from categories into things. The important point is to maintain, and rigorously maintain, the unity of the Spirit as wholly present in any one of its acts. At the same time, we must understand that if, in any given act, there were not such stress upon one particular form as to give that form predominance over all others, one act would be like every other act, and progression or change would not be possible. Furthermore, if more or less similar accentuations did not affect series of acts as well, we should never have that intertwining and interaction of the real which is called society and history. These differentiations of society and history (and of Nature also, which from this point of view is likewise society and history) are seen—if we bear the unity of the Spirit in mind—to be approximative and dynamic merely—they are matters of differing stress, not of differing quality; whereas Hegel and Schelling thought of them as absolute not as approximative, as static and not as dynamic—as metaphysical categories, in short. In this lay the error of these two great thinkers.

Our denial of categories in this sense does not, however, involve a repudiation of them when they are taken for what they genuinely are. We cannot refuse to recognise the obvious fact that there are, for instance, poetical minds and philosophical minds, men of originality and vision, and men of mere deftness or practical skill. No philosopher is a pure philosopher, no poet a pure poet, no selfish man wholly selfish, no moral man wholly moral. For (it scarcely need be said) all such men are men, first of all; and man, the Spirit as a whole, that is, is present in each of them, but present in such a manner, and under such conditions of emphasis, that through the predominance of one or another spiritual form, a given man may be called, after the manner of his acting, poet, philosopher, statesman, or saint. If, on the one hand, these specialisations or tendencies are referable to a dialectical differentiation of spiritual forms, on the other hand, these forms would never manifest themselves in history unless they created those particular instruments of their own which we have called, broadly speaking, “institutions.” An individual who is not distinguished by some special aptitude or who has several or all aptitudes in equal degree (the one interfering with the other) is usually taken lightly as a socially useless person or pitied as a mediocrity and an unfortunate. On the other hand, in men who perform one kind of service with distinction and are quite unable to perform any other—philosophers who can do nothing but think, poets who can do nothing but write, soldiers who are good only at fighting—we recognise the greatest social efficiency. We are not offended if the general is obtuse to the beauties of art, as was Lucius Mummius at the Fall of Corinth. What does it matter if the philosopher is inept as mayor of a village, or if the poet stands dumb before the first theorem of Euclid? To be sure, these are limitations in the individuals in question, limitations and therefore weaknesses, weaknesses and therefore “diseases.” We are wont to smile (sometimes the smile gives way to disgust) at the impracticalness of the philosopher, the extravagance of the poet, the artistic absurdities uttered by men of the sword. But we are not inclined to build such people over. Indeed, if we could correct them, making up deficiencies at the expense of the specific excellences of each, we should never try to do so; for we know that reality does the correcting for us, tempering excesses and bringing virtues and faults into harmony with life (historico-social life) as a whole. In life one individual supplements the other and the irrational element in one is solved in the rationality of another. When we say that “all is right with the world,” that everything is as it ought to be, that reality is rational, in other words, we should understand that the assurance holds only for reality at large, for the Spirit, that is, in its totality and concreteness. It does not apply to the individual who, when isolated from the whole, is only a fragment of reality. We may say the same of history in the large, but not of the historical episode taken apart from the whole progression of which it is a phase; for the full rationality of an historical incident becomes apparent only in our comprehension of the whole history of mankind. But the point I was coming to over this devious route was this: just as the pure poet and the pure philosopher do not exist, as concrete entities, though both are abundant if we think of aptitudes, tendencies, stresses, “institutions,” so the “sick soul” has no concrete existence, but is nevertheless frequently met with as regards disposition or character. Does not experience teach us that some people have a sort of vocation for wrongdoing, as others have for righteousness? Just as there are flights of genius that cannot be provoked by any kind of coercion, so there are defects that cannot be corrected by any discoverable discipline. We all know men who are selfish, calculating, untrustworthy, men deaf to all compassion, insensitive to any ideal, born delinquents, as we say, cynics toward all high attainment, mockers of all noble aspiration. And we all know men who are born weaklings, men without will power, men concerned exclusively with their own comfort and pleasure, ever ready to shirk a duty, ever disposed to satisfy a passion or a caprice. And the former, like the latter, are indifferent to good counsel however considerate and authoritative, refusing to seize the most exciting and most urgent opportunities to get away from themselves and be, as we say, human. Society tries to educate such people, but eventually abandons the futile task. As the Bible says: “The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh”; and there is a common maxim to the effect that “you never can straighten a dog’s hind legs.” So we adopt various remedies for varying cases: we shut men up in prisons, guarding them like dangerous beasts; we ostracise them, leaving them alone in the world; or perhaps we simply advertise them, discrediting them, labelling them for what they are and are not, that others may know them and be on their guard accordingly.

But if individuals of this kind exist (individuals who have stopped, so to speak, on the lowest grade of will, where volition asserts itself as mere volition and is wholly directed to the selfish interest of the individual, who makes of it a weapon and a prop to challenge the world and escape its laws) they must exist as stresses, as specialisations of reality, as “institutions,” just as much as the poet, the philosopher, or the statesman; and in their apparent lack of all social utility whatever, they must nevertheless fulfil a real social function.

That such is the case history amply testifies. To overcome certain obstacles in its path, to pass certain points in its onward march, the world has often relied upon the so-called dregs of humanity. But for these no Bastilles would have fallen, nor would any of the glorious revolutions of modern peoples have attained success. The armies of Europe have written luminous pages in the history of mankind, yet in times past armies were not recruited from respectable citizens but from the outcasts of the social system. From the same sources governments of all ages have drawn the high priests of their solemn ceremonies of justice—their headsmen and their hangmen, celebrated as sacred functionaries by Joseph de Maistre.

And nowadays, if you please, where do we get the intriguers and the unscrupulous politicians without whom, it seems, States cannot transact their necessary business?

Or passing to the other class—individuals predisposed to idleness and pleasure, congenitally lacking in modesty, but richly endowed with gifts of gallantry, charm, allurement, and with special aptitudes for the arts of the Armidas and the Alcinas—we find that from an abundance rather than from a dearth of these (though not only from these, as is sometimes falsely pretended) society chooses the women—ladies or drabs as they may be—who provide an outlet for extramarital fancifulness and for the insurgent sensuality of youth. Not only is society compelled, as it hypocritically pleads, to tolerate such individuals; but when, as sometimes happens, the supply fails, it is constrained actually to seek them out and give them special favours—as we observe in the statutes of the old Republic of Venice and the speedy abandonment by the Popes in Rome of measures to repress them. But—not to linger on this unpleasant territory—where do we get the “low-brows” who on occasion furnish such welcome relief from the “highbrows”? Where do the Muratoris of all ages and places find the dunces they need as companions on their daily walks to entice their minds away from an unhygienic concentration on higher things?

Not that society holds its ground or that mankind progresses through the efficiency of vice and the inefficiency of virtue—as divers lovers of philosophical paradox have claimed in the past, and as certain poets—not the most intelligent among us—have’ sung in recent years. States, they say, come into being and heroes are born, from the release of the most vulgar passions: those same States, which, as Vico so nobly saw, would never have arisen save for a consciousness of the divine there is in man, and heroes who are heroes because they have resisted the onslaught of primitive passions and converted these into ethical riches!

But though the moral force is the one that guides and controls mankind, actual society, which implies differentiation and diverseness, normally presents, on the one hand, men who rule and, on the other hand, men who obey; on the one hand, men who create, and on the other hand, men who seem to be so much material for the former to work with and even to “use.” Surely our moral outlook gives us hope and even some assurance that as time goes on these sorry tools will be the exception rather than the rule in the operations of history; and especially that they will be ennobled after a fashion, as they have in fact been ennobled already, since already they seem to have become more intelligent, more rich of spirit, more humane, than they used to be. Our hopes for them, however, are much the same as our hopes for the abolition of wars. There will always be wars—though perhaps in forms that are somewhat disguised. So there will always be these inferior creatures whom society will look down upon and use. The purposes of the exploitation need not always be as direct as those illustrated above. By no means negligible is the role these unfortunates play in life by sustaining our abhorrence for baseness, treachery, or corrupt living, and therewith by deepening, strengthening, endearing to us our attachment to truth, rectitude, loyalty, clean living. They stand before our eyes as anti-ideals; and as we shrink from them we cling more anxiously and fearfully to the exercise of virtue and to the worship of righteousness, to everything in a word that makes us different from them.

Nevertheless, from this idea of the necessity of evil—of the necessity of specialisation, that is, in the fields of volition and action no less than in the fields of theory, and consequently from the necessary existence of evil as an “institution”—the consciousness of human brotherhood springs, not so joyously perhaps, but not less nobly. These inferior creatures are inferior but they are also unfortunate. Condemned to suffering and punishment, or at least to deprivation of the good things of life, they are not wholly responsible for what they are. Rather the order of things in this world has made them thus. Even in their wretched estate, they work for us and help to make us what we are in the moments when we are at our best. Some of the responsibility for their lot devolves accordingly upon us who profit by it, upon us who are fashioned of their substance though destined to a different, but still correlative, function in life. That is why Christ (and in Him all humanity) wept tears of blood and was ready to expiate in His own person all the sins of the world. That is why each of us, no matter how abject the wickedness before us, passes through horror and loathing to compassion for those who do wrong; and our compassion flares up more brightly when we see, or think we see, on faces clouded with darkness a beam of that sunlight which we feel warming our own souls. That is why each of us, in the presence of a great crime, stands awestruck and in terror as at the bedside of an invalid who is dying of a disease that may some day attack us. And sadness steals into our hearts. For we are again reminded of the unseverable bonds of brotherhood that bind us to the criminal. In the disgust that evil actions arouse in us, we wish like the Manicheans of old that we could drive their authors into the outer darkness as children of the Devil, as outcasts foredoomed to Divine Wrath, as intruders foreign to ourselves and to the world we live in. But then our sense of fairness comes to the fore. Our consciousness of the truth shows them to us as our neighbours, cursed by us and for us, but therefore of our number. And we begin to understand the joy that reigns in heaven, as the gospel says, over the return of a lost sheep; for when it is vouchsafed us to witness the almost miraculous redemption of one of these unfortunates, we are moved to bow down before the omnipotence of the Spirit which has the power to break through the rigid walls of the specialisations, stresses, and institutions it has created, and assert once more its infinite freedom.