4. The Hidden Poet

4. The Hidden Poet.4. Der versteckte Poet.

Our hidden poet, whose utterances stand in a constant ironic contradiction with the views and the inclinations of ordinary sensual life, shows himself in this closely related to another dark field of human nature: the conscience. The shallow view of the age of men now gone down and going down has misjudged and denied away, as far as ever it could, this dark disposition in man too, with which it felt itself in every way in contradiction. Even according to a system of morals otherwise serious, man is first taught by education what is right or wrong, and the fear of the Godhead is stamped into him. That fear brought up into him is, it says, what we call conscience, and man is accordingly first trained to have one.

Conscience can certainly be compared with the sensual feeling of well-being or of being unwell in this, that like it it is capable of refinement or of dulling. For just as only the one who has already enjoyed a higher degree of bodily well-being becomes sensitive to every slight indisposition, while the one who has never felt the feeling of a vigorous health, or who has gradually grown used to being ill, at last takes his sickly state for health, so too it is only a frequent enjoyment of moral well-being that makes us sensitive to every opposite feeling. We enter life not as healthy people but as such as can and are meant to recover here, and the world, with all its means of healing and correction, is an institution for convalescents. In so far we come to the feeling of complete well-being only as those who have recovered; we are not born at once with this feeling, and whole peoples, caught in the error of long centuries, seem on single points to have become uncertain about what is right or wrong, and insensible to the state of moral paralysis in which they find themselves. Yet the confirmation which that shallow reasoning about conscience seems to receive from this is merely apparent, and all men bring with them into life, more or less clearly, the recollection of a once healthy state of their spiritual nature.