5. Of a Babylonian Confusion of Languages

5. Of a Babylonian Confusion of Languages.5. Von einer babylonischen Sprachenverwirrung.

We follow the strange contrast of our nature still further.^* From of old the more serious morality has not set the highest value on those inward feelings and enjoyments by which man feels himself seized in the happiest hours of his inner life. And yet these joys, which the soul receives from intercourse and community with its higher origin, appear as the purest and most spiritual of which it is capable in the present existence. That more serious morality speaks rather of a deep spiritual forsakenness and doing-without even of our most spiritual enjoyments as of a state which is necessary to the development of the inner life, often far more furthering to its thriving than that of enjoyment; although this pain, which lacks even the comfort of tears and of a sensual feeling, is the highest that the soul can bear in its present state.

* On that contrast compare further Franz Baader’s Begründung der Ethik durch die Physik.