The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesthe hangmen! And all the while their duplicity never confesses theirhatred to be hatred.”222Poor Nietzsche’s antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all knowwhat he means, and he expresses well the clash between the twoIdeals. The carnivorous-minded “strong man,” the adult male andcannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in thesaint’s gentleness and self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing.The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall theseen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation?and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressivenessor non-resistance?The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree bothworlds must be acknowledged and taken account of; and in theseen world both aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It isa question of emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint’s type or thestrong-man’s type the more ideal?It has often been supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposedby most persons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type ofhuman character. A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be thebest man absolutely and apart from the utility of his function, apartfrom economical considerations. The saint’s type, and the knight’sor gentleman’s type, have always been rival claimants of this absoluteideality; and in the ideal of military religious orders both typeswere in a manner blended. According to the empirical philosophy,however, all ideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, forexample, to ask for a definition of “the ideal horse,” so long as draggingdrays and running races, bearing children, and jogging aboutwith tradesmen’s packages all remain as indispensable differentiationsof equine function. You may take what you call a general allroundanimal as a compromise, but he will be inferior to any horseof a more specialized type, in some one particular direction. Wemust not forget this now when, in discussing saintliness, we ask if itbe an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by its economicalrelations.222 Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, Section 14. I haveabridged, and in one place transposed, a sentence.333