THE NATURAL 



sensibility variable and always excessive. He is the least 

 poised and the least reasonable of all animals, although 

 the only one who has been able to construct for him- 

 self an idea of reason; he is an animal lunatic, that is to 

 say one who flows out on all sides, who unravels every- 

 thing in theory, and tangles up everything in fact, who 

 desires and wills so many things, who throws his muscles 

 into so many divers activities that his acts are at once 

 the most sensible and the most absurd, the most con- 

 forming and the most opposed to the logical development 

 of life. But he profits even by error, especially by the 

 error fatal to all animals, and that constitutes his original- 

 ity, as Pascal noted, and as Nietzsche repeats. 



If the word modesty (pudeur} is not exact, when 

 applied to animals, although one finds in their habits 

 the distant origin of this complex and refined sentiment, 

 the word cruelty, is not so either, when applied to their 

 natural acts of defence or nutrition. Human cruelty is 

 often an aberration; the cruelty of beasts is a necessity, 

 a normal fact, often the very condition of their existence. 

 An anarchist philosopher, ardent and naive disciple of 

 Jean- Jacques believed that he traced an universal altru- 

 ism in nature; he has redone with other words and 

 another spirit, and a few new examples, the infantile 

 works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and has abused, 

 under pretext of inclining mankind to kindness, the right 

 which one has to promenade about nature without seeing 

 and without understanding her. Nature is neither good, 

 nor evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of 

 forces whereof none cedes save under superior pressure. 

 Her conscience is that of a balance; being of a perfect 

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