ON HUMAN NATURE AND ITS CAPACITIES FOK VIRTUE. 109 



affording a vent for the gloomy side of the souls of men 

 of genius, which they have further invested with a strange 

 attractiveness, but that, nevertheless, all delineations of 

 man, conceived in that spirit, are understood to be too 

 darkly coloured ; that, finally, the cases of the haters and 

 contemners of their species are extreme and exceptional, 

 just as madmen are exceptional ? All this may be said, 

 and with a degree of truth; nevertheless, there is a 

 certain truth in the other views also ; and the last-named 

 cases do really represent a very considerable fraction 

 of mankind similarly affected, though not to the extreme 

 or insane degree. Still more, they represent all of us at 

 certain moments ; for as it has been said that all men are 

 more or less insane and irrational, so it may be said with 

 greater truth, that all men at times are more or less 

 cynical. The character of man, in fact, is no fixed, 

 unchanging thing ; his views are not always the same or 

 under the yoke of one system of opinions, as philosophers 

 fancy. His opinions vary; he holds one set of views 

 under one mood, another under a different mood of mind ; 

 and at certain moments, in a particular mood, under a 

 certain light, the cynical account of man seems the truest 

 expression of the facts, and the pessimist's the most 

 correct portrait of human nature. 



7. But what has all this to do with the question of 

 the love of our kind ? Something ; for if they be even 

 partially true, such accounts abate so far our power of 

 loving such a being as man ; and the existence of such 

 portraits when taken in conjunction with such undoubted 

 facts as anger, instinctive dislike, indignation, envy, 

 rivalry, go to prove that we are not yet ripe for the 

 religion of the love of humanity, and that we are not yet 

 inwardly ready to strike for the greatest happiness of the 

 greatest number, even if we knew how, amidst the com- 



