"A wretched, pitiable creature is man with his craving for positive solutions, thrown into this everlastingly tossing, limitless ocean of _good_ and _evil_, of combinations and contradictions. For centuries men have been struggling and laboring to put the _good_ on one side, the _evil_ on the other. Centuries will pass, and no matter how much the unprejudiced mind may strive to decide where the balance lies between the _good_ and the _evil_, the scales will refuse to tip the beam, and there will always be equal quantities of the _good_ and the _evil_ on each scale.
"If only man would learn to form judgments, and not to indulge in rash and arbitrary thoughts, and not to make reply to questions that are propounded merely to remain forever unanswered! If only he would learn that every thought is both a lie and a truth!--a lie from the one-sidedness and inability of man to recognize all truth; and true because it expresses one side of mortal endeavor. There are divisions in this everlastingly tumultuous, endless, endlessly confused chaos of the _good_ and the _evil_. They have drawn imaginary lines over this ocean, and they contend that the ocean is really thus divided.
"But are there not millions of other possible subdivisions from absolutely different standpoints, in other planes? Certainly these novel subdivisions will be made in centuries to come, just as millions of different ones have been made in centuries past.
"Civilization is _good_, barbarism is _evil_; freedom, _good_; slavery, _evil_. Now, this imaginary knowledge annihilates the instinctive, beatific, primitive craving for the _good_ that is in human nature. And who will explain to me what is freedom, what is despotism, what is civilization, what is barbarism?
"Where are the boundaries that separate them? And whose soul possesses so absolute a standard of good and evil as to measure these fleeting, complicated facts? Whose wit is so great as to comprehend and weigh all the facts in the irretrievable past? And who can find any circumstance in which there is no union of _good_ and _evil_? And because I know that I see more of one than of the other, is it not because my standpoint is wrong? And who has the ability to separate himself so absolutely from life, even for a moment, as to look upon it from above?