The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by time, is dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of his intelligible ego by his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride is towards himself; there is the desire in him to impress his own self by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is the pride peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a higher tribunal. Soft and ascetic natures (Pascal is an example) sometimes suffer from this self-pride, and yet try in vain to shake it off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride before others, but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.
Can it be said that this strong adaptation to duty towards oneself prejudices the sense of duty towards one’s neighbours? Do not the two stand as alternatives, so that he who always keeps faith with himself must break it with others? By no means. As there is only one truth, so there can be only one desire for truth--what Carlyle called sincerity--that a man has or has not with regard both to himself and to the world; it is never one of two, a view of the world differing from a view of oneself, a self-study without a world-study; there is only one duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if he is moral towards himself he is moral towards others.
There are few regions of thought, however, so full of false ideas, as the conception of moral duty towards one’s neighbours and how it is to be fulfilled. Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, the theoretical systems of morality which are based on the maintenance of human society, and which attach less importance to the concrete feelings and motives at the moment of action than to the effect on the general system of morality, we come at once to the popular idea which defines the morality of a man by his “goodness,” the degree to which his compassionate disposition is developed. From the philosophical point of view, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith saw in sympathy the nature and source of all ethical conduct, and this view received a very strong support from Schopenhauer’s sympathetic morality. Schopenhauer’s “Essay on the Foundations of Morality” shows in its motto “It is easy to preach morality, difficult to find a basis for it,” the fundamental error of the sympathetic ethics which always fails to recognise that the science of ethics is not merely an explanation and description of conduct, but a search for a guide to it. Whoever will be at the pains diligently to listen to the inner voice of man, in order to establish what he ought to do, will certainly reject every system of ethics, the aim of which is to be a doctrine of the requirements which man has invented for himself and others instead of being a relation of what he actually does in furthering these requirements or in stifling them. The object of all moral science is not what is happening but what ought to happen.