ich is "the better part of us," to be the natural one.

[Footnote 1: That virtue which springs from knowledge is alone genuine.
The painful, hence unactive, emotions of pity and repentance may impel to
actions whose accomplishment is better than their omission. Emotion caused
by sympathy for others and contrition for one's own guilt, both of which
increase present evil by new ones, have only the value of evils of a lesser
kind. They are salutary for the irrational man, in so far as the one spurs
him on to acts of assistance and the other diminishes his pride. They
are harmful to the wise man, or, at least, useless; he is in no need of
irrational motives to rational action. Action from insight is alone true
morality.]

All men endeavor after continuance of existence (III. _prop_. 6); why not
all after virtue? If all endeavor after it, why do so few reach the goal?
Whence the sadly large number of the irrational, the selfish, the vicious?
Whence the evil in the world? Vice is as truly an outcome of "nature" as
virtue. Virtue is power, vice is weakness; the former is knowledge, the
latter ignorance. Whence the powerless natures? Whence defective knowledge?
Whence imperfection in general?

The concept of imperfection expresses nothing positive, nothing actual, but
merely a defect, an absence of reality. It is nothing but an idea in us,
a fiction which arises through the comparison of one thing with another
possessing greater reality, or with an abstract generic concept, a pattern,
which it seems unable to attain. That concepts of value are not properties
of things themselves, but denote only their pleasurable or painful effects
on us, is evident from the fact that one and the same thing may be at the
same time good, bad, and indifferent: the music which is good for the
melancholy man may be bad for the mourner, and neither good nor bad for the
deaf. Knowledge of the bad is an abstract, inadequate idea; in God there is
no idea of evil. If imperfection and error were something real, it would
have to be conceded that God is the author of evil and sin. In reality
everything is that which it can be, hence without defect: everything actual
is, in itself considered, perfect. Even the fool and the sinner cannot be
otherwise than he is; he appears imperfect only when placed beside the wise
and the virtuous. Sin is thus only a lesser reality than virtue, evil a
lesser good; good and bad, activity and passivity, power and weakness
ar