he
conscience. And doing evil is not the same as being evil. Evil blurs the
conscience, and not only the moral conscience but the general, psychical
consciousness. And everything that exalts and expands consciousness is
good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.

And here we might raise the question which, according to Plato, was
propounded by Socrates, as to whether virtue is knowledge, which is
equivalent to asking whether virtue is rational.

The ethicists--those who maintain that ethics is a science, those whom
the reading of these divagations will provoke to exclaim, "Rhetoric,
rhetoric, rhetoric!"--would appear to think that virtue is the fruit of
knowledge, of rational study, and that even mathematics help us to be
better men. I do not know, but for my part I feel that virtue, like
religion, like the longing never to die--and all these are fundamentally
the same thing--is the fruit of passion.

But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do not know, or rather, I
know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need
for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to
arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess
it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object.
It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something
combustible to find the fire.

That this may appear empty and sophistical well I know. And I shall also
be told that there is the science of passion and the passion of science,
and that it is in the moral sphere that reason and life unite together.

I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be
saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my
imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more
rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have
someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say
freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of
feeling.

And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is
knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a
science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science
being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it
cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known,
moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.