are fundamentally
different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book
never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a
law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the "thou
shall," on which obedience is based. The problem lies exactly here.--At
a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the
greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight,
declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall
live--or _can_ live--has come to an end. The object now is to reap as
rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment
and _hard_ experience. In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided
above everything is further experimentation--the continuation of the
state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized
_ad infinitum_. Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand,
_revelation_, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the
laws are _not_ of human origin, that they were _not_ sought out and
found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of
divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a
history, as a free gift, a miracle...; and on the other hand,
_tradition_, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged
from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one's
forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus
grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers _lived_ it.--The
higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract
consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right
living (that is to say, those that have been _proved_ to be right by
wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a
perfect automatism--a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to
every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book
as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility of future
mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire to the
highest reaches of the art of life. _To that end the thing must be made
unconscious_: that is the aim of every holy lie.--The _order of castes_,
the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an _order
of nature_, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary
fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence. In every healthy
soc