The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt.  Christ, the innocent, since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense the most guilty.  In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself.  Many are wont to be amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints counted themselves the greatest sinners.  But the intensity of the fault is not measured by the external act, but by the consciousness of it, and an act for which the conscience of one man suffers acutely makes scarcely any impression on the conscience of another.  And in a saint, conscience may be developed so fully and to such a degree of sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him more remorse than his crime causes the greatest criminal.  And sin rests upon our consciousness of it, it is in him who judges and in so far as he judges.  When a man commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he is doing a virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally guilty, while on the other hand that man is guilty who commits an act which he believes to be wrong, even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps beneficent.  The act passes away, the intention remains, and the evil of the evil act is that it corrupts the intention, that in knowingly doing wrong a man is predisposed to go on doing it, that it blurs the 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.