Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture--oh,
this culture!--which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of
science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share
in the making of. For saints have concerned themselves very little with
the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather
with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they
lived. Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan
de la Cruz, for example--that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps
somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him--compared with Descartes?
All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their
neighbours, hungering for their own and others' eternalization, who went
about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be--what have all those saints
done for the progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover
the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Koenigsberg, who, if
he was not a saint, deserved to be one?
The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened
his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to
me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in
a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus:
"My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his
spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by
hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his
soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was
in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his
childish days.
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