The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 182

182

Evil eludes definition because the truth-speaker is asked to recuse himself for having removed the link of ignorance from the moral chain.  And he often obliges the request, for he suffers from his own conscience to a greater degree than the moralists suffer from theirs.  

The mechanist struggles with an honest introspection that appears to others as a lack of confidence, because it is.  He trespasses over his own morality to describe its machinery, but does not thereby escape from being the function of this machinery.  Guilt and lack of confidence, as a rule, accompany a fearlessly honest inspection of morality.  And all the while, the good ... the confident ... the complacently ignorant hold up their own smooth conscience as the solid evidence that convicts the wavering mechanist.

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