the recognition of the helplessness, the smallness, the impotence of one's mind.
Is man omniscient?—demand the mystics. Is he infallible? Then how dare he challenge the word of God or of
God's representatives, and set himself up as the judge of—anything?
Intellectual pride is not—as the mystics imply it to be—a pretense at omniscience or infallibility. On the contrary,
precisely because man must struggle for knowledge, precisely because the pursuit of knowledge requires an effort,
the men who assume this responsibility properly feel pride.
Sometimes, colloquially, pride is taken to mean a pretense at accomplishments one has not in fact achieved. But the
braggart, the boaster, the man who affects virtues he does not possess, is not proud; he has merely chosen the most
humiliating way to reveal his humility.
Pride (as an emotional state) is one's response to one's power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in one's own
efficacy. And it is this that mystics regard as evil.
But if doubt, not confidence, is man's proper moral state; if self-distrust, not self-reliance, is the proof of his virtue;
if fear, not self-esteem, is the mark of perfection; if guilt, not pride, is his goal—then mental illness is a moral ideal,
the neurotics and psychotics are the highest exponents of morality, and the thinkers, the achievers, are the sinners,
those who are too corrupt and too arrogant to seek virtue and psychological well-being through the belief that they
are unfit to exist.
Humility is, of necessity, the basic virtue of a mystical morality: it is the only virtue possible to men who have
renounced the mind.
Pride has to be earned; it is the reward of effort and achievement; but to gain the virtue of humility, one has only to
abstain from thinking—nothing else is demanded—and one will feel humble quickly enough.
- His life and self-esteem require of man loyalty to his values, loyalty to his mind and its judgments, loyalty to his
life—but the essence of morality, men are taught, consists of self-sacrifice; the sacrifice of one's mind to some
higher authority, and the sacrifice of one's values to whomever may claim to require it.
It is not necessary, in this context, to analyze the almost countless evils entailed by the precept of self -sacrifice. Its
irrationality