“That too?”
“Yes. Morals should be nothing more than the true, fitting, and natural law of man. Man considered solely as a spiritual machine? No. Considered as an animal that eats and drinks? Not that either. Man considered as a complete whole. Isn’t that so?”
“I believe it is.”
“I proceed. In nature laws become more obscure, according as more complicated objects of knowledge turn up. We all clearly see the law of the triangle, and the law of oxygen or of carbon with the same clearness. These laws appear to us as being without exception. But then comes the mineral, and we begin to see variations; in this form it exerts one attraction, in that form a different one. We ascend to the vegetable and find a sort of surprise-package. The surprises are centupled in the animal; and are raised to an unknown degree in man. What is the law of man, as man? We do not know it, probably we shall never know it. Right and justice may be truths, but they will always be fractional truths. Traditional morality is a pragmatism, useful and efficacious for social life, for well-ordered life; but at the bottom, without reality. Summing all this up: first, life is a labyrinth which has no Ariadne’s thread but one,—action; secondly, man is upheld in his high qualities by force and struggle. Those are my conclusions.”
“Clever devil! I don’t know what to say to you.”
Alzugaray asserted that, without taking it upon him to say whether his friend’s ideas were good or bad, they had no practical value; but Cæsar insisted once and many times on the advantages he saw in his metaphysics.
ENCHIRIDION SAPIENTIAE
Cæsar remained in the same sphere during the whole period of his law course, always seeking, according to his own words, to add one wheel more to his machine.
His life contained few incidents; summers he went to Valencia, and there, in the villa, he read and talked with the peasants. His mother, devoted solely to the Church, bothered herself little about her son.
Cæsar ended his studies, and on his coming of age, they gave him his share of his father’s estate.