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What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man’s animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God’s sanctity
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p. 40

 

Georg Brandes

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Nietzsche proposes the following brilliant hypothesis: The bad conscience is the deep-seated morbid condition that declared itself in man under the stress of the most radical change he has ever experienced when he found himself imprisoned in perpetuity within a society which was in- violable. All the strong and savage instincts such as adventurousness, rashness, cunning, rapacity, lust of power, which till then had not only been honoured, but actually encouraged, were suddenly put down as dangerous, and by degrees branded as immoral and criminal. Creatures adapted to a roving life of war and adventure suddenly saw all their instincts classed as worthless, nay, as forbidden. An immense despondency, a dejection without parallel, then took possession of them. And all these instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on the man himself feelings of enmity, cruelty, … violence, persecution, destruction and thus the bad conscience originated.

 

Georg Brandes

 

The erotic instinct is something questionable, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

 

Carl Jung

 

In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

 

Max Beerbohm

 

The recognition of the light of reality within the darkness of abstraction is a contradiction – both the affirmation and the negation of the real at one and the same time. The new philosophy, which thinks the concrete not in an abstract but a concrete way, which acknowledges the real in its reality – that is, in a way corresponding to the being of the real as true, which elevates it into the principle and object of philosophy – is consequently the truth of the Hegelian philosophy, indeed of modern philosophy as a whole.

 

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

 

“They did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Rom. i. 28), and though they could not extinguish “the Light that lighteth every man,” and which “shone in the darkness;” yet because the darkness could not comprehend the Light, they refused to bear witness of it, and worshipped, instead, the shaping mist, which the Light had drawn upward from the ground (i.e., from the mere animal nature and instinct), and which that Light alone had made visible (i.e., by super-inducing on the animal instinct the principle of self-consciousness).

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge