THE ALEXANDRIAN MIND
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matter the reason
is
simple: there are no choices anywhere, ever; as
the body
is
ruinous from the start, so is the commonwealth as he
knows it:
And my conscience is easy
As to the indifference of my choice.
All three of them do to Syria the same amount of harm.
But I'm a ruined man, it isn't my fault.
I have misfortunes and I'm trying to mend them.
The almighty gods ought to have seen about
Creating a fourth man and an, honest one.
I should have been delighted to work with him.
No further thought
is
wasted, however, on that fictitious "honest"
man. A world so neatly divided between knaves and fools is "suf–
ficient" to the Alexandrian mind, which knows that it
is
to be
sacrificed on some altar or other and whose only fear is that it might
have to bleed, perhaps through its own mistake, with the fools. At
this point the Alexandrian's power of will, all but atrophied as we
have seen, is called into action once more: he refuses with every
ounce of strength that is left him to die the wrong death.
Values Become Indifferent. The Heir in His Pride
The Alexandrian
is
convinced of the fundamental equivalence
of all moral values. This means that together with the notion of
summum bonum
there also went below the horizon that of
summum
malum:
a fact from which he derives not so much comfort as pride;
a justified pride. For it is due to him, he feels, that the ghost of
radical evil, or hell, was laid which haunted his elders; rid of their
heady hopes, he is rid of most traditional fears as well. Such emotions
as he has kept come to be centered exclusively round the main chance,
his private allotment of pleasure and pain. He is not denying life, as
his
enemies claim, but only life as his forebears conceived and lived
it; nor is he unwilling to take the consequences of that refusal :
He
never repen ts who has once denied; / He would say No again, if he
were tried'; Y et that proper No all his life subdues him.
In the lan–
guage of an obsolete system he might be charged-and actually will
be so charged, over and over-with the sin of
superbia.
But the
