And now I hear a thousand voices raised against me crying, "Impious!" but I ask in all fairness to be heard, before you pronounce the anathema. These ideas are too new not to demand further development.
When I see the ancient tragedies, I am seized with a feeling of personal indignation against. the cruel gods who allow such terrible calamities to be heaped upon the innocent. OEdipus, Jocasta, Phædra, Ariadne, Philoctetes, Orestes, and many others, inspire more terror in me than interest. Devoted passive beings, blind instruments of the wrath and caprice of the gods, I am more horrified at, than compassionate toward them. Everything in these plays seems monstrous to me: unbridled passions, atrocious crimes, these are as far from being natural as they are unusual in the civilization of our time. In all these tragedies we pass through nothing but ruins, oceans of blood, heaps of slain, and arrive at the catastrophe only by way of poisoning, murder, incest, and parricide. The tears shed are forced, they seldom flow, and when they do, they are burning hot: they cause the forehead to contract before tears finally flow. Unbelievably great efforts are necessary to force them, so that only the very greatest geniuses are able to accomplish the feat.
And then, the inevitable tragedies of destiny offer no moral struggle. When one can only tremble and be silent, is not thinking the very worst thing to do? If one could evolve some sort of moral from a play of this sort, it is a terrible moral, and would indubitably encourage as many to commit crimes who might urge fate as an excuse, as it would discourage to follow in the paths of virtue, because according to this system all our efforts mean nothing at all. If it be true that no virtue can be attained without sacrifice, then it must equally stand to reason that no sacrifice can be made without hope of reward. A belief in fatalism degrades man, because it takes his personal liberty from him; and without this, there is no morality in his acts.
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