This pair of passages from Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human seem to address the same problems as Yeats A Vision. We confuse two domains of truth (sometimes pointedly, as if on principle) collapsing the related but distinctly different realms of scientific fact and moral ideals into a single “objective truth”, which makes peaceful resolution of practical conflicts impossible.

29. Drunk with the odour of blossoms. — The ship of mankind has, one believes, a deeper and deeper draught the more heavily it is laden; one believes that the more profoundly a man thinks, the more tenderly he feels, the more highly he rates himself, the greater the distance grows between him and the other animals — the more he appears as the genius among animals the closer he will get to the true nature of the world and to a knowledge of it: this he does in fact do through science, but he thinks he does so even more through his arts and religions. These are, to be sure, a blossom of the world, but they are certainly not closer to the roots of the world than the stem is: they provide us with no better understanding of the nature of things at all, although almost everyone believes they do. It is error that has made mankind so profound, tender, inventive as to produce such a flower as the arts and religions. Pure knowledge would have been incapable of it. Anyone who unveiled to us the nature of the world would produce for all of us the most unpleasant disappointment. It is not the world as thing in itself, it is the world as idea (as error) that is so full of significance, profound, marvelous, and bearing in its womb all happiness and unhappiness. This consequence leads to a philosophy of logical world-denial: which can, however, be united with a practical world affirmation just as easily as with its opposite.

30. Bad habits in making conclusions. — The most common false conclusions of men are these: a thing exists, therefore it is legitimate. Here one is concluding functionality from viability, and legitimacy from functionality. Furthermore, if an opinion makes us glad, it must be true; if its effect is good, it in itself must be good and true. Here one is attributing to the effect the predicate “gladdening,” “good,” in the sense of the useful, and providing the cause with the same predicate “good,” but now in the sense of the logically valid. The reversal of the proposition is: if a thing cannot prevail and maintain itself, it must be wrong; if an opinion tortures and agitates, it must be false. The free spirit, who comes to know all too well the error of this sort of deduction and has to suffer from its consequences, often succumbs to the temptation of making contrary deductions, which are in general naturally just as false: if a thing cannot prevail, it must be good; if an opinion troubles and disturbs, it must be true.

We permit our moral ideals — the image of a world that we feel ought to exist — to distort what we think about the world as it actually is, as it would look to us if we were simply trying to explain and predict phenomenal events. Just as often we turn around and adopt a moral stance of resigned passivity, crushing our moral ideals in the iron maiden of “that’s how things are”. We call this “realism”, ignoring the fact that mutability is just as real as stability.

We lack the courage for meliorism: taking responsibility for our own morality. And by this, I do not mean we take responsibility for success or failure in executing on an already-known morality. I mean: we take responsibility for outlining a moral ideal, attempting to persuade others to it, succeeding or failing to maintain one’s faith in this ideal, succeeding or failing to bring one’s ideal about in practical fact, and finally in fully owning the sweet and bitter fruits of one’s efforts.

The moral nature of the world might be set from the start, built right into reality like physical laws, but why should we expect it to flow out from the world of objects to us? Why wouldn’t it flow out into the world of objects though us? After all, isn’t morality (the sense of a better and a worse) primary to human nature?

And if the moral form of the world must flow out through us if the world is to have any moral shape at all, wouldn’t the modesty and obedience and resignation of our so-called religious folks be euphemisms for moral negligence, indifference, irresponsibility, infantilism?

Yes, it would.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — 1 Corinthians