# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S54
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

54 The Secret Societies etc.

whose moral feeling is already so dreadfully blunted that they, perhaps unconsciously paying homage to the Jesuitical maxim that the end sanctifies the means, must let themselves be put to shame even by upright rationalists of lively moral feeling. As proof of this, let the following testimony serve.

The well-known philosopher Wilh. Traugott Krug, formerly professor of philosophy at Leipzig, writes the following, among other things, in his "System of Practical Philosophy" of the year 1838: "Can morality approve, or even indeed recommend, admission to the so-called secret societies (societates clandestinae)? Or, in other words, can it likewise reckon those societies among the external conditions and constituents of our perfection and happiness, and of our personal efficacy in the world of sense? We assume here that admission to such societies, either in general or at least to certain kinds of them (for instance, the Masonic), is permitted by the state. For if this were not so, the question would settle itself through duty toward the state. If the state tolerates secret societies in its bosom, then he who joins them acts, to be sure, lawfully. But does he act altogether conscientiously? That is another question. Secret societies are unquestionably such as conceal either their ends, or the means to those ends, or both at once, from the eyes of all the uninitiated, and therefore make them known even to one who wishes to join only after admission (ex post), and perhaps even then not all at once, but only gradually and step by step (pedetentim et gradatim).*) Now there lies, surely, in admission to a society, if not an express, then at least a tacit approval of its ends and means, and the assumption of the obligation to cooperate toward those ends by these means. But how can a conscientious man bind himself to such a thing, when he does not even know the actual object of his obligation? If anywhere, the rule finds its application here: Quod dubitas, ne feceris! [Whereof you are in doubt, do it not. Pliny, Epistles I, 18.**)] The reservatio mentalis, that one presupposes the goodness of the ends and means, is of no avail, like all such reservations. You should first ask: What are your ends and means, that I may know beforehand whether they are good? You should ask this all the more, since the mysterious darkness in which the society wraps itself is always suspicious and justifies the suspicion that

*) By this the secret society is distinguished from the merely closed one. The latter may indeed choose its members and admit them according to certain forms, and let only those admitted attend its meetings; but if it lays open its doings and nature, its ends and means, to everyone before admission, then it is no secret society. It then has no mysteries. K.

**) Compare Cicero, De Officiis I, 30: "Bene praecipiunt, qui vetant quidquam agere, quod dubites, aequum sit an iniquum" — that is, they give a right precept who forbid doing anything about which one doubts whether it is right or wrong.