With every step he takes, man tries to smuggle some goal into nothingness.
The melancholic is skeptical of those goals, seeing aimlessness as life’s main motive force. Hence his bad conscience: after all, burdened with two thousand years of Christian culture,
how else could he look on the collapse following aimlessness as anything but a sin? But he cannot be absolved of his sin: it does not have a definite location, but extends to everything, and like illness, it is not an external force.
In sin, existence blossoms, as it were. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed