Aversion

“ Aversion, or rather antipathy, is as powerful a motive force as love, and I was looking forward to the end of my studies as the close of a patronage which I felt to be unbearable. To be my own master, to earn enough money to live on, to pay back to my uncle what he had given me—that was my dream ”

“ A laudable good nature, or a laudable aversion, is only reason acting in a certain manner: a criminal good nature, or a criminal aversion, is nothing else but reason acting in another certain manner.
But still it is reason, or our understanding that is the only agent in our bad passions, as well as good passions; and as much the sole agent in all our passions and tempers, as in things of mere speculation.
So that the state of reason in human life, is nothing else but the state of human tempers and passions; and right reason in morality, is nothing else but right love, and right aversion. ”

“ What proceeds from aversion, they define thus: a vehement idea of something to be avoided, deeply implanted, and inherent in our minds, when there is no reason for avoiding it; and this kind of opinion is a deliberate belief that one understands things of which one is wholly ignorant. Now, sickness of the mind has all these subordinate divisions, avarice, ambition, fondness for women, obstinacy, gluttony, drunkenness, covetousness, and other similar vices. ”

“ The indisposition, nay, the angry aversion to think, even in persons who are most willing to attend, and on the subjects to which they are giving studious attention—as Political Economy, Biblical Theology, Classical Antiquities, and the like,—is the phenomenon that forces itself on my notice afresh, every time I enter into the society of persons in the higher ranks. To assign a feeling and a determination of will, as a satisfactory reason for embracing or rejecting this or that opinion or belief, is of ordinary occurrence, and sure to obtain the sympathy and the suffrages of the company. ”

“ But, if the nervous organism of our creature should now be changed so that most of these occurrences which I have defined as desires should be transacted in terms of one specific sense, and those of aversion in terms of a different sense, we see at once that new and important characteristics would thus be introduced mentally distinguishing desire from aversion. ”

“ These, however, are as fatal, and may be as hard to be got rid of as actual aversion; it being easier, in most cases, to change the direction of an active feeling than to create one in a state previously passive. ”

“ Everything new, everything unknown, causes aversion, and this aversion must lead to misunderstandings and war the more surely because each of the opponents feels himself disturbed in his supposed right to limitless possession. ”

“ The moral and æsthetic aversion which many of the practices and tenets of Spiritualism arouses in those whose ideals are sound [170] and steadfast may prove to be a more serious menace to the spread of the belief, a more potent source of its decay, than even its inherent inconsistencies and improbabilities. ”

“ The impressions, which arise from good and evil most naturally, and with the least preparation are the dared passions of desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear, along with volition. The mind by an original instinct tends to unite itself with the good, and to avoid the evil, tho' they be conceiv'd merely in idea, and be consider'd as to exist in any future period of time. ”

“ None the less it is important to recognise that a genuine aversion from affairs is characteristic of many fine original investigators, and it is on such persons that the idea of the simple and childlike nature of philosophers, a simplicity often reaching real incapacity for the affairs of life, is [205] based. ”

“ In order to judge how he will act under the variety of desires and aversions which are concurrently operating upon him, we must know how he would act under the exclusive influence of each one in particular. ”

“ The conations, the desires and aversions, arising within this self-regarding sentiment are the motive forces which, adding themselves to the weaker ideal motive in the case of moral effort, enable it to win the mastery over some stronger, coarser desire of our primitive animal nature and to banish from consciousness the idea of the end of this desire. ”

“ But if we wish to analyze this innate conviction, upon which so much weight is placed, we will find that it is but the effect of a rooted habit, which, making them close their eyes against the most demonstrative proofs, leads the majority of men, and often the most enlightened ones, back to the prejudices of childhood. What can this innate sense or this ill-founded persuasion prove against the evidence which shows us that what implies contradiction can not exist? ”

“ The contest about the original benevolence or malignity of man had not yet commenced. Speculation had not yet attempted to analyse the mind, to trace the passions to their sources, to unfold the seminal principles of vice and virtue, or sound the depths of the heart for the motives of action. All those enquiries, which from that time that human nature became the fashionable study, have been made sometimes with nice discernment, but often with idle subtilty, were yet unattempted. ”

“ To begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion: first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the “sin” which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. ”

“ You interest me, Heard. If you deny the susceptibility of a temperament like his, you deny the whole operation of externals upon character and action. You deny, for example, the success of the Roman Catholic Church which relies, for its moral effects, upon such optic appeals to the senses, and upon the ease with which transitory feelings can be transmuted into axioms of conduct. ”

“ As, for instance, diffidence is the opposite to confidence, and is therefore a vice; audacity is not the opposite of confidence, but is near it and akin to it, and, nevertheless, is also a vice. And in this manner there will be found a vice akin to every virtue, and either already known by some particular name—as audacity, which is akin to confidence ”

“ And though reflection upon conduct may lead us to suppose that our past acts were determined, that desire of pleasure or the wish to avoid pain controlled our wills, the unphilosophical observer interprets, in offenders against morality, such arguments as a mere excuse. ”

“ It would need a clearer head than mine to trace all the varying and discordant elements of character I had witnessed to their true source; to sift the evil from the good; to know what to cherish, what to repress, whereon to build hope or what to fear. ”

“ On every occasion his judgments are corrected by experience; want and pain are the necessary [Pg xvii] consequences arising from false judgment; gratification and pleasure are produced by judging aright. Under such masters, we cannot fail to become well informed; and we soon learn to reason justly, when want and pain are the necessary consequences of a contrary conduct. ”

“ The vividness of the ideas of this class easily generates this false persuasion in persons of strong fancies, little experience in divine things, and narrow understandings, (and especially where the moral sense, and the scrupulosity attending its growth and improvement, are but imperfectly formed,) by giving a reality and certainty to all the reveries of a man’s own mind, and cementing the associations in a preternatural manner. ”

“ But it is enough that such assertions should be either contradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of our experience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our consideration should be demonstrated. They persuade, indeed, only those who desire to be persuaded. ”

“ And now, therefore, when we are accused of preaching up a spirit of cultivated inaction, of provoking the earnest lovers of action, of refusing to lend a hand at uprooting certain definite evils, of despairing to find any lasting truth to minister to the diseased spirit of our time, we shall not be so much confounded and embarrassed what to answer for ourselves. ”

“ Therefore a habit either of virtue or of vice, may be corrupted by a judgment of reason, whenever its motion is contrary to such vice or virtue, whether through ignorance, passion or deliberate choice. ”

“ Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the clearness of statement that the [p.101] subject should certainly elicit, upon the strange equanimity with which mankind, in science or in practical life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into positive and negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, explains the mystery; perhaps the fact that negation or opposition is and can only be in kind, that there never is or can be any real change or need of change in a mere negation, is at least an important factor in the case ”

“ If you assert, that vice and virtue consist in relations susceptible of certainty and demonstration, you must confine yourself to those four relations, which alone admit of that degree of evidence; and in that case you run into absurdities, from which you will never be able to extricate yourself. ”

“ The dead abstract notions of the intellect, the dialectical disputes of the reason, the purely subjective and one-sided apprehension of objects by a deluded fancy, and the absolute will, are the four sources of human error. ”

“ You have admitted that those who go wrong in the choice of pleasures and pains — that is, in the choice of good and evil things — go wrong from want of knowledge, of the knowledge or science of mensuration. ”

“ In order to illustrate the nature of evils of this class, I may take two instances—cruelty and lasciviousness. That these are great intrinsic evils, we may, I think, easily assure ourselves, by imagining the state of a man, whose mind is solely occupied by either of these passions, in their worst form. ”

“ No doubt it is reasonable, and even honest, to act according to our present feelings and conviction: but if these feelings and their causes do vary by the very nature of things, how dare we impose upon ourselves or others an invariable conviction? ”

“ This experience furnishes him with the ideas of virtue and of vice, of justice and of injustice, of goodness and of wickedness, of decency and of indecency, of probity and of knavery: In short, he learns to form a judgment of men—to estimate their actions—to distinguish the various sentiments excited in them, according to the diversity of those effects which they make him experience. ”

“ The quality of our taste, the predominance of our feelings, or even the casualty of circumstance, may produce associations of ideas, confirmed by habit into predilection or enmity. To search for the cause of these varying opinions, to examine the foundation of these attachments and prejudices, and to reduce them all to the rule of equity is the office of the judgment, that most important effort of the reasoning powers. ”

“ The other principle, Sympathy and Antipathy, means the unreasoning approbation or disapprobation of the individual mind, where fancy, caprice, accidental liking or disliking, may mix with a regard to human happiness. This is properly the negation of a principle. What we expect to find in a principle is some external consideration, warranting and guiding our sentiments of approbation and disapprobation ”

“ Those of the other class, finding, in many instances, much zeal for these peculiarities, without a state of moral feeling adapted to the truths which are professed, are apt to consider the whole as either pretence or delusion. ”

“ I cou'd wish to form a contrary opinion, but to do so I must shut my eyes on every object which presents itself to them & fabricate in my own mind non-existing things, to be substituted for realities, & to form the basis of my creed. ”

“ But I am afraid that in many cases their wider understanding of people and things allows them to handle the truth in a manner to convert it to their own needs; in a measure leading you to believe an omission in themselves a virtue by comparison, while another's virtue may be distorted to appear as folly or even sin. ”

“ It would indeed be strange and lamentable if the divorce between feeling and conviction—to adopt a popular classification—was not simply incidental to change, but was also an inexpugnable part of fundamental aspects of human life. ”

“ So that, for this reason alone, and quite apart from differences of feeling between different men, we shall have to admit, according to our theory, that it is often now true of an action that it was right, although it was formerly true of the same action that it was wrong. ”

“ However ridiculous and pernicious we must admit the vulgar accessories of this creed to be, there is a certain analogy, not wholly absurd, between the consequences resulting to an individual during life from the virtuous or vicious, prudent or imprudent, conduct of his external actions, to those consequences which are conjectured to ensue from the discipline and order of his internal thoughts, as affecting his condition in a future state. ”

“ The same difference of opinion prevails amongst men, when they try to account for these moral miracles. Some refer them to an undefined fanaticism, or to a love of singularity, or to the power of persuasion, or to the imbecility or partial derangement of the intellectual faculty ”

“ But our judgment concerning a man's motives, his temper, and his full conquest over self, vanity and impulsive passion, depends on the accurate knowledge of a vast variety of minor points; even the curl of the lip, or the discord of eye and mouth, may change our moral judgment of a man ”