Cant

“ Certes is but the dream of a drie brain:
God maim’d in goodnesse, inconsistencie;
Wherefore my troubled mind is now in pain
Of a new birth, which this one Canto’ll not contain.
Now Reader, thou art arrived to the Canto it self, from which I have kept thee off by too tedious Preface and Apologie, which is seldome made without consciousnesse of some fault, which I professe I find not in my self, unlesse this be it, that I am more tender of thy satisfaction then mine own credit. As for that high sullen Poem, Cupids Conflict, I must leave it to thy candour and favourable censure. ”

“ For it is always possible that fear of disgrace, perhaps also obscure dread of other dangers, may have a secret influence on the will. Who can prove by experience the non-existence of a cause when all that experience tells us is that we do not perceive it? ”

“ Why should a stern, condemning voice declare in recesses of my soul, 'You could and should resist'? For years I have been daily yielding to temptation, and conscience as often pronounces sentence against me. ”

“ Then compare with all this the duties, difficulties, and dangers of the state of life upon which you purpose to enter. If you feel compelled to say to yourself: "When I remember the weakness of my will and the force of the temptations which assail me, I do not think that I am capable of fulfilling the duties of that state, or of overcoming the difficulties which it presents," it becomes plain that this road to heaven is too steep for you. ”

“ If they had understood it better, they'd have made a big fuss about it. I'm frightened now.”
“But what fuss can they make? I've surely a right to my own opinions, and I didn't criticise any creed offensively.” ”

“ Permit me to exhibit in their genuine deformity the [Pg 298] errors which are seducing you to destruction. State to me with candour the train of sophisms by which the evil spirit has deluded your understanding. Confess the secret motives of your disbelief; suffer me to administer a remedy to your intellectual disease. I fear not the contagion of such revolting sentiments: I fear only lest patience should desert me before you have finished the detail of your presumptuous credulity. ”

“ The will to live, of life conscious and unconscious, the physical instinct, cruel, wasteful, and careless—at times it seemed to her to make of human beings mere foolish puppets, without will or dignity. ”

“ We cannot— (and in my heart I feel deeply what I say) —we cannot all be right. And it is my honest and heart-rending conviction, that some of our differences are such, as will separate us for ever, if we die in them. ”

“ No, it is impossible; for whoever yet could check the current of thought, or impose restraints upon conscience? do what we will it forces its way, and sweeps along with it every accursed thing we would fain lose sight of for ever. ”

“ What are your poor little wrongs, in the reckoning for greater wrongs which is demanded of me? I am not trying to frighten you, I am only miserable about myself. Do you know what it is to have a firm presentiment of calamity that is coming to you—and yet to hope that your own positive conviction will not prove true? ”

“ But when I found that I was to remain, bound hand and foot, amidst beings corrupted beyond all cure, and daily to accustom my eyes and my mind to scenes and thoughts which could leave no high or holy feeling unblasted in my heart, I said, 'Man has no right to do this,' and I broke my chain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, to pass from sensation to thought, the soul traverses a medium position, in which sensibility and reason are at the same time active, and thus they mutually destroy their determinant power, and by their antagonism produce a negation. ”

“ It benumbed the will, one’s very being became dissolved in it and acquired disgust for life and action. Of what use could it be to will anything, do anything, when you totally resigned yourself to the caprices of an unknown almighty power? ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body. ”

“ Let the danger of my situation touch thee, O my God! The character of my heart discourages and alarms me; I know that inconstancy in thy ways is a presage of perdition, and that the versatile and changeable soul is cursed in thy holy books. ”

“ I must be pardoned for giving these distressing details; but how otherwise can I depict the misery, moral and physical, which we are enduring? And with it all, I dare not venture to hope that we have reached the climax of our sufferings. ”

“ Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish for spiritual things—in [31] short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself. ”

“ Thirdly, the existence of such an arbitrary faculty, to choose without regard to the qualities of objects, would destroy the use of our senses, appetites, passions, and reason; which have been given us to direct us in our inquiries after truth, in our pursuit after happiness, and to preserve our beings. ”

“ Why then shouldst thou call anything that befalls thee a misfortune, and not the rather a blessing? Is that a "misfortune," in all cases, which does not defeat the purpose of man's nature? and does that defeat man's nature which his Will can accept? And what that Will can accept, thou knowest. Can this misadventure, then, prevent thy Will from being just, magnanimous, temperate, circumspect, free from rashness or error, considerate, independent? Can it prevent thy Will from being, in short, all that becomes a man? ”

“ Therefore it seems to me to follow as a matter of course that because I can do the things which I can do, I cannot do the things which I cannot do. Nothing could be simpler. Or more obvious. We cannot all of us be Admirable Crichtons. And it is just as well that we cannot. ”

“ He brought out this awful confession with a gasp at its enormity, but hurried on to a yet more terrible climax. "I cannot be righteous, but many times there are those who cannot—but oh, worse than that, I cannot even wish to be! ”

“ Should the worst come to the worst, which I believe to be altogether impossible,—mind, I think it next to impossible, for I have never for a moment believed him to be guilty,—we will,—visit him,—together. ”

“ When things get to the worst they must mend, as the old adage goes. Our situation, if the adage is true, must soon be in a better condition. I hope this may be the case! I can not see how we would, or could, be in a worse condition. ”

“ That will suggest itself to us only too clearly; but what we do need is to have a very clear sense of our shortcomings and failures, our faults of temper, our faults of desire, our faults in our relations to our fellows, and all the other evils that still buzz and sting and poison our blood. ”

“ And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the--the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. ”

“ To me, indeed, one thing alone seems to embrace the question of all that relates to the perturbations of the mind—the fact, namely, that all perturbations are in our own power; that they are taken up upon opinion, and are voluntary. ”

“ But abstracting from these cases, wandering thoughts, in the latter sense of the word, that is, thoughts wherein our understanding wanders, from the point it has in view, are no more sinful than the motion of the blood in our veins, or of the spirits in our brain. If they arise from an infirm constitution, or from some accidental weakness or distemper, they are as innocent as it is to have a weak constitution, or a distempered body. ”

“ Shall not conscience rise up and sting him on such occasions?——No; thank God there is no occasion, I pay every man his own;—I have no fornication to answer to my conscience;—no faithless vows or promises to make up;—I have debauched no man’s wife or child ”

“ To them that object out of conscience, these poor resolutions may afford some relief, if not satisfaction; or, if these slender endeavours fall short of my design, and the reader's desires herein, I shall send them to their labours, who have taken more able and fruitful pains in this subject. To them that object out of a spirit of bitterness and malignity, nothing will suffice. He that is resolved to err, is satisfied with nothing but that which strengthens his error. ”

“ Fire his conscience, and he blushes; check his circulation, and he thinks tardily or not at all; impair his secretions, and the moral sense is dulled, discolored, or depraved, his aspirations flag, his hope and love both reel; impair them still more, and he becomes a brute. ”

“ Does he will knowledge and discernment, perhaps it might prove to be only an eye so much the sharper to show him so much the more fearfully the evils that are now concealed from him, and that cannot be avoided, or to impose more wants on his desires, which already give him concern enough. ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ They stalk about in our midst as living reproaches, as warnings to us—as though health, fitness, strength, pride, the sensation of power, were really vicious things in themselves, for which one would have some day to do penance, bitter penance. ”

“ Where the knowledge is relative, that knowledge is certainly more or less conditioned by our impotence. And hence, through that impotence, the impossibility may be more or less weakened and made conditional. ”

“ I fly from the subject, and thicken the cloud of mystery, of which I have so often, and, I still think, so justly complained.—These are some of the effects of the contradictory systems, that have so long bewildered our principles and conduct. A combination of causes, added to the conflict between a thousand delicate and nameless emotions, have lately conspired to confuse, to weaken, my spirits. You can conceive, that these acute, mental, sensations, must have had a temporary effect on the state of my health. ”

“ The now unclogged mind grasps with vigor any subject presented to it, the spirits are exuberant and the physical frame buoyant. But, is the trouble cured, is it permanently eradicated from the system? ”

“ Experience does indeed present numerous examples where the rational forces appear compressed in proportion to the violence of the sensuous forces. But instead of deducing this spiritual weakness from the energy of passion, this passionate energy must rather be explained by the weakness of the human mind. ”

“ Unfortunately for speculation—but perhaps fortunately for the practical interests of humanity—reason, in the midst of her highest anticipations, finds herself hemmed in by a press of opposite and contradictory conclusions, from which neither her honour nor her safety will permit her to draw back. ”

“ For in this case there seem to disappear most of the irregularities which otherwise, owing to the contradiction between the moral and physical relations of men here on earth, strike us as being so strange. ”

“ Those scruples which are beyond the range of our ideas we call superstitions and prejudices, and are unwilling to look upon conduct as conscientious, even when prompted by the uninstructed conscience, unless in so far as it is reasonable and right in itself. ”

“ I pass by the manifold subdivisions of conscience, and only observe what follows from what has just been said, namely, that there is no such thing as an erring conscience. No doubt it is possible sometimes to err in the objective judgement whether something is a duty or not ”

“ Moreover, the man before her was so detached from the shames and prides and schemes of life that he seemed not to count at all, except that somehow or other he managed at times to catch the mere literal sense of the words addressed to him—and answer them. ”

“ I mean also those who now and then speak roughly to us, or refuse some request; who excite us to impatience by contradiction, sour looks, disobedience, or who in any other way act contrary to our will, whether the injury done us be great or small. ”

“ In the former we oppose the individual, a sensuous and limited being, and his personal will, which can be effected pathologically, to the absolute law of the will in general, and of unconditional duty which binds every spiritual being; in the second case, on the contrary, we oppose the faculty of willing, absolute volition, and the spiritual force as an infinite thing, to the solicitations of nature and the impediments of sense. ”

“ We will let bygones be bygones and not bear ill will,’—forgetting that the cause for ill will is on his side rather than on yours, and showing surprise that he does not respond, and appear obliged to you. ”