Duplicity

“ Here duplicity passes for wit, and frankness is looked upon as folly. I am neither cunning nor mysterious. I am often told I lead too monotonous a life, and am asked why I do not take a part in certain affairs. ”

“ Duplicity is a natural accompaniment of all abstraction, and it has, as we saw at least in part, a certain protective and corrective function, which both the logic of experience and the social and historical conditions of its expression and development warranted us in ascribing to it. ”

“ In the best fabric of duplicity there is some weak point, if you can strike it, which will loosen all. ”

“ Duplicity, whatever may be its own special dangers, is always better, being nearer to reality, than narrowness.
Is not the road-mender also a good Catholic, or in some other way, conventional or unconventional, religiously devout, piously doing, not his own, but another's work? Does not the scientist give point to the idea of another and different life, that is to say, of his life of knowledge not being the whole of life, by the agnosticism which he not only carefully asserts but also actually embodies as a factor in his method? ”

“ I have, of course, frequently been asked the reason of such conduct, to which I have invariably returned no answer, for I scorn duplicity; whereupon people have looked mysteriously, and sometimes put their fingers to their foreheads. ‘And yet it can’t be,’ I once heard an old gentleman say ”

“ It is curious to see how many traits in common these barbarous people have with those people of Christendom who boast of having the highest order of refinement and civilization. Duplicity is one of their most conspicuous traits of character. ”

“ But, to say no more, with the lawful miracle, with law the strange support of what is arbitrary, with this as a very good example of the duplicity which in general we are all of us wont to allow in our practical life, the present exposure of our ordinary consciousness must come to an end. ”

“ Such a defect, however, is cause for doubt; so that man, above all "practical" man, having inconsistency or duplicity as almost, if not quite, an uncontrollable habit with him, should be himself a prince of sceptics. ”

“ A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity. ”

“ Cautious even to timidity, he resorted to a system of duplicity, to call it by no more offensive title, which, while it proved wholly ineffective, has served sufficiently to perplex his biographers, and to give rise to a view of his character which has no foundation in fact. ”

“ Can we not upset every standard? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an invention and a subtlety of the devil? Is everything, in the last resort, false? And if we are dupes are we not on that very account dupers also? must we not be dupers also? ”

“ I mean, I see no reason to suppose that the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the seasons will continue to observe their course, or that any of our most certain expectations will be fulfilled in the future as they have been in the past. We import into the universe our own prejudice in favour of order; and the universe, I admit, up to a point appears to conform to it. But I don't trust the conformity. Too many evidences abound of frivolous and incalculable caprice. Why should not the appearance of order be but one caprice the more, or even a crowning device of calculated malice? ”

“ The nature of duality is just the contrary,—to the air disturbance, to souls evil, to bodies disease, to cities and dwellings factions and hostilities. For every evil comes from discord and disagreement. ”

“ Have we ever sufficiently reflected how that "all things are double, one against the other," in this mysteriously governed world, that everything has its counterpart? the world appears to be split into halves, which yet cleave to each other, as a man is haunted by his shadow. "An inevitable dualism bisects Nature, so that each thing is half, and suggests another thing to make it whole." ”

“ Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism. ”

“ There are few to whom mere constancy of succession appears a sufficiently stringent bond of union for so peculiar a relation as that of cause and effect. Even if the reason repudiates, the imagination retains, the feeling of some more intimate connection, of some peculiar tie, or mysterious constraint exercised by the antecedent over the consequent. Now this it is which, considered as applying to the human will, conflicts with our consciousness, and revolts our feelings. We are certain that, in the case of our volitions, there is not this mysterious constraint. ”

“ There is, in the third place, the dominant consciousness of Multiplicity in Unity and of Unity in Multiplicity, and of the necessity of the soul’s ever moving from one to the other—moving out of itself and into the world of Multiplicity, of sense and exterior work ”

“ We are not merely to look out for three distinct and separate forms of error, but, as all the three act together, they may combine in every conceivable variety. One may act on one mind, two on another, and all three on a third, and so produce the most remarkable and inconsistent combinations. ”

“ This world, too, is certainly a world of incongruities, and the more I see of it, the more I am biased in that way of reflection; and if any one will take the trouble to look at things as they are, abstractedly, and observe how good, bad and indifferent, black, white and blue, are jumbled together, he will not deny me his assent. ”

“ The distinction of unity and duality, made in the meaningless speech of the unwise, is laughed at by the enlightened and wise, as the aged and intelligent men laugh to scorn, at the pranks and prattlings of young lads. ”

“ Since it is impossible, therefore, to fix the limits of pain and pleasure, and every affection or state of mind, agreeable, disagreeable, or indifferent, may, by a very trifling change of circumstance, be converted into an opposite state, it is evident, that any division, founded on this vague and transient distinction, must perplex, and mislead us, in our attempts to systematize the almost infinite diversities of thought and feeling, rather than give us any aid in the arrangement. ”

“ Nor is this particular conflict in our ordinary ideas yet before us in all its fatefulness, for—as if to defy the principle of consistency to the very last degree of its forbearance—we are often, if not usually, given not only to unifying our world of things in terms of just one more thing, or of persons in terms of just one more person, but also to thinking of this one more thing, or person as sui generis, as altogether different in nature and substance. ”

“ But if the people themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas at the same time that they were its dupes, how has this extraordinary dupery been able to perpetuate itself all through the course of history? ”

“ The four opposite poles or extremes of man’s divided and discordant consciousness are, I said, its four fundamental faculties or powers, understanding and will, and reason and fancy. With regard to the two first, every one may, both from internal experience of his own self and from observation of his fellow-men, easily arrive at a conviction that they seldom work together in perfect harmony, and that the discord is often the most violent when either one or both of these two faculties possess more than ordinary strength. ”

“ One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. ”

“ When the characteristics which belong to a kind and make it a kind were considered as the attributes of distinct entities, called essences, then the name was considered to be one of these essential attributes or properties by which the class was designated. Thus a fallacy was made to breed a fallacy, and the two fallacies grew up together and are often connected, and how can you dispel the fallacy of essence without dispelling the fallacy of inherent name? Thus a pair of ghosts stalk the world together, and fight each other’s battles. ”

“ If in this situation we observe ourselves, we shall appear as divided into two distinct beings, of which the first, or the rational faculty, blames every thing done by the second, but has not strength sufficient effectually to subdue it; the second, on the contrary, being formed of all the illusions of [58] sense and imagination, constrains, and often overwhelms the first, and makes us either act contrary to our judgment, or remain inactive, though disposed to action by our will. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Past masters in compromise and self-delusion, we had stripped ourselves of simplicity in every detail of life, and, from the cradle to the grave, seemed willingly to be hedged about with every kind of complexity. ”

“ But, furthermore, looking and thinking through the theory of parallelism, we can see something of special significance for the doubter's world. Men often forget that new relations of things mean new things, or at least new characters for the old things. Thus, mind and matter, or man and nature, if become, or found to be, parallel, are no longer the mind and the matter, the spiritual man and the physical world, that they were. ”

“ Could blind chance constitute order and decorum, and consequently a providence? That wisdom, order, and design should be the production of nonentity, or of chaos, confusion, and old night, is too absurd to deserve a serious confutation, for it supposeth that there may be effects without a cause, viz.: produced by nonentity, or that chaos and confusion could produce the effects of power, wisdom, and goodness. Such absurdities as these we must assent to, or subscribe to the doctrine of a self-existent and providential being. ”

“ They are unlucky. These two kinds, together with the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer has put it) "the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness," miss, perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is short on this earth, the abode of conflicting opinions. ”

“ First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—one that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. ”

“ We are puzzled now to comprehend how that which was independent has been induced to leave its path. We begin to seek the cause which forces it to exert and to suffer influence; and, with this, we are well on the road to false theory and ruinous error. ”

“ For every property, therefore, in facts, or in our mode of considering facts, which leads us to believe that they are habitually conjoined when they are not, or that they are not when in reality they are, there is a corresponding kind of Fallacy; and an enumeration of fallacies would consist in a specification of those properties in facts, and those peculiarities in our mode of considering them, which give rise to this erroneous opinion. ”

“ What we first feel is a bluntness, then a suspicion of doubleness, which presently becomes a distinct doubleness, and at last two different-feeling and differently placed spots with a definite tract of space between them. ”

“ The more important the subject of difference, the greater, not the less, will be the indulgence of him who has learned to trace the sources of human error,—of error, that has its origin not in our weakness and imperfection merely, but often in the most virtuous affections of the heart.—Brown, Philosophy of the Human Mind, i. ”

“ The actions which are classed under the general appellation of marriage, education, friendship, &c., are perpetually going on, and to a superficial glance, are similar one to the other.
But, if we would see the truth of things, they must be stripped of this fallacious appearance of uniformity. In truth, no one action has, when considered in its whole extent, any essential resemblance with any other. ”

“ Distinction may be joined with imperfection, as ignorance, or forgetfulness; and so it is in men:—and if this be called separation by a metaphor from bodies, then the conclusion would be that in the Supreme Mind there is distinction without imperfection; and then the question is, whence comes plurality of Persons? ”

“ I may, indeed, divide in my thoughts, or conceive apart from each other, those things which, perhaps, I never perceived by sense so divided. Thus I imagine the trunk of a human body without the limbs, or conceive the smell of a rose without thinking on the rose itself. ”

“ By hypothesis, no change whatever need occur in the other being. And this means, as we now know, that no character or relation, visible or invisible, which is in any wise essential to the first definition of the being that is supposed to remain, is in the least altered when its fellow vanishes. Q, then, the quality supposed to be the same in both beings, survives unchanged in the being that does riot vanish. ”