Human error

“ His chief fallacy lay in the failure to recognize evil as an inherent force in human nature and to acknowledge sect and state, to which he attributed the origin of all error, as inventions of man’s ingenuity. ”

“ But when a man has looked for thirty or forty years into pretty nearly every phase of human suffering and error, as men of my cloth have to do, he comes to see that there must be adjustments ... adjustments in the balance of evil. ”

“ But when he called to mind the frightful consequences to which the belief of this opinion has led, the cruelties which have been exercised, the crimes which have been perpetrated, the miseries which have been inflicted and endured, it made him shudder at perceiving that the most absurd error may produce the greatest mischief to society, if it be accompanied with presumption, and if any real or imaginary interest be connected with maintaining it. ”

“ It was painful to gaze upon this sorrowing group, to contemplate the suffering, the mental anguish that spoke plainly in every face; to think of the wrongs which one man can legally put upon another—the deep sinful wrongs, the outrage of every human principle. ”

“ If these Impressions were Inbred, and the Errors purely their Own, it would be a Point, not only of Good Nature, but of Common Justice, and Humanity, to have a Tenderness for People under an Invincible Mistake: But you have Started the Strongest Argument in the World, against your self here, by Enforcing the Necessity of Clearing the Stage of the Seditious Oracles, that Inspire These Desperate Resolutions. ”

“ The consequences, then, to the poor sufferer, whose offence is, at most, but an error of judgment or a weakness of the heart, are the same as if her imprudence were indeed a crime of the blackest dye. ”

“ We may err, as all human beings err. But the continual holding up to us of our mistakes—perhaps they are worse than mistakes—does not help us to see things more distinctly. We should prefer to see wherein we err. ”

“ We are all human, and all do wrong.” ”

“ That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to maiming or life-long incurable disease?—and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort toward a good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common. ”

“ When he mistakes the advantages of virtue, it ought to be ascribed to the errors that are infused into him—to the irrationality of his institutions: all his wanderings are the fatal consequences of error,—the necessary result of prejudices which have identified themselves with his existence. ”

“ The theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong. ”

“ Before this dull round, this fatal law of human cycles, all differences between individuals disappear; an impersonal Fate destroys the distinctions between good and evil bound up so indissolubly with personal morality, and even reduces man, individual and social, to the level of the brute. ”

“ There is not in human nature a more wonderful phenomenon, nor in the whole theory of it a more intricate speculation, than the shiftings, turnings, windings, and evasions of a guilty conscience. Such is our unalterable moral constitution, that an internal inclination to do wrong is criminal; and a wicked thought stains the mind with guilt, and makes it tingle with pain. ”

“ But the example is to be admitted to be equivocal. A more decisive argument is afforded by a consideration of the universal connexion of ferocity of manners, and a contempt of social ties, with the contempt of human life. ”

“ But there is another way, also, in which the reason of man was capable of producing evil,—namely, by its liability to error: and error, when acted upon, produces disorder, mental and physical, or, in other words, evil; for disorder, derangement, or perversion of mind is, as shown in the preceding Section, the immediate cause of what we term evil. Man's reason is liable and very liable to error—and this, chiefly by mistaking appearances for realities. ”

“ Still she tells us that she was blamed for her imprudence; and she brings instances from her own experience to show the frequent error of judging of what one does, or forbears to do, by the apparent result, rather than from knowledge or by principle. "People judge by consequences, or what seem to be consequences, rather than by reasoning upon premises." ”

“ The unspeakable difficulties in the way of the solution of this problem,—the difficulties which the radical bias in the individual human nature, even under its noblest forms, creates,—the difficulties which the ignorance, and stupidity, and passion of the multitude created then, and still create, appear here without any mitigation. ”

“ The Untruth, the Error is loudly exploded, that the workers may not be too many; here and there the real truth will be exploded to let a few bold and stiff-necked errors be on show for a time; there is never a lack of “moral idiosyncrasies,”—formerly called rascalities. ”

“ We were so apt in this world of struggle and ambition to become centred solely in ourselves, that possibly the wrong done to another,—the wrong that turned our thoughts from ourselves, and kept them bent in agony and despair upon the suffering we had caused another, and knew not how to mitigate—possibly this wrong, nay, certainly this wrong, was good in disguise. ”

“ Can you, who have so much power—so deep an interest too in this momentous matter—can you deliberately and seriously contemplate these crying evils, this enormous aggregate of human guilt and woe, without ascribing it principally to our defective systems of education, and without some secret dread lest you yourselves individually may have, in some way or other, either directly or indirectly, contributed to augment it? ”

“ Instead of having our eyes opened by this cardinal error, we proceed to reason that their conduct should be made to become like our conduct, and that we should treat them and deal with them as if they were still just like us, with a history behind them similar to ours, with institutions similar to ours, and with an ethic similar to ours. ”

“ And this is more especially the case when the mistakes and the blankness have been caused by our own actions. There is not even stolid philosophy to come to our aid, a shrugging of the shoulders, a foisting of the blame on to fate. It may be that the majority of the incidents have been forced upon us, that we have not been free agents in the matter, but if we must of honesty say,—Here or there was the mistake which led to them, and I made that mistake of my own free will,—we cannot turn to philosophy regarding fate for our comfort. ”

“ Look about you at the terrible examples of each form of error,—gluttons who have "eaten their own heads off," thinking no more than the swine they feed upon and resemble; drunkards who have drowned themselves in the Red Sea of their own debauchery, the Pharaohs of intemperance, their nobler faculties strangled long before their flesh is cold I The religious faculty—call it soul—may err as much as the appetite for food, and the mistake produce consequences not less hideous on the individual and the nation. ”

“ Having thus declared the infallible nature of Man even from his first production, we have beheld the general cause of Error. But as for popular Errors, they are more neerly founded upon an erroneous inclination of the people; as being the most deceptable part of Mankind and ready with open armes to receive the encroachments of Error. ”

“ It may seem hard—suffering for what one has not done. Yet that has to be. All wrong that is done, brings evil upon others. It is one of the great mysteries of life. By-and-by, we shall understand better—the reasons, I mean—the why and the wherefore. ”

“ When you started out to win the favor of society, from which you had been alienated partly by misfortune, but largely through your own wrong action, there was no radical change in your character, or even in your controlling motives. You regretted the evil because of its immediate and disagreeable consequences. I do not excuse the world's harshness toward the erring; but, after all, if you can disabuse your mind of prejudice you will admit that its action is very natural, and would, probably, have been your own before you passed under this cloud. Consider what the world knows of you. ”

“ The evils considered here are as old as the world and inherent wherever human frailty meets human strength. They are involved in every human attribute, and no rule of thumb or cut and dried theory can affect them wholly or completely. ”

“ But the history of the efforts made to satisfy these demands might be broadly described as a history of errors—the error consisting in ascribing fixity to that which is fluent, which varies as we vary, being gross when we are gross, and becoming, as our capacities widen, more abstract and sublime. ”

“ Now what principle governs an error, whether that error be in music, mathematics, or life conduct?”
There was no reply to the question.
“Very well,” continued Hitt. “Evil can not be really known. And that is why God––infinite Mind––can not behold evil. And now, friends, I have come to the conclusion of a long series of deductions. ”

“ Most assuredly, if they are brought before the mind as examples, or as things slightly to be blamed, as evils unavoidably incident to human nature, they are dangerous; but if they are exhibited as warnings, and as that which produces, when indulged, great human misery and debasement, they teach us a lesson more powerful than many that proceed from the academical chair or the pulpit. ”

“ What gives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, which projects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow.
The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls the despair of an unattainable perfection. ”

“ Why did you not act in the same manner? The whole fault lies in your own wicked will.
Alas, we are weak, corrupt creatures; we have a perverse nature, inclined to all evil, to which faults and failings are as its daily bread. ”

“ But in the case of moral and religious truths or errors, people, if they admit that nothing is to be set to the credit of error as such, still constantly have a subtle and practically mischievous confusion in their minds between the possible usefulness of error, and the possible expediency of leaving it temporarily undisturbed. ”

“ Now exaggeration by mere suggestion is the fault, the glaring fault, of these queries. One who had no knowledge of mundane affairs beyond the conception they insinuate would assume that, as a rule, evil has the upper hand in the management of the world. ”

“ But the evils that surround us—that come to our knowledge and under our very eyes—are real and tangible and dreadful. So much the more reason for our being here;—but so much the less likely that you, gently reared and delicately cared for, will be allowed to risk your delicate nurture in this land of savages. ”

“ In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that “error is life and knowledge is death,” because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish. ”

“ Farther, in every course of life how many wracks there may be of torturing diseases, how many unhappy accidents may casually occur, how many unexpected disasters may arise, and what strange alterations may one moment produce? Not to mention such miseries as men are mutually the cause of, as poverty, imprisonment, slander, reproach, revenge, treachery, malice, cousenage, deceit, and so many more, as to reckon them all would be as puzzling arithmetic as the numbering of the sands. ”

“ See how, confounding the weakness and the folly of the human heart with direct and actual criminality, you have suffered the probable or the possible to usurp the place of the inevitably true; have been so carried away by prejudice or by passion as to sentence an innocent man!—see, I say, that your judgments are fallible and your tests are weak ”

“ The mistake, by which courage is released from all moral estimation of the purposes, for which it is exerted, and is considered to be necessarily and universally a good in itself, rather than a means of good, or of evil, according to its application, is among the severest misfortunes of mankind. ”

“ And so you have the curious condition that the "fall of man" is brought about by his ignorance of Right and Wrong; he does the Wrong unconsciously, and so gains the knowledge of distinction between good and evil. ”

“ And one of his faults was the fault of many good people,—the fault of expecting to find every one as good as themselves, of being harsh and unforgiving, of sulking and pining instead of having an open explanation. ”

“ I think it all the fault of my own blunders,—and therein I find a new terror. That one should suffer for wrong-doing is to be looked for, but if one is to be dealt with so unsparingly only for making mistakes, who knows where his position is or what to expect? ”

“ Note 13} Yet the universal experience of mankind testified then, as now, that, whether we look within us or without us, evil stares us in the face on all sides; that if anything is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are realities. ”

“ Constant fault-finding, persistent misrepresentations of motives, suspicions of evil where no evil was intended, will complete the work in all but the finest and most heroic natures. They alone can stand the fiery test, coming out purer and stronger for the ordeal. ”

“ The sense of wrong, of hardship, of bitterness, of personal injustice, seems by degrees to melt away from it, and therefore it can be better faced. At least it is well that we should tell ourselves so. ”