Human fallibility

“ Meanwhile failings are the worst and most mischievous, the deadliest and least curable, of the ills to which the moral nature of man is heir. They are the sources of evil whence spring the blackest vices of human character, the false roots that nourish and sustain its parasites, and steal the sap of its inner life. A failing is not merely negative ”

“ And the most surprising part of all is that human lethargy is so profound that men credit these theories, although the whole structure of life, and every stage in human progress, demonstrate their fallacy. ”

“ If we were forced to believe that these right-hand fallings-off and left-hand defections were indeed the legitimate workings of the human heart, the natural history of mankind, then should we be forced to believe that this world is a stupendous failure, and the sooner it is burned up the better. ”

“ It is never without very melancholy reflections, that we can observe the misconduct, or miscarriage, of those men, who seem, by the force of understanding, or extent of knowledge, exempted from the general frailties of human nature, and privileged from the common infelicities of life. Though the world is crowded with scenes of calamity, we look upon the general mass of wretchedness with very little regard, and fix our eyes upon the state of particular persons, whom the eminence of their qualities marks out from the multitude ”

“ Yet in process of time, as I have been told, he came to some recovery and confessed this error; an evident proof of human weakness, and a notorious instance of our frailty, when we assume to ourselves the doing of any thing to which Heaven alone can enable us. ”

“ The lack of foresight among the human faculties, a lack I had scarcely thought of before, now impresses me, ever more deeply, as a fact out of harmony with the rest of our nature, belying its promise,—a moral mutilation, a deprivation arbitrary and unaccountable. The spectacle of a race doomed to walk backward, beholding only what has gone by, assured only of what is past and dead,’ comes over me from time to time with a sadly fantastical effect which I cannot describe. ”

“ The same specimen of fallen human nature; the same weakness, infirmities, and follies that have characterized men who have lived in former ages.
How many of us have fallen on the right hand and on the left; those we have judged to be men of intelligence, some of them have stepped aside in one shape and some in another. Some have given way to their corrupt appetites and passions, and have fallen in an evil hour, have lost the Spirit of God, have destroyed themselves, and have destroyed others; corrupted, weak, fallen, degenerate, and abominable, they have sunk to their own place. ”

“ Men could perceive, with their corporeal senses, the types of [Pg 224] immutable things, and the fluctuating objects of the material world; but the sudden changes to which these are continually liable, create innumerable disorders, and hence arise deception, and, in short, all the errors of human life. ”

“ This is merely to note the mortal fallibility of man, most fallible when herded in groups and prone to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate to do when left to himself and his individual accountability. ”

“ But some cry, ‘Ay, but this habit of disregarding misfortunes blunts your wills when you have the power to relieve them.’ Relieve! was ever such delusion? What can we relieve in the vast mass of human misfortunes? As well might we take a drop from the ocean, and cry, ‘Ha, ha! we have lessened the sea!’ What are even your public charities? what your best institutions? How few of the multitude are relieved at all; how few of that few relieved permanently! Men die, suffer, starve just as soon, and just as numerously ”

“ I trust that my purgations are now being performed, and are almost completed, for things appear to be drawing rapidly towards a crisis. The proverb says, when things are at their worst they must mend; but how bad that worst may be is beyond the reach of human knowledge. ”

“ That men, in the infirmity of human nature, should fall into misfortunes which defy calculation, is the fault not of the sufferers but of Fortune, and of those who do the wrong; but that they should from mere levity, and with their eyes open, thrust themselves upon the most serious disasters is without dispute the fault of the victims themselves. ”

“ She remembered what she accounted that man's only weakness—his dwelling with joy on the sound of the hammer-stroke of his swift, retributive justice—the concussion of the remorseless wrought iron on the split skull of a human beast. ”

“ Shall we, poor human beings at such a disadvantage from the first in the fight with Fate through the many weaknesses and ailments of our bodies, load our souls as well with an ever-growing burden of regret and penitence? ”

“ The uncertainty and vanity of human pursuits have for ever been a subject of remark.
And, if we examine the motives of human conduct and see the fallacious objects of human hope, we always perceive the constant attendance of pain, misery, and woe. ”

“ For human weaknesses, human failings, arising from our nature, springing from our temperament, which the Creator has ordained, shall be even thus, and not otherwise; for these have I suffered enough on earth. ”

“ Inefficiency and defect in scientific and social contrivances are made apparent by accident, which, having entailed human suffering, is therefore productive of effort to rectify the cause of danger, and thus of reducing the risk of further punishment. ”

“ I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise, deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of the closely connected nervous centres. ”

“ Among the fallacies which only experience can detect, there are some, of which scarcely experience itself can destroy the influence; some which, by a captivating show of indubitable certainty, are perpetually gaining upon the human mind; and which, though every trial ends in disappointment, obtain new credit as the sense of miscarriage wears gradually away, persuade us to try again what we have tried already, and expose us by the same failure to double vexation. ”

“ And, indeed, when I reflect on those troubles with which I have been so severely exercised by fortune, I begin to distrust this opinion; and sometimes even to dread the weakness and frailty of human nature, for I am afraid lest, when nature had given us infirm bodies, and had joined to them incurable diseases and intolerable pains, she perhaps also gave us minds participating in these bodily pains, and harassed also with troubles and uneasinesses, peculiarly their own. ”

“ if when we oppress and grind our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in imagination, the deep testimony of dead men's voices, which no power can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and injustice, the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong, that each day's life brings with it! ”

“ Our limits at present prevent us from illustrating this subject more fully; but in our next Number we shall show how closely our views are connected with the approved doctrine of man's natural depravity. In order to penetrate still deeper into the secrets of consciousness, we shall discuss the history of the Fall of Man, and shall show what mighty and essential parts are respectively played by the elements of good and evil in the realisation of human liberty ”

“ Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. ”

“ Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition,86 under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple fatality weighs upon us—the fatality of dogmas, the fatality of laws, the fatality of matter. In Notre Dame the author has denounced the first; in Les Misérables he has described the second; in this book he points out the third.
With these three fatalities that envelop mankind is mingled the inward fatality—the highest fatality—the human heart. ”

“ And all these evils, and the lesser ones, as they are called, though it may be doubted if they are really lesser, the infirmities of temper, of idleness, of defective memory—in short, every human frailty and affliction, except the insignificant damage of war and accident and pestilence—truly insignificant in comparison—he traced to the one cause. ”

“ Such, indeed, is the uncertainty of all human affairs, that security and despair are equal follies; and as it is presumption and arrogance to anticipate triumphs, it is weakness and cowardice [213] to prognosticate miscarriages. ”

“ Thus it is. And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which, after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are about to do. Who knows? We may succeed. ”

“ The result is a kind of mental and moral chaos, in which many of the fundamental rules of living, which have been worked out painfully by thousands of years of bitter human experience, seem in imminent risk of disappearing totally. ”

“ For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself ”

“ From that time I drew, in my own mind, a clear distinction between the doctrine of circumstances and Fatalism; discarding altogether the misleading word Necessity. The theory, which I now for the first time rightly apprehended, ceased altogether to be discouraging; and, besides the relief to my spirits, I no longer suffered under the burden—so heavy to one who aims at being a reformer in opinions—of thinking one doctrine true and the contrary doctrine morally beneficial. ”

“ The degeneration of life is essentially determined by the extraordinary fallibility of consciousness, which is held at bay least of all by the instincts, and thus commits the gravest and profoundest errors. ”

“ "Moreover, there is this harm too, and one of vast extent, and touching men generally, that by insincerity and lying faith and truth are lost, which are the firmest bonds of human society, and, when they are lost, supreme confusion follows in life, so that men seem in nothing to differ from devils. ”

“ It must be confessed, that through the corruption of our depraved nature, and that power, which self-will has, since the Fall, usurped in the soul, we must necessarily break through a great many obstacles. ”

“ Looking back upon the path we have trodden, with its continual fight against disease, its manifold combats with obstacles of life, and with its inevitable portion of sorrow we all must bear, we should think seriously and consider the result of our act before we deliberately bring another human being into this life. ”

“ All these conditions of mind are rightly called “evil,” for they are the efforts of the soul to subvert, in its ignorance, the law, an they, therefore, lead to chaos and confusion within, and are sooner or later actualized in the outward circumstances as disease, failure, and misfortune, coupled with grief, pain, and despair. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ Blood and power intoxicate; they aid the development of callousness and debauchery; the mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty in the form of pleasure; the man and the citizen disappear for ever in the tyrant; and then a return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible. ”

“ Now the Corruption must needs be Strong, where Humane Frailty strikes in so Early with it, and the Progress no less Mortal, where it is suffer'd to go on without Control: For what are all the Extravagances of the Leudest Life, but the more Consummated Follies and Disorders, of either a Mis-taught, or a Neglected Youth? ”

“ regardless of their doom,
The little victims play;
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day:
Yet see how all around them wait,
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train! ”

“ Upon my return home, I fell into a profound contemplation on the evils that attend these superstitious follies of mankind: how they subject us to imaginary afflictions and additional sorrows that do not properly come within our lot. As if the natural calamities of life were not sufficient for it, we turn the most indifferent circumstances into misfortunes, and suffer as much from trifling accidents, as from real evils. ”

“ If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed. ”

“ “In this dreadful situation we were taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair; ”

“ Mark well the wasted hand, the putty-like skin, the black-ringed, lack-lustre eyes, the heavy lip, the labored breath—read the consequences of his sin and crime in his shame-faced way, his shambling gait, his nerveless hands, his fluttering heart, his weakened muscles, and his tottering memory and mind.
Must he needs lie dead at our feet before these skeptics can be convinced? Is not such a state a living death? Must these men visit him in the cell of the asylum, watch him as a raving maniac, gaze upon him as a hopeless idiot or a driveling imbecile, before they will be convinced? ”