Incomprehensibility

“ Sorely as I have struggled, I have yet to encounter that common myth of weak men, an insurmountable barrier. The imperfection of our lives— what is it but the imperfection of our planning and doing? Shattered ideals—what hand shatters them but one's own? ”

“ In theory you cannot indulge with consistency in an ultimate doubt. You are forced, willingly or not, at a certain point to assume infallibility. For, otherwise, how could you proceed to judge at all? ”

“ I knew myself the very worst conceivable, but how to give to such other persons a decent or coherent reason for my being so required more presence of mind than I could in the least muster—the consequence of which failure had to be for me, I fear, under all that confused first flush, rather an abject acceptance of the air of imbecility. ”

“ The perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness, which we labour under in abstruse inquiries, philosophical, moral, and religious, ought, perhaps, to be referred to this head. Also the secondary perplexity which arises from our being subject to this perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness. ”

“ To one who is imperfect, unstable, passionate, and revengeful? To a being who has, in fact, no uniformity of conduct, no system of action, and no immutability of procedure? No! Those who place their confidence here must be wretchedly disappointed, and an agitated mind will be their unavoidable portion. ”

“ Men under such circumstances in general err from an inaccuracy or deficiency of statement, proceeding from the confusion and uncertainty of a mind oppressed and agitated by the burthen of important affairs, or difficult and intricate circumstances. ”

“ Poor weak mortal, why shouldst thou vaunt of the firmness of thy purpose, of thy good resolution? How little it takes to weaken thee, to upset thy reason and common sense, and turn thee from the path of rectitude! ”

“ It was all a part of the terrible and yet useful perversity of life—of the perversity that enables a human being to pass from inconsistency to inconsistency without pausing in his course to reflect on his folly. ”

“ A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.— 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' —Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? ”

“ He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. ”

“ How full of strange incoherence and contradiction is the human soul! Who is it says that inconsistency is the true characteristic of man? Certainly the greater part of our disasters come from punctiliousness, from pride, as to letting ourselves be inconsistent. We often ought to be, we often wish to be, inconsistent. ”

“ Such insufficiency is caused by various obstacles, presented by the self-same nature of man, and the objects that surround him, and which prevent reason from exercising an absolute dominion over the heart, and naturally weaken its influence on human actions. ”

“ It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and sorrows. But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion something drives, something that is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out of it. ”

“ My experience had not been sufficient, nor was my philosophy subtle enough, to enable me to see that while there is much in the conduct of men that is imperfect, such imperfection is at least as great among those who narrate and comment as among those who do the work of the world. ”

“ Anything short of this is a condition of incompleteness, and therefore the enlightened souls who have passed over in possession of both sides of their mentality will realize that their condition, however beatific, is still one of incompleteness ”

“ When we act in a similar manner, and take upon us to specify with precision the changes we should like to see in our condition, and the methods by which these changes might best be accomplished, we commonly manifest our own incompetence. ”

“ An instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. ”

“ Could anything be more characteristic of human nature than just such inconsistencies? Suavity and trickery, harshness and integrity, a fiery temper and a gentle heart,—how often do we see the good and the bad dwelling together! ”

“ 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. ”

“ When nobody cares or notices or suffers, by all one makes out, when no displeasure, by what one can see, is ever felt or ever registered, why shouldn’t you, you may indeed ask, be as much in your right as you need? But in that fact itself, that fact of the vast general unconsciousness and indifference, looms, for any restless analyst who may come along, the accumulation, on your hands, of the unretrieved and the irretrievable! ”

“ For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. ”

“ Those that know most in this state of imperfection cannot but be most sensible of their own weakness and short-sightedness, and that after all their researches, and all their attainments in those researches, while they are here they cannot order their speech by reason of darkness. ”

“ When it appears that our fate may be determined by a single word which we feel the power of uttering, we can scarcely help thinking that upon our own heads must be all the consequences which may follow; and thinking thus, we must realize our weakness and insufficiency. ”

“ But the very same extravagancies and showy paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their garb, not only of beauty but of decency, and show themselves in the loathsome nakedness of error. ”

“ Yet those who make the most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and ignorance! ”

“ But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. ”

“ When they attempt to describe him, lost in the mists of their own ignorance, they grow more and more vague until the Supreme Being melts into a mere essence, or nonentity, boundless and limitless, because possessing no qualities that can be limited, and no attributes that can be defined. ”

“ Those thousand vexations which come upon us through the unreasonableness, the carelessness, the various constitutional failings, or ill-adaptedness of others to our peculiarities of character, form a very large item of the disquietudes of life ”

“ But is, then, the contemplation of a bad condition itself a good condition? Is he not so much the worse that he bears this consciousness, and so much the weaker that he sees an incurable cancer-sore growing upon him? The highest thing he has, at all events, lost,—innocence. ”

“ And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble. ”

“ This imperfection which we observe in ourselves, is an imperfection that cleaves in some degree to creatures of the highest capacities, as they are creatures, that is, beings of finite and limited natures. ”

“ Sir, that nobody but yourself would think of attributing to conscious weakness our preference of the most perfect and searching method of discussion, to the most flimsy, insufficient, and unscholarlike that could by possibility be selected. ”

“ But of these ‘difficulties’ it now seems possible to propound a profounder explanation. The real root of the trouble may be found to lie in the will rather than in the reason, whose innocent amiability is always ready to provide an intellectual formulation for the most discordant aims and the most obscure desires. ”

“ A failure in their production, would not less prove imperfection, than a defect of the foreknowledge of them. Contingency belongs not to the things in futurity, but to the defective knowledge of imperfect beings, and is always proportional to our ignorance. ”

“ Even in an incomplete world, such as the world which appears in our knowledge, incompleteness and ignorance after all are partial. They do not hold good with every feature, but there are points where no legitimate idea of an Other exists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As we grow older and rise in the world, there is always a deterioration both in disposition and in character. A man’s disposition grows sharper through dealing with, and having to deal sharply with, incompetence. ”

“ Advancing from one ill founded supposition to another, we have at last bewildered ourselves amidst a multitude of errors. These errors becoming prejudices, are, of course, adopted as principles, and we thus bewilder ourselves more and more. ”

“ You should attack not only those gross and manifest defects which disfigure the soul, but also those imperfections which are slight in appearance, but which, if left alone, will in time become pernicious inclinations. ”

“ And truly confusion is our worthy portion, if we have done no more than those who are inferior to us in knowledge. But if it be confusion to us, to be found equal to them in works, what shall become of us if the examination that is to take place find us inferior and worse than them? ”

“ With such encouragement, how inexcusable is the negligence which suffers the most interesting and important truths, to seem heavy and dull, and fall ineffectual to the ground, through mere sluggishness in their delivery! ”

“ Either I see all the hidden weakness that's in men's natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my own weakness into them. Either way, it's a drawback to their presenting a truly manly appearance. ”

“ All the cases decide that mere imbecility will not do: that an inability to manage a man's affairs will not do, unless that inability and that incapacity to manage his affairs, AMOUNT to evidence that he is of unsound mind: and he must be found to be so. ”

“ And thus, with the singular inconsequence of human life, the explanation was made where it was not needed, and left unspoken where it would have availed much against future misunderstanding, trouble, wrong, and sorrow! ”

“ 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. ”