Irresolution

“ But immediately the passion rouses anew, and with fresh fury drives him on to commit what he had the instant before resolved to abstain from. Wearied and distracted with those continual irresolutions, he at length, from a sort of despair, makes the last fatal and irrecoverable step; but with that terror and amazement with which one flying from an enemy, throws himself over a precipice, where he is sure of meeting with more certain destruction than from any thing that pursues him from behind. ”

“ How shall I communicate a resolution fatal, as thy tenderness will deem it, to thy peace, yet a resolution suggested by a heart which has, at length, permitted all selfish regards to be swallowed up by a disinterested consideration of thy good? ”

“ That is the curse which will be fatal to our ideas—insubordination. Do not you think it is very disobedient of you? How can our Society be worked if each one sets himself up as the sole judge of what ought to be done? ”

“ Are we intelligible? Will those possessed by present tell us whether any bondage, any Bastille, can suggest ideas of more frightful tyranny, misery, than the cruel present, which clings to us, and cannot be removed. ”

“ Let any man then ask himself, Suppose a law is passed by which I am ruined! Have I interest enough to overturn the government of my country? If I have, we still may be a ruined people, and myself ruined among the rest. ”

“ We may choose whether or not we will act; but the consequences, and they may be most deadly,—the consequences of our action or our no-action we cannot escape. They may fall upon us with a crushing power at our very firesides, and ruin our private and domestic peace for ever. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Impunity and remissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. ”

“ But, if that, which is only submission to necessity, should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow. ”

“ Circumstances are compulsory, from the absence of a power to resist or control them: and if the absence likewise be the effect of circumstances.... the evil derives from the circumstances.... and such evil is not sin."* Do you say that you are independent of all circumstances, that you can control them, that you have a free will? ”

“ But it is not in my power to recall the past; that which is ruined remains ruined; what I have thrown down will never more rise up again. Yet one thing is left me whereby I may atone to the offended majesty of the law and restore the order which I have violated. ”

“ Till that happy and sure disposal of any issue has been reached, discord, passion, wasteful expedients, and failure attend all discussions of it, all dealing with it. Experiment and shifting policy will still keep it open, but only justice and right can ever dispose of it. ”

“ Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that the mere will to separate were in this case, or in any case, a sufficient ground for separation, I beg to be informed whose will? The will of any knot of men who, by fair means or foul, by usurpation, terrorism, or fraud, have got the reins of government into their hands? ”

“ And what matter to the reformer, the agitator, the dreamer, though you stone him to death, or throw him to the lions, or clap him into a nineteenth-century prison and shut his mouth that way? He has handed on the sacred fire. Others will bear the torch; and he who is unencumbered will outstrip his fellows. The wrong must be put right. ”

“ None but the few fanatics who are engaged in the herculean task of reconciling the justice of their God with the misery of man, will longer outrage common sense by the supposition of an event without a cause, a voluntary action without a motive. ”

“ Unity, stability, power, have ceased, and the end is extinction of the will.” We prefer to say, loss of the freedom of the will. On the principle of evolution, abuse of freedom may result in reversion to the brute, annihilation not of existence but of higher manhood, punishment from within rather than from without, eternal penalty in the shape of eternal loss. ”

“ Don't you think there's enough disorder as it is?
Hoche. When order is injustice, disorder is the beginning of justice.
Hulin. Justice! Justice consists in not demanding of things what they cannot give. You can't make over the world; you must accept it as it is. Why demand the impossible? ”

“ But when concession is made, when tears of penitence are wept, and when, in moments of returning confidence, that luckless tendency of temper is candidly confessed, and sincerely bewailed; when all the different acts committed under its influence, are acknowledged to have been wrong, how complete ought to be the reconciliation thus begun, and how zealous our endeavours for the future to avert the consequences of this sad calamity! ”

“ There are, I think, a great number of men and women who would go unflinchingly to the stake in vindication of a principle, whose resolution, somewhere in the course of a long, solitary, and indefinite imprisonment, would break down into a discreditable compromise of opinions for which they were unquestionably willing to die. ”

“ Unreason and injustice at the top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom, unreason and injustice from beginning to end—if it ever has an end—how should poor Rick, always hovering near it, pluck reason out of it? ”

“ We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution to go all right. ”

“ When this passion has any fair cause, it may be justifiable, and a crisis generally ends it; but when no cause exists, save in the distempered fancy of a sinking constitution, it is permanent and invincible. ”

“ But this sect unloosed their tongues in reproach and began to admonish them, saying, “What meanness is this, and what evident treason; that man should, for worldly advantages, personal profit, easy circumstances, or protection of life and property, cast himself into this great detriment and evident loss, and embark in a course of action which will conduce to the greatest abasement and involve the utmost infamy and disgrace both here and hereafter! ”

“ The most obstinate and desperate struggles of all—struggles for the preservation of one’s most sacred identity, of one’s inmost liberty of action and feeling—take place, and have their advances and retreats, their treacheries and their betrayals, under the hypocritical calm of the domestic roof. ”

“ But here we enter the sphere of will and of moral obligation, choice, and duty; and instead of witnessing that harmonious action of many parts exhibited by the involuntary regions of organic life, we witness all those evils which, if they do not have the effect of awakening a nation to the error of its ways, eventually lead to anarchy and decay. ”

“ The disposition which is ready to yield or to be reconciled, the meek and philanthropic spirit, the settlement of disputes, and even the surrender of one’s rights are not always incompatible with my theory. What it is opposed to is simply the unworthy endurance of wrong through cowardice or indolence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nay, principles never die!
But wherever a ruler lies.
And a people share the lie;
Where right is crushed by force,
And manhood is stricken dead —
There dwelleth the ancient curse,
And the blood on the earth is red! ”

“ Shall we see our authority brought into contempt, and the craft by which we get our living ruined, and not bestir ourselves? What have we been doing all this while? And what are we now thinking of? Shall we be always talking, and bring nothing to pass? ”

“ Profitless rebellion against the laws which season all things for the inexorable grave! Yet not the less we rebel again and again; and, though wisdom counsels resignation, yet our human passions, still cleaving to their object, force us into endless rebellion. ”

“ When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences. Sure I am, from what I have heard, and from what I have seen, that to pass the hill under all the 321 existing circumstances, without enquiry, without deliberation, would only be to add injustice to irritation, and barbarity to neglect. ”

“ We shall reflect that he already bears, or will bear, the whole penalty of his error; if he spoils his life by mismanagement, we shall not, for that reason, desire to spoil it still further: instead of wishing to punish him, we shall rather endeavour to alleviate his punishment, by showing him how he may avoid or cure the evils his conduct tends to bring upon him. ”

“ All that is to come is in the hands of that dark mysterious fate, which, ruling silent and unseen the acts and wills of men, reserves to itself, in its own dim council-chamber, each purpose unfulfilled, each resolution made and not performed; sporting with chances and with hopes, trampling into dust expectations and designs, and leaving to man but the past for his instruction, and the present for his energies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He sees such a desperate Rapaciousness prevail; such a Disregard to Equity, such Contempt of Order, such stupid Blindness to future Consequences, as must immediately have the most tragical Conclusion, and must terminate in Destruction to the greater Number, and in a total Dissolution of Society to the rest. ”

“ It is frequently observed, that the complete discharge of the obligations pressing upon us as moral agents is attended with conflict and difficulty. Frequently, therefore, we address ourselves to the discharge of these obligations with some measure of resistance, perhaps with obstinacy, and I may add, indeed, with unwillingness. ”

“ Has not the Blessed One formerly declared this to us, that it is in the very nature of all things near and dear unto us, that we must separate from them and leave them, since everything that is born, brought into being, and organized, contains within itself the inherent necessity of dissolution? ”

“ We build up rules wherewith life is to be governed, and behold!—some fine day the character of life itself changes and our rules are worthless.
Many of us now dream that there is such a thing as justice, but experience teaches us that it is an abstraction and that what we actually see is an occasional compromise struck in an eternal battle. ”

“ Could these men and women who had so long borne the bitterest yoke, who had been accustomed to the spectacle of the most ferocious punishments, when suddenly untrammelled, act with perfect clemency, moderation, or humanity? ”

“ Must not our aims and purposes cease to have any interest for us, once we are clear that they are not true ends? And that which, according to the hypothesis, is the true end, the 'dateless and irrevoluble circle' of activity, that, surely, we at least cannot sanction or approve, seeing that it involves and perpetuates the very misery and pain whose destruction was our only motive for acting at all. ”

“ They therefore welcome hardness of heart, obstinacy, and recklessness of disposition as an actual means of escape from thoughts which would, under favourable circumstances, lead to moral amendment and reformation. ”

“ This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. ”

“ We have hitherto lived in a society formed by chance, without fixed agreements, without free conventions, without a stipulation of rights, without reciprocal engagements,—and a multitude of disorders and evils have arisen from this precarious state. ”

“ The punishment is sure, if we either refuse the reverence, or are too cowardly and indolent to enforce the compulsion. A base nation crucifies or poisons its wise men, and lets its fools rave and rot in its streets. A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the other, and cherishes all. ”

“ If the gallows, and "absolutely indescribable torture, thrilling through every fibre," provided by enlightened Legislatures, are the only infallible remedies, then, indeed, is our vaunted civilization a sad failure. ”