Mendacity

“ What must we do in this dilemma? shall we be so uncharitable, as judging from mens actions, to say, that all the world prevaricates, and that this is not their opinion, let them talk what they will? or shall we be so silly, as relying on what they say, to think them sincere in their sentiments, and so not believe our own eyes? or shall we rather endeavour to believe ourselves and them too, and say with Montaigne, that they imagine, and are fully persuaded, that they believe what they do not believe? ”

“ Practically we may agree with you in choosing, as men of action, your aim. Our personal caprice may agree with yours. But theoretically we cannot justify this aim. We find, in all that you say, no objective moral truth, but only somebody’s capricious resolution. And even if we chance to accept your resolution, who knows when we shall change our minds, and begin acting in some new way, so that what we now call good shall be called evil? ”

“ And, at the end, man is reaped—the product, not of good alone, but of evil; not of joy alone, but of sorrow—perhaps mellowed and ripened, perhaps stricken and withered and sour. How, then, shall we judge any one?”
Can we not judge a man by his will? Does not such an instrument reflect his character, his nature, and his eccentricities? ”

“ What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way—nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? ”

“ And as the relations of magnitude, as they are the objects of our reason, are only the objects of its assent or dissent; so good and evil, as they are objects of our reason, are only the objects of its desire or aversion: and as the assent or dissent, in matters of speculation, whether right or wrong, is solely the act of our reason; so desire or aversion, in human life, whether right or wrong, is equally the act of our reason.
We often say, that our passions deceive us, or persuade us ”

“ It would need a clearer head than mine to trace all the varying and discordant elements of character I had witnessed to their true source; to sift the evil from the good; to know what to cherish, what to repress, whereon to build hope or what to fear. ”

“ He felt, how arbitrary was the law of human opinion; how little resorted to were the principles of human nature; how difficult to eradicate those principles impressed on the character without any operation of the reason, received in the first era of existence, expanding with the years, and associating with all the feelings, the passions, and the habits of life. ”

“ The dead abstract notions of the intellect, the dialectical disputes of the reason, the purely subjective and one-sided apprehension of objects by a deluded fancy, and the absolute will, are the four sources of human error. ”

“ The choice that is finally made between the right, the expedient, and the wrong is determined by a variety of considerations—by conflicting emotions, by the balancing of probabilities and inclinations, by the degree or kind of temptation, by the presence or absence of witnesses, especially human, by other specialties of an animal's position, by the nature and extent of its moral training, by the character of the rewards and punishments offered on previous occasions. ”

“ They would appear as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,—a necessity or law which of course knows no exception and is as ‘ruthless’ as fate. ”

“ In order, therefore, to escape the latter of these alternatives, we will do our best to embrace and comply with the former of them. Such being our reasons, we now nail our colours to the mast, and prepare ourselves for a good deal of polemical discussion on the subject of "the human mind." ”

“ However ridiculous and pernicious we must admit the vulgar accessories of this creed to be, there is a certain analogy, not wholly absurd, between the consequences resulting to an individual during life from the virtuous or vicious, prudent or imprudent, conduct of his external actions, to those consequences which are conjectured to ensue from the discipline and order of his internal thoughts, as affecting his condition in a future state. ”

“ I am only trying to discover what you make yourself do. And do you, as a matter of fact, really dispute the main conclusions to which we have come, or rather, if you will accept my phrase, the main 'postulates of the will' which we have elicited? ”

“ To them that object out of conscience, these poor resolutions may afford some relief, if not satisfaction; or, if these slender endeavours fall short of my design, and the reader's desires herein, I shall send them to their labours, who have taken more able and fruitful pains in this subject. To them that object out of a spirit of bitterness and malignity, nothing will suffice. He that is resolved to err, is satisfied with nothing but that which strengthens his error. ”

“ He that will contest things apparently decided by sense and experience, or who disavows clear principles of reason, approved by general consent and the common sense of men, what other hopeful way is there of proceeding with him, than pleasantly to explode his conceits? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You are both right to amuse yourselves in this world as your faculties best point out, but each radically wrong in attributing motives to the other. What, in all that is wonderful, have we to do with motives? ”

“ The tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires; ... the force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. ”

“ And though reflection upon conduct may lead us to suppose that our past acts were determined, that desire of pleasure or the wish to avoid pain controlled our wills, the unphilosophical observer interprets, in offenders against morality, such arguments as a mere excuse. ”

“ For instance, I read among other things this golden rule on such an ordinary printed paper stuck against a room door, "Make no comparisons;" and if you consider how many quarrels, and how much mischief arise in the world from odious comparisons of the merits of one with the merits of another, the most delightful lessons of morality are contained in the few words of the above-mentioned rule. ”

“ It is thus, O my God! that by our eternal contradictions we justify the adorable ways of thy wisdom upon the lots of men, and that we provide for thy justice powerful reasons to overthrow one day the illusion, and the falsity of our pretexts. ”

“ Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? ”

“ In fact, he held that the conditions of modern life, the relations of people in mass, which she had somehow always considered as almost perfect and, indeed, divinely established, were absolutely outworn and fundamentally unrighteous and unjust. ”

“ And we learn nothing from being told that our conscience or sense of duty, our sentiments in regard to right and wrong, our obligation to pursue one course of conduct and to avoid another course, are ultimate principles which admit of no further analysis or explanation. ”

“ You interest me, Heard. If you deny the susceptibility of a temperament like his, you deny the whole operation of externals upon character and action. You deny, for example, the success of the Roman Catholic Church which relies, for its moral effects, upon such optic appeals to the senses, and upon the ease with which transitory feelings can be transmuted into axioms of conduct. ”

“ In order to illustrate the nature of evils of this class, I may take two instances—cruelty and lasciviousness. That these are great intrinsic evils, we may, I think, easily assure ourselves, by imagining the state of a man, whose mind is solely occupied by either of these passions, in their worst form. ”

“ Our whole natural thinking, as shall be distinctly proved in the body of this work, consists of a series of judgments, each of which involves a mental contradiction,—in other words, controverts a necessary truth or law of reason. ”

“ In the former we oppose the individual, a sensuous and limited being, and his personal will, which can be effected pathologically, to the absolute law of the will in general, and of unconditional duty which binds every spiritual being; in the second case, on the contrary, we oppose the faculty of willing, absolute volition, and the spiritual force as an infinite thing, to the solicitations of nature and the impediments of sense. ”

“ These questions at every point have done their best to draw us beyond our depth into the abstract metaphysic which in the end they turn upon. And now we come to one which threatens to involve us more deeply, and our answer to which must remain superficial. What sense have the words ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ when applied to morality? ”

“ And to such minds we shall leave it to determine, whether the scheme of moral necessity has owed its hold upon the reason of man to a dark confusion of words and things, or whether its glory has been obscured by the misconception of its opponents? ”

“ Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” ”

“ But in matters of right and wrong, whatever be the lures, the taunts, or the usages of the world, or whatever the supposed inconveniences of singularity, let judgment and conscience always rule with absolute sway. ”

“ Let us, on the contrary, respect them for their intentions and motives, at the same time that we make certain reservations as to the final consequences that would result from this distrust and refashioning of nature. ”

“ What is not supposed to be my concern! [2] First and foremost, the good cause [3] , then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!" ”

“ I hold for vices (but every one according to its proportion) , not only those which reason and nature condemn, but those also which the opinion of men, though false and erroneous, have made such, if authorised by law and custom. ”

“ You have admitted that those who go wrong in the choice of pleasures and pains — that is, in the choice of good and evil things — go wrong from want of knowledge, of the knowledge or science of mensuration. ”

“ There are some—and perhaps you think me one of them—who are driven by circumstances, led by their passions, or their follies, or their vices, to a state of opposition with the rest of mankind, and who then, when cast out from society, find a thousand specious reasons for warring against it. ”

“ Yet, as one may still insist, the question is not answered, Why do the facts often seem as foreign as they do? Why is their explicit conformity to our purpose, as defined by the Ought, joined with aspects of such hostility to all our purposes? ”

“ Hence their knowledge and command of energies unfamiliar to us—and hence, also, the grave question whether they may not have an entirely different sense of justice, of values—and that is rather terrifying! ”

“ Deriving pretentiously its name from Reason, this false doctrine, by flattering and stimulating the eagerness to outstrip others which is interwoven with man's nature, and giving the rein to every kind of unlawful desire, has taken willing possession of the minds of great numbers, and has even pervaded the whole of civilized society. ”

“ The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. ”

“ But the effects of custom are much more manifest in the strange impressions she imprints in our minds, where she meets with less resistance. What has she not the power to impose upon our judgments and beliefs? ”

“ Usually what we call our convictions are propositions which we have not thoroughly examined in quietude, but notions which have just come into our heads and are irreversible to us solely because we are committed to them. Much may be urged against the Ethic and on behalf of hatred, contempt, and sorrow. ”

“ Equipped with this outfit of criteria he looks upon life and finds it complete or wanting, tests his fellow men and approves or condemns, examines all created things and calls them good or bad. But he is so constituted that his acquiescence is likely to be somewhat passive, and his protests active, his commendation grudging and qualified, his condemmation sweeping and thorough. ”

“ Thence I propose to make a new arrangement of madness, whether as defect, or as excess of any of these senses or faculties; and thus by appropriate cases to shew the difference between, I. a man, having lost his reason, but not his senses or understanding—that is, he sees things as other men see them; he adapts means to ends, as other men would adapt them, and not seldom, with more sagacity; but his final end is altogether irrational. II. His having lost his wits, i.e. his understanding or judicial power; but not his reason, or the use of his senses. ”