I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion
had but a small part.
For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it;
though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as
a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against
health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
Free-will was impossible. We could only _seem_ to will freely, and that
only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity,
education, and circumstance--a little geometrical arrangement of my own,
of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on
all-fours--perhaps because it is only a triangle.
That is, we could will fast enough--_too_ fast; but could not will _how_
to will--fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to
come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature,
training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with,
or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must
be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its
madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil--to bend the knee, or
lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had
befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own
successful endeavor--was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its
futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling
impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
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