Short Studies on Great Subjects | Page 9

space, without limit and without end; the other was,
right and wrong. Right, the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the
sacrifice of good to self;--not graduated objects of desire, to which we
are determined by the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as
pole and pole, as light and darkness--one, the object of infinite love; the
other, the object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this
marvellous power in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the
less true for that)--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it
lies somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of
forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
were consistently selfish, you might analyse their motives; if they were
consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the
highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
the strange creature which results from the combination is now under
one influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of
him except from the old-fashioned moral--or, if you please,
imaginative--point of view.
Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and
sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of supply
and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers that he

stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes, rightly
or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for their
labour he is bound to see that their children are decently taught, and
they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he
ought to care for them in sickness and in old age; then political
economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself
and his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.
So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply
and demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
factor spoils the equation.
And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
emotions--in the struggle, ever failing, yet ever renewed, to carry truth
and justice into the administration of human society; in the
establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise and
fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of the
great actors in the drama of life; where good and evil fight out their
everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more often
in the heart, both of them, of each living man--that the true human
interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the growth of
material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but they are not
the most interesting. They have their reward in the increase of material
comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our nature, they do not
highly concern us after all.
Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,
but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific
analysis.
Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell
whether A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one
man in every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact
proportion), will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No
doubt it is a comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one
generation need not be the average of the next. We may be converted
by the Japanese, for all that we know, and the Japanese methods of

taking leave of life may become fashionable among us. Nay, did not
Novalis suggest that the whole race of men would at last become so
disgusted with their impotence, that they would extinguish themselves
by a simultaneous act of suicide, and make room for a better order of
beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of which the race is flowing
perpetually changes--no two generations are alike. Whether there is a
change in the organisation itself, we cannot tell; but this is certain, that
as the planet varies with the atmosphere which surrounds it, so each
new generation varies from the last, because it inhales as its atmosphere
the accumulated experience and knowledge of the whole past of the
world. These things form the spiritual air which we breathe as we grow;
and in the infinite multiplicity of elements of which that air is now
composed, it is for ever matter of conjecture what the minds will be
like which expand