The Angel in the Cloud

by Edwin W. Fuller

And yet why false belief? The world believes,
And acting, moves in general harmony;
Could harmony from such an error flow?
Would all believe, would not some one
Have doubted by his works as well as faith?
The veriest skeptic walks the earth to-day,
As if he held the seal of freest will,
And shapes its course, and judges all mankind
By freedom’s rule.
Then may not that be true
Which most believe, and those who doubt profess
In every act; as that which few believe
And to which none conform?
Two paths I see,
One marked Free-Will, the other Fate. The first,
Extending far as human thought can reach,
Through lovely meads with sweetest flowers, and fruits
Of actions clearly shown as right and wrong,
Because of choice ’twixt the two; of laws
With sanction suiting agents who are free;
Of courts acquitting the insane of crime,
Of crime made crime, alone, when done as crime,
Of judgment passed by public sentiment
On action in the ratio of liberty.
Delightful view; but seek an entrance there—
The towering bars of unruled motive stand
Before the path, and none can overleap.

The field of Fate lies open; nothing bars
Our progress there. A thousand different ways
The path diverges. Every by-path leads
To some foul pit or bottomless abyss.
Along each side are strewed the whitening bones
Of venturous pilgrims, lost amid its snares,
Some broken on the rocks of gross decree,
Who hold an unchanged destiny from birth;
Who will not take a medicine if sick,
Who cant of “To be, will be,” and the time
Unalterably set to each man’s life.
Some stranded on the finer form of Fate,
Who say it works by means. Hence they believe
In using all preventives to disease,
In going boating in a rubber belt,
In placing Franklin rods upon a house,
In preaching, and in praying men repent.
These, when one dies, cry out, “It was his time.”
Or if he should recover, “It was not.”
Their fate is always ex post facto fate,
And knowing not the future, they abide
The issue of events, and then confirm
Their dogged dogmas.
Still another class,
Though fewer far in numbers, perish here.
These are the sophists; men who deeply dive
Beneath the surface of effect, and trace
Our actions to their source. They find that man,
Made in the glorious image of his God,
Is not an independent cause, but works
From motive causes out of his control.
They find that every mental act must flow
From outside source, then fearlessly ascend
The chain of being to a height divine,
And dare to fetter the Eternal mind,
And throw their bonds around Omnipotence.
As well a spider in an eagle’s nest
Might, from his hidden web among the twigs,
Attempt to throw his little gluey thread
Around the mottled wing, whose muscled strength
Beats hurried vacuums in the ocean’s spray,
Or circling upward, parts the thunder-cloud,
And bursts above; and shaking off the mists,
With rigid feathers bright as burnished steel,
Floats proudly through the tranquil air.
Which realm
Shall now be mine, Free-Will or Fate? The one
Stands open wide, but all in ruin ends;
The other, fair if once within the pale;
But how to scale the barriers none can tell.
Bah! all is doubt. I’ll leave the mystic paths
Where, on each side, are ranged the phantom shapes
Of disputants, alive and dead, who fight,
With foolish zeal, o’er myths intangible;
When each one cries “Eureka!” for his creed.
That scarcely lives a day, then yields its place.
A Roman ’gainst a Roman, Greek to Greek,
A zealous Omar with an Ali paired;
A saintly Pharisee in hot dispute
With Sadducees. Along th’ illustrious rows
Of lesser lights, who advocate the creeds
Of their respective masters, we descend
To later days and see Titanic minds
Exert their giant strength to reach the truth,
And, baffled, fall. Locke, ever elsewhere clear,
Here mystified Spinoza’s dizzy wing
O’erweighted by his strange “imperium;”
Hobbes, with his new intrinsic liberty;
And Belsham’s quaint reduction too absurd;
“Sufficient reason,” reared in Leibnitz’s strength;
Reid, Collins, Edwards, Tappan, Priestley, Clarke,
All push each other from the door of Truth.

None ever have, nor ever will, on earth,
Reach truth of theory concerning Fate.
It stands as whole from every touch of man
As ocean’s broad blue scroll, whose rubber waves
Erase the furrows of the plowing keels.

Then, careless whether man be king or slave,
I’ll take his actions, whether free or not,
And trace them to their sources. Deep the dive,
But, throwing off the buoys of Charity
And Faith, and all the prejudice of life,
I grasp the lead of Doubt, and downward sink
Into the cesspool of the human heart,
To find the fount, that to the surface casts
A thousand bubbles of such varied hues:
The pale white bubble of hypocrisy,
The murky bubble of revenge and hate,
The frail gilt bubble of ambition’s hope,
The rainbow bubble of sweet love in youth,
The dull slime bubble of a sensual lust,
The crystal bubble of true charity!
Instead of analyzing every fact
Of moral nature, searching for its source,
I’ll name a source most probable, and try
The facts upon it; if they fit, confirm,
If not, reject. With Hobbes and Paley then
I join; and here avow that all mankind
Have but one source of action—Love of self—
Yet not self-love as understands the world,
For that’s a name for error shown by few;
But natural instinct that impels all men
To give self pleasure, and to save it pain;
For pain and pleasure are Life’s only modes—
No neutral state—we suffer, or enjoy;
And every action’s linked with one of these.
We cannot act without a consciousness,
A consciousness of pleasure or of pain,
The very automatic workings of our frames
Are pleasures, unmarked from their constancy;
But if impeded, they produce a pain.
This instinct, teaching us to pleasure seek,
And pain avoid, none ever disobey;
For be their conduct what it may, a crime
Or virtue, greed or pure benevolence,
To find the greatest pleasure is their aim.
Nay, start not, critic, but attend the proofs.
A man exists within himself alone,
Himself, or he would lose identity.
To him the world exists but by effects
Upon himself. His actions toward it then
Bear reference to himself. He cannot act
Without affecting self. His nature’s law
Demands that self be dealt with pleasantly.

There is no pain or pleasure in the world,
But as he feels th’ reality in self,
Or fancies it by signs in other men.
This fancied pain is never real pain,
But yields a real reflex. Others’ pain
Is never pain to us, unless we know
It does exist. Within a hundred yards
A neighbor dies, in agony intense,
And yet we feel no slightest trace of pain,
Unless informed thereof. ’Tis only when we know,
And therefore are affected, that we feel.

The modes of pain and pleasure are then two,
A real and a fancied one. The first acute,
In ratio of our sensibilities;
The last in ratio of our image-power.
These gifts in different men unequal are,
And hence life’s varied phases. One may deem
A real pain far greater than a pain
In fancy formed, from others’ sufferings;
He eats alone, and drives the starving off.
Another’s fancy paints more vividly,
And he endures keen hunger to supply
The poor with food. And so of pleasure too,—
And this moves all to shun the greatest pain,
And find the greatest pleasure.
Different minds,
And each at different times of life, possess
A different standard of this highest good.
The swaddled infant wails for its own food,
Because its highest pleasure is alone in sense;
The child will from its playmate hide a cake
Until it learns that praise for sharing it
Gives greater pleasure than the sweetened taste;
One boy at school proves insubordinate,
His schoolmates’ praise he deems his highest good;
Another studies well, because he values more
A parent’s smile. The murderer with his knife,
The maiden praying in her purity,
The miser dying over hoards of gold,
The widow casting thither her two mites,
A white-veil bending o’er the dying couch,
A stained beauty floating through the waltz,
The preacher’s zeal, the gambler’s eager zest;
All have one motive, greatest good to self!

The tender stop their ears, and cry aloud:
“What! do you dare assert the gambler seeks
With hellish zeal the faintest shade of good?
That he is holy as the Man of God?”
By no means, yet he seeks his good the same.
Not good as you’ve been taught to apprehend,
But good, the greatest to his frame of mind.
Do not exclaim that good is always good,
And never differs from itself. Anon
We’ll speak of abstract truths, if such there be
That good and pleasure are synonymous
At times of action, is most surely plain;
For pleasure’s but the consciousness of good,
Or satisfaction of our tendencies.
If all the gambler’s soul is bent on gain,
Then at the moment gain is greatest good;
But should you reason with him, and explain
Another life, and make it really seem
To him the best, he straight would change his course.

“But,” cries my friend, “the preacher, if he’s true,
Must labor, not for self, but others’ good;
And in proportion as the self’s forgot,
And others cared for, does his conduct rise.”

But he can not, if conscious, forget self,
For everything he does is felt within;
But deeds for others’ good a pleasure give;
If done in pain to self, the pleasure’s more.
To gain the pleasure, self is put to pain,
Just as a vesication brings relief.
If he refused to undergo the pain
Remorse would double it.
Among his flock
Some one is sick; to visit him is right,
And done, affords a pleasure. Sweeter far
That pleasure, if he walks through snow and ice,
At duty’s call!

Sublime self-sacrifice,
Of which men prate, is nothing more nor less
Than base self-worship. Little pain endured
T’ avoid a great; a smaller pleasure lost
To gain a larger!