The Angel in the Cloud

by Edwin W. Fuller

All the preacher’s words,
That burn or die upon the stolid ear,
Are spoken from this motive, good to self.
You stare; but it is true. Why does he preach?
To save men’s souls?—Why does he try to save?
Because he loves his fellow-men? Not so.
His love for them but to the pleasure adds,
Which duty done confers; but all his work
Must be with reference to himself alone,
Though cunning self the real motive hides,
And leaves his broad philanthropy and love
To claim the merit. Let a score of men,
The blackest sinners, die. He knows it not,
And feels no pang; but if he is informed,
He suffers reflex pain. And if his charge,
Remorseful tortures for unfaithfulness.
And only is the state of souls to him
Of interest, as they are known. When known,
It is a source of pleasure or of pain
Which all his labor is to gain or shun.

“This difference then,” says one, “between men’s lives;
Some live for present, some for future good.
The sensual care for self on earth alone,
The mystic cares for self beyond the grave.”

Both love a present self, in present time.
They differ in their notions of its good.
The stern ascetic, with his shirt of hair,
His bleeding penitential knees, his fasts
To almost death, his soul-exhausting prayers,
Is seeking, cries the world, good after death.
And yet his course of life is that alone
Which could yield pleasure in his state of mind.
He suffers, it is true, but hope of Heaven
Thus rendered sure, as much a present good
Is, as the food that feasts the epicure.
The contemplation of his future home,
Which he is thus securing, is a balm
That heals his stripes, and sweetens all their pain.
The penance blows upon his blood-wealed breast
Are bliss compared to lashes of remorse.
So for the greater good, the hope of Heaven,
He undergoes “the trivial pain of flesh.”
The epicure cares not a fig for Heaven,
But finds his greatest good in pleasing sense.
And so the man who gives his wealth away
Is just as selfish as the money-slave
Who grinds out life amid his dusty bags.
They both seek happiness with equal zest:
The one finds pleasure in the many thanks
Of those receiving, or the public’s praise,
Or if concealed, in consciousness of right;
The other in the consciousness of wealth.

If all men act from motives just the same,
Where is the right and wrong? In the effect?
The quality of actions must be judged
From their intent, and not their consequence.
If two men matches light for their cigars,
And from one careless dropped, a house is burned,
Is he that dropped it guiltier of crime
Than he whose match went out? Most surely no!
Then is the miser blameless, though he turn
The helpless orphan freezing from his door;
And Dives should not be commended more,
Though all his goods to feed the poor he gives.

How then shall we determine quality
Of actions, when their sources are the same,
And their effects possess no quality?
Two dead men lie in blood beside the way,
The one shot by a friend, an accident;
The other murdered for his gold. ’Tis plain
No wrong lies in th’ effects, for both are ’like;
And of the agents, he of accident
Had no intent, and therefore did no wrong.
The other killed to satisfy the self,
A motive founding all the Christian work,
And right if that is right. The wrong
Then lies between the motive and effect,
And must exist in the effecting means.
Yet how within the means is wrong proved wrong?
Jouffroy would say, because a disregard
Of others’ rights; for here he places good,
When classifying Nature’s moral facts.
He makes the child first serve flesh self,
Then moral self, and last to others’ good
Ascend, and general order. What a myth!
As if man thought of others, save effect
From them upon himself. But order gives
A greater good to self; therefore he joins
His strength to others, creates laws that bind
Himself and them, and produce harmony.
He thus surrenders minor good of self,
To gain a greater. This is all the need
He has of order, though Jouffroy asserts
That order universal is the Good.
Yet still he says that private good of each
Is but a fragment of the absolute,
And that regard for every being’s rights
Is binding as the universal law!

Regard for others’ rights indeed, when men
Unharmed agree to hang a man for crime!
Not for the crime—that’s past; but to prevent
A second crime, which crime alone exists
In apprehensive fancy. Thus for wrong
That’s but forethought, they do a real wrong.
To save their rights from harm they fear may come.
They strip a fellow-man of actual right,
And highest, right of life; then dare to call
Their action pure, divinely just, and good,
And all the farce of empty names.
They make
Of gross injustice individual,
A flimsy justice, for mankind at large,
And cry, Let it be done, though Heaven fall!
As if a whole could differ from its parts,
Or right be made from wrong. Yet some may say
That one is sacrificed for many’s good,
Or hung that many may avoid his fate;
And that his crime deserved what he received.

But law must value every man alike,
And cannot save one man, or thousand men,
From future evil, only possible,
By greatest evil to another man,
In its own view of justice. Nor can crime
Meet punishment, at mortal hands, by right,
For murder’s murder, done by one or twelve,
And legal murder’s done in colder blood,
Whose stains are chalked by vain authority.
Authority! the child of numbers and self-love!
Regard for rights of things, indeed, when beasts
And birds must yield their right of life that man
May please his right of taste. When, during Lent,
The holy-days of fasting and of prayer,
The scaly victims crowd the Bishop’s board,
Their flesh unfleshed by Conscience’ pliant rule,
Our palates must be for a moment pleased,
Though costing something agonies of death;
And worse than robbers, what we cannot give,
We dare to take.
They have no souls, say you?
Nor after death exist?
That nothing’s lost,
Philosophy maintains as axiom truth.
An object disappears, but somewhere lives
In other form. The water-pool to mist
Is changed, the powder into flame and smoke.
My pointer dies, his body, decomposed,
The air, the soil, and vegetation feeds;
Yet still exists, although disintegrate.
For there was something, while the pointer lived,
That was not body, but that governed it,
A spirit, essence, call it what you will,
A something seen but through phenomena,
And by them proved most clearly to exist.
A something, not the feet that made them run,
A something, not the eyes, but knew they saw,
A something, without which the eyes could see
As much as glasses can without the eye,
The something, “Carlo” named, that knew the name.
The pointer dies, and we dissect the flesh.
All there, none missing, to the tiniest nerve;
Yet something’s gone, the more important part,
And can you say that it has ceased to be,
When th’ flesh, inferior to it, still exists?
The spirit, if existent, must be whole,
Nor can be parted till material proven.
That Carlo lives, seems plain as I shall live;
He lived for self, and so did I; we fare
Alike in after-life, we differ here
In consciousness of immortality.
But I digress.
Where is the right and wrong?
This is the Gordian knot no sword can cut,
All sages of the world, with wisdom-teeth,
Have gnawed this file without the least effect.
The thousand savants of old Greece and Rome
Proclaimed a thousand theories of good,
That each, successive, proud devoid of truth.
A myriad moderns have advanced their views,
Each gained a few disciples, who avowed their truth,
And each, by some one else, been proven wrong.
A Bentham marches out utility,
A moral test from benefit or harm.
As if the good depended on effect,
And good would not be good, though universe
In all its phases found no use! And Price
Parades his “reason,” with its simple good;
Who’d rather give the question up, than err,
And so declares it cannot be defined.
Then Wollaston declares that good is truth,
Which no one doubts, far as it goes; it goes
Toward good, as far as truth, its attribute;
Beyond, it cannot reach. And Montesquieu
And Clarke, relation’s order preach; a rule
That makes the growing grain, or falling shower,
A moral agent, capable of good.
Then Wolf and Malebranche perfection see,
And therefore good, in God; but their sight fails,
And God may mirror good, but man’s weak eyes
Ne’er see it. Adam Smith, with “sentiment”
Proceeds to dress a thought, and call it, good;
And makes the abstract of a Universe
Arise from puling human sympathy.
The largest concourse follow Hutcheson,
Although the greater part ne’er heard of him.
The world at large believes in moral sense;
They call it conscience! Oh the precious word!
Though stretched and warped, they almost deify,
And term it man’s tribunal in his breast,
Where he may judge his actions, right or wrong.
What nonsense! Conscience is but consciousness
Of soul, and idea of its good. We form
This idea from regard of fellow-men,
Association, and from thought. We find
Sometimes the good of soul conflicts with flesh,
And when we know the soul above the flesh,
We yield to that the preference. Hence arise
The foolish notions of self disregard.
The savage does not know he has a soul,
And therefore has no conscience. He can steal
Without remorse. But when he learns of soul,
He finds it has a good, and by this test
Tries moral actions, are they good for soul?
And this is conscience.
Yet is conscience changed
By circumstance. The Hindoo mother tears
The helpless infant from her trickling breast,
To feed the crocodile, and save her soul;
She’s happier in its conscience-murdered wail
Than in its gleeful prattle on her knee.
And daily we see one commit a deed
Without a pang, another dare not do.
If conscience may be warped but one degree
By plain Sorites, it may be reversed,
And only prove an interested thought.

To abstract good no man has found the key,
Though in the various forms of concrete good
We see the similars, and from these frame
A good that serves the purposes of life.
We pass it as we do the concept, “Man,”
But never ope to count the attributes.
Our purest right is but approximate
To this vague abstract idea, how obtained,
We know not. Plato says ’tis memory
Of previous life. Perhaps! ’Tis very dim
In this; and yet it rocks the cradle world
As strongly as the baby man can bear
And so of truth, or aught abstract, we know
Of such existence somewhere, that is all.
“But we,” cries one, “do hold some abstract truth,
In perfect form. The truth of science’ laws,
The truths of numbers, each are perfect truths.”
The truths of science are hypotheses,
And only true as far as they explain.
But perfect truth must save all facts,
That ever rose or possibly can rise.
“The priest of Nature” thought he held the truth
When throughout space he tracked the motes of light,
And ground the sunbeams into dazzling dust.
Our quivering waves through subtle ether flash,
And drown Sir Isaac’s atoms in a flood
Of glorious truth; till some new fact shall rise
To give our truth the lie, and cause a change
Of theory.
Our numbers no truth have,
Or but a shadow, cast on Earth by truth
Existent in some unknown world. We make
Our little numbers fit the shadow’s line
As best they can, and boast eternal truth!
Yet take a simple form of numbers, “two,”
We cannot have a perfect thought of this,
Because the mind directly asks, two what?
’Tis not enough chameleon to feed
On empty air. Two units, we reply
Then what is meant by unity? An “One,”—
The mind can only cognize o-n-e,
Which makes three units and not one.
The mind
Must have a concrete object to adjust
The abstract on, before it comprehends.
But two concretes are never two, because
They never can be proved exactly ’like.
To illustrate: suppose two ivory balls,
Of finest mold, and equal weight, precise
As hair-hung scales, arranged most delicate,
Can prove; yet they can not be shown
To differ, not the trillionth of a grain;
Or if they could, they may in density
Be unlike; then to equal weight, one must
Be larger by the trillionth of an inch.
Even if alike in density and weight,
No one will dare assert that they possess
A perfect similarity in all.
The abstract two is twice as much as one,
But our two balls unlike, perforce must be
Greater or less than two of either one;
But two of one, the same can never be
On poor, imperfect Earth. Thus all our twos
Fall, in some measure, short of concept two.
And if we paint the concept to the eye,
The figure 2 of finest stereotype,
Beneath the microscope imperfect shows.
And so our perfect numbers, wisdom’s boast,
Are faint, uncertain shadows in the mind,
That we can never picture to the eye,
Nor truthfully apply to anything.
We use a ragged, ill-drawn substitute,
That answers all the purposes of life.
The truths of mathematics, so sublime,
Are never true to us, concretely known;
And in the abstract so concealed are they,
No man can swear he has their perfect form.
We can’t conceive a line without some breadth—
The perfect line possesses length alone;
Earth never saw a pure right-angle drawn,
Pythag’ras cannot prove his theorem,
The finest quadrant is but nearest truth,
The closest measures but approximate,
And all from Sanconiathon to Pierce,
With grandest soaring into Number’s realms,
Have only fluttered feebly o’er the ground,
Their heaven-strong wings by feebling matter tied.

Man is a pris’ner, but the prison walls
Are very vast; so vast the universe
Lies, like a mote, within their mighty scope.
Most are content to grovel on the earth,
Some rise a little way, and sink again;
And some, on noble wing, soar to the bounds,
And eager beat the bars. Beyond these walls
The abstract lies, and oft the straggling rays,
Through crevices and chinks, stray to our jail;
And these we fondly hug as truth.
Poor man!
The glimpses of the great Beyond have roused,
For centuries, his curious soul to flight.
With eagle eye fixed on the distant goal,
He cleaves his way, till dashed against the walls;
Some fall with bruiséd wing again to Earth,
And some cling bravely there, so eager they
To reach the untouched prize, and so intent
Their gaze upon its light, they notice not
The bounds, till Hamilton, with wary eye,
Discovers the Eternal bounding line,
And sadly shows its hopeless fixity.

But man on Earth I love to ridicule,
A little clod of sordid selfishness!
I’ll take his mental acts of every kind
And see how self originates them all;
I’ll follow Stewart, since he classifies
With shrewd discretion, though his reasoning err,
He places first the appetites; and these
Perforce are selfish, as our self alone
Must feel and suffer with our wants. Our food
Tastes good alone to us. The richest feast,
In others’ mouths, could never satisfy
Our appetite for food; self must be fed.
Desires are next; and that of knowledge, first,
Is proven selfish, by his quoted line
From Cicero—that “knowledge is the food
Of mind”—and food is ever sought for self.
Desire of social intercourse with men,
From thought that it will better self, proceeds.
Man’s state is friendly, not a state of war,
For instinct teaches him society
Will offer many benefits to self;
And only when he has a cause to fear
That self will suffer, does he learn to war.
Desire to gain esteem, is self in search
Of approbation; like the appetite,
The end pursued affects alone the self.
And lastly Stewart boasts posthumous fame,
When self, as sacrificed, can seek no good.
To prove the motive is a selfish good,
I’ll not assert enjoyment after life,
But say, the pleasure of the millions’ praise,
Anticipated in the present thought,
And intense consciousness of heroism,
Far more than compensates the pangs of death.
A Curtius leaping down the dread abyss,
Enjoys his fame enough, before he strikes,
To pay for every pain of mangling death.
Affections next adorn the moral page.
At that of kindred, mothers cry aloud:
“For shame! for shame! do you pretend to say
I love my child with any thought of self?
When I would lay my arm upon the block,
And have it severed for his slightest good!”
I’ll square your love by Reason’s rigid rule,
And test its source. Why do you love him so?
For benefit he has conferred, or may?
No, as the helpless babe, demanding care,
You love him most. Your love is instinct then,
And like the cow her calf, you love your child;
That you may care for him, before self moves.
Then do you love him always just the same,
When rude and bad as when obedient?
But I’ll dissect your love, and take away
Each part affecting self; and see what’s left.
He now has grown beyond your instinct love;
You love him, first, because he is your son,
And you would suffer blame, if you did not;
You love him, too, because he does reflect
A credit on yourself. You feel assured
That others thinking well of him, think well
Of you. Because it flatters all your pride
To think so fine a life is part of yours;
Because his high opinion of your worth
Evokes a meet return; because you look
Into the future, and see honors bright
Awaiting you through him; because you feel
The world is praising you for loving him,
And would condemn you, did you not. And last,
You feel the pleasure deep of self-esteem,
Because you fill the public’s and your own
Romantic ideas of a mother’s love.