“By any one, any thing, any thought, with which can go the word required by—anything that carries right in its demand. If a man does not do the thing which the very notion of a free will requires, what in earth, heaven, or hell, would be the use of his knowing all about the will? But it is impossible he should know anything.”
“You are a bold preacher!” said the earl. “—Suppose now a man was unconscious of any ability to do the thing required of him?”
“I should say there was the more need he should do the thing.”
“That is nonsense.”
“If it be nonsense, the nonsense lies in the supposition that a man can be conscious of not possessing a power; he can only be not conscious of possessing it, and that is a very different thing. How is a power to be known but by being a power, and how is it to be a power but in its own exercise of itself? There is more in man than he can at any given moment be conscious of; there is life, the power of the eternal behind his consciousness, which only in action can he make his own; of which, therefore, only in action, that is obedience, can he become conscious, for then only is it his.”
“You are splitting a hair!”
“If the only way to life lay through a hair, what must you do but split it? The fact, however, is, that he who takes the live sphere of truth for a flat intellectual disc, may well take the disc’s edge for a hair.”
“Come, come! how does all this apply to me—a man who would really like to make up his mind about the thing, and is not at the moment aware of any very pressing duty that he is neglecting to do?”
“Is your lordship not aware of some not very pressing duty that you are neglecting to do? Some duties need but to be acknowledged by the smallest amount of action, to become paramount in their demands upon us.”
“That is the worst of it!” murmured the earl. “I refuse, I avoid such acknowledgment! Who knows whither it might carry me, or what it might not go on to demand of me!”