He spoke like one unaware that he spoke.
“Yes, my lord,” said Donal, “that is how most men treat the greatest things! The devil blinds us that he may guide us!”
“The devil!—bah!” cried his lordship, glad to turn at right angles from the path of the conversation; “you don’t surely believe in that legendary personage?”
“He who does what the devil would have him do, is the man who believes in him, not he who does not care whether he is or not, so long as he avoids doing his works. If there be such a one, his last thought must be to persuade men of his existence! He is a subject I do not care to discuss; he is not very interesting to me. But if your lordship now would but overcome the habit of depending on medicine, you would soon find out that you had a free will.”
His lordship scowled like a thunder-cloud.
“I am certain, my lord,” added Donal, “that the least question asked by the will itself, will bring an answer; a thousand asked by the intellect, will bring nothing.”
“I did not send for you to act the part of father confessor, Mr. Grant,” said his lordship, in a tone which rather perplexed Donal; “but as you have taken upon you the office, I may as well allow you keep it; the matter to which you refer, that of my medical treatment of myself, is precisely what has brought me into my present difficulty. It would be too long a story to tell you how, like poor Coleridge, I was first decoyed, then enticed from one stage to another; the desire to escape from pain is a natural instinct; and that, and the necessity also for escaping my past self, especially in its relations to certain others, have brought me by degrees into far too great a dependence on the use of drugs. And now that, from certain symptoms, I have ground to fear a change of some kind not so far off—I do not of course mean to-morrow, or next year, but somewhere nearer than it was this time, I won’t say last year, but say ten years ago—why, then, one begins to think about things one has been too ready to forget. I suppose, however, if the will be a natural possession of the human being, and if a man should, through actions on the tissue of his brain, have ceased to be conscious of any will, it must return to him the moment he is free from the body, that is, from the dilapidated brain!”
“My lord, I would not have you count too much upon that. We know very little about these things; but what if the brain give the opportunity for the action which is to result in freedom? What if there should, without the brain, be no means of working our liberty? What if we are here like birds in a cage, with wings, able to fly but not flying about the cage; and what if, when we are dead, we shall indeed be out of the cage, but without wings, having never made use of such as we had while we had them? Think for a moment what we should be without the senses!”
“We shall be able at least to see and hear, else where were the use of believing in another world?”
“I suspect, my lord, the other world does not need our believing in it to make a fact of it. But if a man were never to teach his soul to see, if he were obstinately to close his eyes upon this world, and look at nothing all the time he was in it, I should be very doubtful whether the mere fact of going a little more dead, would make him see. The soul never having learned to see, its sense of seeing, correspondent to and higher than that of the body, never having been developed, how should it expand and impower itself by mere deliverance from the one best schoolmaster to whom it would give no heed? The senses are, I suspect, only the husks under which are ripening the deeper, keener, better senses belonging to the next stage of our life; and so, my lord, I cannot think that, if the will has not been developed through the means and occasions given it, the mere passing into another condition will set it free. For freedom is the unclosing of the idea which lies at our root, and is the vital power of our existence. The rose is the freedom of the rose tree. I should think, having lost his brain, and got nothing instead, a man would find himself a mere centre of unanswerable questions.”