‘There is not a doubt but that health, talents, character, decent competency, respectable friends, are real, substantial blessings; and yet do we not daily see those who enjoy many, or all, of these good things, and notwithstanding contrive to be as unhappy as others to whose lot few of them have fallen? I believe one great source of this mistake or misconduct is owing to a certain stimulus, with us called ambition, which goads us up the hill of life—not as we ascend other eminences, for the laudable curiosity of viewing an extended landscape, but rather for the dishonest pride of looking down on others of our fellow-creatures, seemingly diminutive in other stations, &c.’
His philosophy clearly recognised the evils of unduly centring our minds and hearts on pleasure, and thus not only robbing ourselves of development, and humanity of the advantage of the many things we might do in our overtime devoted to pleasure, but destroying our interest in the things that were intended to give us happiness.
He also recognised fully the evils of selfish ambition which aims at attaining higher positions than others; which climbs, not to get into purer air to see more widely our true relationships to our fellow-men, but for the degrading satisfaction of being able to look down with a hardening pride that separates humanity into groups instead of uniting all men in brotherhood. A man whose heart and mind are engrossed by base material aims cannot grow truly, and he loses the advantages that should have come to him from the elements of blessing he possesses by misusing them for selfish ends.
In another letter he wrote: ‘All my fears and cares are of this world; if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. I hate a man that wishes to be a Deist; but, I fear, every fair, unprejudiced inquirer must in some degree be a sceptic. It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the immortality of man, but, like electricity, phlogiston, &c., the subject is so involved in darkness that we want data to go upon.’
His philosophy left him no fears for what comes after death. He had deep faith in the justice of God. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that God perfectly understands the being He has made.’ Believing this, and believing also that God is just, he feared not the future. Burns, as he said to Mrs Dunlop, was ‘in his idle moments sometimes a little sceptical.’ But they were only moments. He knew there were problems he could not solve, and so, as he wrote to Dr Candlish, ‘he was glad to grasp revealed religion.’ A thoughtful man requires more faith in revealed religion than a man who does not really think, but only thinks he is thinking, when other people’s thoughts are running through his head. Burns needed strong faith, and he had it even about religious matters he could not explain. ‘The necessities of my own heart,’ as he wrote to Mrs Dunlop, ‘gave the lie to my cold philosophisings.’ His ‘Ode to Mrs Dunlop on New Year’s Day, 1790,’ said:
The voice of Nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies.
He accepted by faith the ‘messages from the skies,’ and in his soul harmonised the messages with the ‘Voice of Nature,’ even though his philosophic mind searched for proof of problems he could not solve.
In a letter to Peter Hill, 1790, he wrote: ‘Mankind are by nature benevolent creatures, except in a few scoundrelly instances. I do not think that avarice for the good things we chance to have is born with us; but we are placed here among so much nakedness and hunger and poverty and want, that we are under a damning necessity of studying selfishness in order that we may EXIST. Still there are in every age a few souls that all the wants and woes of life cannot debase into selfishness, or even give the necessary alloy of caution and prudence. If ever I am in danger of vanity, it is when I contemplate myself on this side of my disposition and character. God knows I am no saint; I have a whole host of follies and sins to answer for, but if I could (and I believe I do, as far as I can), I would ‘wipe away all tears from all eyes.’
Burns was not self-righteous. He moralises in this quotation not as one of the ‘unco guid,’ but as a man on what he thought was one of life’s most perplexing problems, poverty. He saw the problem more keenly than most men see it yet. It was not the poverty of Burns himself that, as Carlyle believed, made him write and work for freedom and justice for the labouring-classes. It is quite true, however, that one of his reasons for pleading for democracy was the poverty among the peasantry of his time. He saw the injustice of conditions, and admitted in his poem to Davie, a brother poet, that
It’s hardly in a body’s power
To keep at times from being sour,
To see how things are shared.