LOVE AND DUTY
Würde, worthiness, VIRTUE, consist in the mastery over the sensuous and sensual impulses; but love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his heart whether he can endure that his mistress should have struggled with a sensual impulse for another man, though she overcame it from a sense of duty to him. Women are LESS offended with men, in part, from the vicious habits of men, and, in part, from the difference of bodily constitution. Yet, still, to a pure and truly loving woman this must be a painful thought. That he should struggle with and overcome ambition, desire of fortune, superior beauty, &c., or with objectless desire of any kind, is pleasing, but not that he has struggled with positive, appropriated desire, that is, desire with an object. Love, in short, requires an absolute peace and harmony between all parts of human nature, such as it is; and it is offended by any war, though the battle should be decided in favour of the worthier. This is, perhaps, the final cause of the rarity of true love, and the efficient and immediate cause of its difficulty. Ours is a life of probation. We are to contemplate and obey duty for its own sake, and in order to do this, we, in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not merely abstracted from but in direct opposition to the wish, the inclination. Having perfected this, the highest possibility of human nature, man may then with safety harmonise all his being with this—he may love. To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty is the ideal, which, perhaps, no human being ever can arrive at, but which every human being ought to try to draw near unto. This is, in the only wise, and, verily, in a most sublime sense, to see God face to face, which, alas! it seems too true that no man can do and live, that is, a human life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or rather, it would transmute it, and the process of that transmutation, to the senses of other men, would be called death. Even as to the caterpillar, in all probability, the caterpillar dies, and he either, which is most probable, does not see (or, at all events, does not see the connection between the caterpillar and) the butterfly, the beautiful Psyche of the Greeks.
HAPPINESS MADE PERFECT
Those who in this life love in perfection, if such there be, in proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a veil. For when duty and pleasure are absolutely co-incident, the very nature of our organisation necessitates that duty will be contemplated as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. For herein lies the distinction between human and angelic happiness. Humanly happy I call him who in enjoyment finds his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks and finds his duty in enjoyment.
Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate of pleasurable sensations—for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase—but the state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of conscious feeling, has no need of doing wrong, and who, in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from enjoyment.
[Vide Life of S. T. C., by James Gillman, 1838, pp. 176-78.]
THOUGHT AND THINGS
Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the echo.