Obliviscor jam injurias tuas, Clodia.—This is about the most barefaced use of the rhetorical trick—viz., to affect not to do, to pass over whilst actually doing all the while—that anywhere I have met with.—'Pro Cælio,' p. 234 [p. 35, Volgraff's edition].
Evaserint and comprehenderint.—Suppose they had rushed out, and suppose they had seized Licinus. So I read—not issent.—Ibid., p. 236 [Ibid., p. 44].
Velim vel potius quid nolim dicere.—Aristotle's case of throwing overboard your own property. He vult dicere, else he could not mean, yet nonvult, for he is shocked at saying such things of Clodia.—Ibid., p. 242 [Ibid., p. 49].
2.—MORAL AND PRACTICAL.
Morality.—That Paley's principle does not apply to the higher morality of Christianity is evident from this: when I seek to bring before myself some ordinary form of wickedness that all men offend by, I think, perhaps, of their ingratitude. The man born to £400 a year thinks nothing of it, compares himself only with those above his own standard, and sees rather a ground of discontent in his £400 as not being £4,000 than any ground of deep thankfulness. Now, this being so odious a form of immorality, should—by Paley—terminate in excessive evil. On the contrary, it is the principle, the very dissatisfaction which God uses for keeping the world moving (how villainous the form—these 'ings'!).
All faith in the great majority is, and ought to be, implicit. That is, your faith is not unrolled—not separately applied to each individual doctrine—but is applied to some individual man, and on him you rely. What he says, you say; what he believes, you believe. Now, he believes all these doctrines, and you implicitly through him. But what I chiefly say as the object of this note is, that the bulk of men must believe by an implicit faith. Ergo, decry it not.
You delude yourself, Christian theorist, with the idea of offences that else would unfit you for heaven being washed out by repentance. But hearken a moment. Figure the case of those innumerable people that, having no temptation, small or great, to commit murder, would have committed it cheerfully for half-a-crown; that, having no opening or possibility for committing adultery, would have committed it in case they had. Now, of these people, having no possibility of repentance (for how repent of what they have not done?), and yet ripe to excess for the guilt, what will you say? Shall they perish because they might have been guilty? Shall they not perish because the potential guilt was not, by pure accident, accomplished in esse?
Here is a mistake to be guarded against. If you ask why such a man, though by nature gross or even Swift-like in his love of dirty ideas, yet, because a gentleman and moving in corresponding society, does not indulge in such brutalities, the answer is that he abstains through the modifications of the sympathies. A low man in low society would not be doubtful of its reception; but he, by the anticipations of sympathy (a form that should be introduced as technically as Kant's anticipations of perception), feels it would be ill or gloomily received. Well now, I, when saying that a man is altered by sympathy so as to think that, through means of this power, which otherwise he would not think, shall be interpreted of such a case as that above. But wait; there is a distinction: the man does not think differently, he only acts as if he thought differently. The case I contemplate is far otherwise; it is where a man feels a lively contempt or admiration in consequence of seeing or hearing such feelings powerfully expressed by a multitude, or, at least, by others which else he would not have felt. Vulgar people would sit for hours in the presence of people the most refined, totally unaware of their superiority, for the same reason that most people (if assenting to the praise of the Lord's Prayer) would do so hyper-critically, because its real and chief beauties are negative.
Not only is it false that my understanding is no measure or rule for another man, but of necessity it is so, and every step I take towards truth for myself is a step made on behalf of every other man.