This did very well for a time; but in the autumn of 1826, whilst, as he expresses it, he was in a dull state of nerves, he awakened as from a dream. He put the question to himself: "'Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions to which you are looking forward could be effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!' At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.... I seemed to have nothing left to live for.
"At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not.... I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it.... The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection'—I was not then acquainted with them—exactly describe my case:
"'A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.'"[263]
He now felt that his father had committed a blunder in the education which he had given him; that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings and dry up the fountains of pleasurable emotions; that it is a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermines all desires and all pleasures which are the effects of association.
"My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for; no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as little in anything else.... I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I was bound to, go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year."[264]
This sad state of mind was the protest of the soul against the skeleton of intellectual formulas into which it had been cramped. A man is not going to live or die for conclusions, opinions, calculations, analytical nothings. Man is not and cannot be made to be a mere reasoning machine, a contrivance to grind out syllogisms. He is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, believing, acting animal. We cannot construct a philosophy of life upon abstract conclusions of the analytical faculty; life is action and for action, and, if we insist on analyzing and proving everything, we shall never come to action. Humanity is a mere fiction of the mind, and can be nothing, whilst God, to most men at least, is a living reality, to be believed in, hoped in, loved. Were it possible for us to accept the doctrines of Stuart Mill, we should feel the same interest in his humanitarian projects that we do in Mr. Bergh's society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. We pity the poor brutes, but we butcher them and eat them all the same. If there is nothing but nature and nature's laws, it is perfectly right that the few should live for the many, and that thousands should sweat and groan to fill the belly of one animal who is finer and stronger than those he feeds upon. Neither the law of gravity, nor that of the conservation of forces, nor that which impels bodies along the line of least resistance, nor that which causes the fittest—which means the strongest—to survive, can impose upon us a moral obligation not to do what we have the strength to do. These infidels talk of the intellectual cowardice of those who believe. Let them first be frank, and tell us, without circumlocution or concealment, that there is nothing but force; that whatever is, must be; and that nothing is either right or wrong. If we are permitted to swallow oysters whole, to butcher oxen and imprison monkeys in mere wantonness; and if these are our forefathers, why may not the strong and intelligent members of the human race put the weak and ignorant to any use they may see fit; or why may we not imitate the more natural savage who roasts or boils his man as his civilized brother would a pig?
It is easy to make a show of despising the argument implied in this question; but, admitting the atheistic evolutionary hypothesis, it cannot be answered.
Cannibals hold that it is for the greatest happiness of the greatest number that their enemies should be eaten; and, after all, what is happiness, in the utilitarian and animal sense, but an affair of taste, to a great extent even of imagination? Have not slave-owners in all times held that it was for the greatest good of the greatest number that slavery should continue to exist? Or has the greatest-happiness principle had anything to do with the abolition of slavery among the Christian nations or elsewhere?