He paused, and Donal sat silent--so long that his lordship opened the eyes which, the better to enjoy the process of sentence-making, he had kept shut, and half turned his head towards him: he had begun to doubt whether he was really by his bedside, or but one of his many visions undistinguishable by him from realities. Re-a.s.sured by the glance, he resumed.
"I cannot, of course, expect from you such an exhaustive and formed opinion as from an older man who had made metaphysics his business, and acquainted himself with all that had been said upon the subject; at the same time you must have expended a considerable amount of thought on these matters!"
He talked in a quiet, level manner, almost without inflection, and with his eyes again closed--very much as if he were reading a book inside him.
"I have had a good deal," he went on, "to shake my belief in the common ideas on such points.--Do you believe there is such a thing as free will?"
He ceased, awaiting the answer which Donal felt far from prepared to give him.
"My lord," he said at length, "what I believe, I do not feel capable, at a moment"s notice, of setting forth; neither do I think, however unavoidable such discussions may be in the forum of one"s own thoughts, that they are profitable between men. I think such questions, if they are to be treated at all between man and man, and not between G.o.d and man only, had better be discussed in print, where what is said is in some measure fixed, and can with a glance be considered afresh. But not so either do I think they can be discussed to any profit."
"What do you mean? Surely this question is of the first importance to humanity!"
"I grant it, my lord, if by humanity you mean the human individual. But my meaning is, that there are many questions, and this one, that can be tested better than argued."
"You seem fond of paradox!"
"I will speak as directly as I can: such questions are to be answered only by the moral nature, which first and almost only they concern; and the moral nature operates in action, not discussion."
"Do I not then," said his lordship, the faintest shadow of indignation in his tone, "bring my moral nature to bear on a question which I consider from the ground of duty?"
"No, my lord," answered Donal, with decision; "you bring nothing but your intellectual nature to bear on it so; the moral nature, I repeat, operates only in action. To come to the point in hand: the sole way for a man to know he has freedom is to do something he ought to do, which he would rather not do. He may strive to acquaint himself with the facts concerning will, and spend himself imagining its mode of working, yet all the time not know whether he has any will."
"But how am I to put a force in operation, while I do not know whether I possess it or not?"
"By putting it in operation--that alone; by being alive; by doing the next thing you ought to do, or abstaining from the next thing you are tempted to, knowing you ought not to do it. It sounds childish; and most people set action aside as what will do any time, and try first to settle questions which never can be settled but in just this divinely childish way. For not merely is it the only way in which a man can know whether he has a free will, but the man has in fact no will at all unless it comes into being in such action."
"Suppose he found he had no will, for he could not do what he wished?"
"What he ought, I said, my lord."
"Well, what he ought," yielded the earl almost angrily.
"He could not find it proved that he had no faculty for generating a free will. He might indeed doubt it the more; but the positive only, not the negative, can be proved."
"Where would be the satisfaction if he could only prove the one thing and not the other."
"The truth alone can be proved, my lord; how should a lie be proved?
The man that wanted to prove he had no freedom of will, would find no satisfaction from his test--and the less the more honest he was; but the man anxious about the dignity of the nature given him, would find every needful satisfaction in the progress of his obedience."
"How can there be free will where the first thing demanded for its existence or knowledge of itself is obedience?"
"There is no free will save in resisting what one would like, and doing what the Truth would have him do. It is true the man"s liking and the truth may coincide, but therein he will not learn his freedom, though in such coincidence he will always thereafter find it, and in such coincidence alone, for freedom is harmony with the originating law of one"s existence."
"That"s dreary doctrine."
"My lord, I have spent no little time and thought on the subject, and the result is some sort of practical clearness to myself; but, were it possible, I should not care to make it clear to another save by persuading him to arrive at the same conviction by the same path--that, namely, of doing the thing required of him."
"Required of him by what?"
"By any one, any thing, any thought, with which can go the word required by--anything that carries right in its demand. If a man does not do the thing which the very notion of a free will requires, what in earth, heaven, or h.e.l.l, would be the use of his knowing all about the will? But it is impossible he should know anything."
"You are a bold preacher!" said the earl. "--Suppose now a man was unconscious of any ability to do the thing required of him?"
"I should say there was the more need he should do the thing."
"That is nonsense."
"If it be nonsense, the nonsense lies in the supposition that a man can be conscious of not possessing a power; he can only be not conscious of possessing it, and that is a very different thing. How is a power to be known but by being a power, and how is it to be a power but in its own exercise of itself? There is more in man than he can at any given moment be conscious of; there is life, the power of the eternal behind his consciousness, which only in action can he make his own; of which, therefore, only in action, that is obedience, can he become conscious, for then only is it his."
"You are splitting a hair!"
"If the only way to life lay through a hair, what must you do but split it? The fact, however, is, that he who takes the live sphere of truth for a flat intellectual disc, may well take the disc"s edge for a hair."
"Come, come! how does all this apply to me--a man who would really like to make up his mind about the thing, and is not at the moment aware of any very pressing duty that he is neglecting to do?"
"Is your lordship not aware of some not very pressing duty that you are neglecting to do? Some duties need but to be acknowledged by the smallest amount of action, to become paramount in their demands upon us."
"That is the worst of it!" murmured the earl. "I refuse, I avoid such acknowledgment! Who knows whither it might carry me, or what it might not go on to demand of me!"
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 in, the mere pa.s.sing 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."
"You go too far for me," said his lordship, looking a little uncomfortable, "but I think it is time to try and break myself a little of the habit--or almost time. By degrees one might, you know,--eh?"
"I have little faith in doing things by degrees, my lord--except such indeed as by their very nature cannot be done at once. It is true a bad habit can only be contracted by degrees; and I will not say, because I do not know, whether anyone has ever cured himself of one by degrees; but it cannot be the best way. What is bad ought to be got rid of at once."
"Ah, but, don"t you know? that might cost you your life!"
"What of that, my lord! Life, the life you mean, is not the first thing."