consoling us. In religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the
consciences of men 'accusing or else excusing them.' For all our life long
we are talking with ourselves:--What is thought but speech? What is
feeling but rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be
always in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at
first sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.

Third Thesis:--

We do not what we will, but what we wish.

Socrates would teach us a lesson which we are slow to learn--that good
intentions, and even benevolent actions, when they are not prompted by
wisdom, are of no value. We believe something to be for our good which we
afterwards find out not to be for our good. The consequences may be
inevitable, for they may follow an invariable law, yet they may often be
the very opposite of what is expected by us. When we increase pauperism by
almsgiving; when we tie up property without regard to changes of
circumstances; when we say hastily what we deliberately disapprove; when we
do in a moment of passion what upon reflection we regret; when from any
want of self-control we give another an advantage over us--we are doing not
what we will, but what we wish. All actions of which the consequences are
not weighed and foreseen, are of this impotent and paralytic sort; and the
author of them has 'the least possible power' while seeming to have the
greatest. For he is actually bringing about the reverse of what he
intended. And yet the book of nature is open to him, in which he who runs
may read if he will exercise ordinary attention; every day offers him
experiences of his own and of other men's characters, and he passes them
unheeded by. The contemplation of the consequences of actions, and the
ignorance of men in regard to them, seems to have led Socrates to his