insisting on the importance of the future is of the utmost use in aiding
our resolutions and stimulating our exertions. If the future were no
more amenable to our wills than the past; if our precautions, our
sanguine schemes, our hopes and fears were of as little avail in the one
case as the other; if we could neither soften our minds to pleasure, nor
steel our fortitude to the resistance of pain beforehand; if all objects
drifted along by us like straws or pieces of wood in a river, the will
being purely passive, and as little able to avert the future as to
arrest the past, we should in that case be equally indifferent to both;
that is, we should consider each as they affected the thoughts and
imagination with certain sentiments of approbation or regret, but
without the importunity of action, the irritation of the will, throwing
the whole weight of passion and prejudice into one scale, and leaving
the other quite empty. While the blow is coming, we prepare to meet it,
we think to ward off or break its force, we arm ourselves with patience
to endure what cannot be avoided, we agitate ourselves with fifty
needless alarms about it; but when the blow is struck, the pang is over,
the struggle is no longer necessary, and we cease to harass or torment
ourselves about it more than we can help. It is not that the one
belongs to the future and the other to time past; but that the one is a
subject of action, of uneasy apprehension, of strong passion, and that
the other has passed wholly out of the sphere of action into the region
of

Calm contemplation and majestic pains.[3]

It would not give a man more concern to know that he should be put to
the rack a year hence, than to recollect that he had been put to it a
year ago, but that he hopes to avoid the one, whereas he must sit down
patiently under the consciousness of the other. In this hope he wears