he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated
those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable
and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever.
Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra
(excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins
into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams
and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous
times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively
speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned
to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having
learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully
convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old
bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely
re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are
confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to
say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests.
That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man (though to my
mind it's a superfluous luxury) that he never has really had any caprice
or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a
piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things
called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his
willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we
have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have
to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.
All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these
laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and
entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain
edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything
will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no
more incidents or adventures in the world.