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Philosophically considered, Pain is so far stronger a determinant than Pleasure, that its vis a tergo might have sufficed to ensure the survival of the race, without the far milder action of Pleasure being necessary at all; so that the very existence of Pleasure would lead us to infer that, besides its function of selecting, like Pain, among life's possibilities, it has the function of actually replenishing the vital powers, and thus making amends, by its healing and invigorating, for the wear and tear, the lessening of life's resources through life's other great Power of Selection, the terror-angel of Pain.
It is a confession of failure in the highest function of being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a vis a tergo for the evolution of living force.
What would be the result were I to leave this, and indeed the kingdom of Austria altogether? Would the life-certificate, if signed by the authorities of a non-Austrian place, still be valid? A tergo. I beg you will let me know the postage all my letters have cost you. Sunday, September 22, 1816. Certain things can never be fully expressed.
Whatever the number was, the crowd was very great, so great that one might well feel alarmed for the safety of any delicate person who was in the pack which formed itself at one place in the course of the evening. Some obstruction must have existed a fronte, and the vis a tergo became fearful in its pressure on those who were caught in the jam.
which an Italian translator has entirely mistaken; Uomin' ambi, ch'orrore a' risguardanti Facean coi rosseggianti Vanni del tergo. But Darwin could have known nothing of Pindar; and the word may perhaps he found with a similar application in one of our own poets. As the singularity of his poems caused them to be too much admired at first, so are they now more neglected than they deserve.
So you see, when a child comes to be, we will say a year and a day old, and makes his first choice between right and wrong, he is at a disadvantage; for he has that vis a tergo, as we doctors call it, that force from behind, of a whole year's life of selfishness, for which he is no more to blame than a calf is to blame for having lived in the same way, purely to gratify his natural appetites.
Beauty must be the first law of life to the sex that has not the privilege of choosing. Under the circumstances, it is surprising how much of plainness women have preserved. Possibly because of the extraordinary directions which beauty culture may take. Burton asserts that the Somali choose wives by ranging the women in line for inspection; she wins a husband of note who projects farthest a tergo.
Science itself had been crowded so close to the edge of the abyss that its attempts to escape were as metaphysical as the leap, while an ignorant old man felt no motive for trying to escape, seeing that the only escape possible lay in the form of vis a tergo commonly called Death.
Such a view forgets that all the forces of life work originally and fundamentally a tergo, that experience and reason are not the ground of preference but its result.
So that a preacher is resembled to a ploughman, as it is in another place: Nemo admota aratro manu, et a tergo respiciens, aptus est regno Dei. "No man that putteth his hand to the plough, and looketh back, is apt for the kingdom of God." That is to say, let no preacher be negligent in doing his office. Albeit this is one of the places that hath been racked, as I told you of racking scriptures.
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