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Updated: May 10, 2025
Although the force of example will always exercise great influence upon the formation of character, the self-originating and sustaining force of one's own spirit must be the mainstay. This alone can hold up the life, and give individual independence and energy. "Unless man can erect himself above himself," said Daniel, a poet of the Elizabethan era, "how poor a thing is man!"
The switch had operated; the current, probably from the device's own batteries, was there! Quickly and steadily the liquid within the case took on its self-originating glow, until the midnight laboratory was faintly washed with the delicate rosy light. The wires emerged in their complexity as before, and then the brains, all gruesome and naked in their cradles of unnatural life.
All that the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this if more be possible would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and introspective thought.
On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in men, is certainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher virtues. Safety and comfort are good, indeed, for the good; for the brave, the self-originating, the earnest. They give to such a clear stage and no favour, wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men.
I wish, at the outset, to forestall any such misapplication of the facts I am about to state, and to impress upon my readers the difference between these two subjects of inquiry, since it by no means follows, that, because individuals are endowed with the power of reproducing and perpetuating their kind, they are in any sense self-originating.
And the special characteristic of the action of this force as thus conceived, which we may call the derivative force, is seen to be its regularity, just as the special characteristic of the self-originating action was its spontaneity.
And a perpetually increasing number of phenomena are brought under this head, and are shown to be, not the immediate results of self-originating action, but the more or less remote results of derivative action governed by laws.
Nature never asks any questions nor makes any allowances. To her mind, sin is sin! Whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap. Whether he yield to evil voluntarily or be driven into it by resistless force; whether he sin because of a self-originating propensity or because his father sinned before him, is all one to those resistless executors of Nature's law, sickness, sorrow, disaster, death!
And even a large number of those phenomena, which specially belong to life and living creatures, in whom alone, if anywhere, the self-originating action is to be found, are observed to be subject to law and therefore to be the issue not of self-originating but of derivative action.
And the purpose of all and each of these moralists precludes the theory of free-will i.e., the theory that our volitions are self-originating and unpredictable. III. We must consider next the Stoical theory of Happiness, or rather of the Good, which with them was proclaimed to be the sole, indispensable, and self-sufficing condition of Happiness.
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