Human experimentation in psychology -- Fiction; Science fiction; Thought and thinking -- Fiction
"But scarcely any application of the process gives me so much pleasure to
dream about as its use to make forgiving possible, full, free, perfect,
joyous forgiving, in cases where otherwise, however good our intentions,
it is impossible, simply because we cannot forget. Because they cannot
forget, friends must part from friends who have wronged them, even though
they do from their hearts wish them well. But they must leave them, for
they cannot bear to look in their eyes and be reminded every time of
some bitter thing. To all such what good tidings will it be to learn of
my process!
"Why, when the world gets to understand about it I expect that two men or
two women, or a man and a woman, will come in here, and say to me, 'We
have quarrelled and outraged each other, we have injured our friend, our
wife, our husband; we regret, we would forgive, but we cannot, because we
remember. Put between us the atonement of forgetfulness, that we may love
each other as of old,' and so joyous will be the tidings of forgiveness
made easy and perfect, that none will be willing to waste even an hour in
enmity. Raging foes in the heat of their first wrath will bethink
themselves ere they smite, and come to me for a more perfect satisfaction
of their feud than any vengeance could promise."
Henry suddenly stopped in his restless pacing, stepped on tiptoe to the
slightly opened door of the retiring room, and peered anxiously in. He
thought he heard a slight stir. But no; she was still sleeping deeply,
her position quite unchanged. He drew noiselessly back, and again almost
closed the door.
"I suppose," resumed the doctor, after a pause, "that I must prepare
myself as soon as the process gets well enough known to attract attention
to be roundly abused by the theologians and moralists. I mean, of course,
the thicker-headed ones. They'll say I've got a machine for destroying
conscience, and am sapping the foundations of society. I believe that is
the phrase. The same class of people will maintain that it's wrong to
cure the moral pain which results from a bad act who used to think it
wrong to cure the physical diseases induced by vicious indulgence. But
the outcry won't last long, for nobody will be long in seeing that the
morality of the two kinds of cures is precisely the same, If one is
wrong, the other is. If there is something holy and God-ordained in the
painful consequences of sin, it is as wrong to meddle with those
consequences when they are physical as when they are mental. The alleged
reformatory effect of such suffering is as great in one case as the
other. But, bless you, nobody nowadays holds that a doctor ought to
refuse to set a leg which its owner broke when drunk or fighting, so that
the man may limp through life as a warning to himself and others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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