Lay Morals, and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
Philosophy
Lay Morals, and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Essays; Short stories
It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and
autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other
powers tributary but independent. If I now behold one walking in a
garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun, digesting his food
with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing himself
by the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand delicate
balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the path, and all the
time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about America, or the dog-star, or
the attributes of God—what am I to say, or how am I to describe the thing
I see? Is that truly a man, in the rigorous meaning of the word? or is
it not a man and something else? What, then, are we to count the
centre-bit and axle of a being so variously compounded? It is a question
much debated. Some read his history in a certain intricacy of nerve and
the success of successive digestions; others find him an exiled piece of
heaven blown upon and determined by the breath of God; and both schools
of theorists will scream like scalded children at a word of doubt. Yet
either of these views, however plausible, is beside the question; either
may be right; and I care not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a
more immediate point. What is the man? There is Something that was
before hunger and that remains behind after a meal. It may or may not be
engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it changes,
heightens, and sanctifies. Thus it is not engaged in lust, where
satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love, where no
satisfaction can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age, sickness,
or alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing the
sentiment. This something, which is the man, is a permanence which
abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now
triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress of
appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all. So, to the man, his
own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult of the
senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night. It is forgotten; it is
hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall behold
himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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