The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2 [of 2]Shelley, Percy Bysshe
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The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2 [of 2]
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
English prose literature
But, if we would see the truth of things, they must be stripped of this
fallacious appearance of uniformity. In truth, no one action has, when
considered in its whole extent, any essential resemblance with any
other. Each individual, who composes the vast multitude which we have
been contemplating, has a peculiar frame of mind, which, whilst the
features of the great mass of his actions remain uniform, impresses the
minuter lineaments with its peculiar hues. Thus, whilst his life, as a
whole, is like the lives of other men, in detail it is most unlike; and
the more subdivided the actions become, that is, the more they enter
into that class which have a vital influence on the happiness of others
and his own, so much the more are they distinct from those of other men.
“Those little nameless unremember’d acts
Of kindness and of love,”[14]
as well as those deadly outrages which are inflicted by a look, a
word--or less--the very refraining from some faint and most evanescent
expression of countenance; these flow from a profounder source than
the series of our habitual conduct, which, it has been already said,
derives its origin from without. These are the actions, and such as
these, which make human life what it is, and are the fountains of
all the good and evil with which its entire surface is so widely and
impartially overspread; and though they are called minute, they are
called so in compliance with the blindness of those who cannot estimate
their importance. It is in the due appreciating the general effects of
their peculiarities, and in cultivating the habit of acquiring decisive
knowledge respecting the tendencies arising out of them in particular
cases, that the most important part of moral science consists. The
deepest abyss of these vast and multitudinous caverns, it is necessary
that we should visit.
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