off as fast as we can. Come, Copus, get up, you lazy hound—we must be off."
" Off or not off, sir, I doesn't budge a foot. I stays with my young missus."
" Very well, only 'let us out of the house." While preparations were making for a rapid retreat, one of the brigands went up to Jane Somers and whispered, "my carriage is waiting on the bridge. Lady Teysham and the other ladies at my shooting-box expect us every moment; so be under no alarm."
Jane bowed her head and yielded to her destiny, and since that time has been as happy a specimen of the married life as is often to be met with. Ben-na-Groich, on finding out the hoax, was too much afraid of the ridicule of his friends to make it public; and to this hour, Aunt Alice tells the most wondrous tales of the lawlessness of the Highlands, and the blood-thirstiness and revenge characteristic of a Scottish Chieftain. "Only to think of people cherishing a resentment for nearly a thousand years, and only satisfying it at last by marriage or murder. Oh, Mrs Hobbins, never believe what people says when they talk to you about the foodle system—the starvation system would be a much better name for it, for the whole country is made of nothing but heath, and the gentlemen's clothes is no covering from the cold; and besides all that, they are indelicate to a degree!"—
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
Part VII.
The Conclusion
Chap. I.
The argument, in the foregoing part of our discussion (in which we showed that morality is grounded in an antagonism carried on between our nature and our consciousness,) is obviously founded on the assumption that man is born in weakness and depravity. We need hardly, now-a-days, insist on the natural sinfulness of the human heart, which we are told by our own, and by all recorded experience, as well as by a higher authority than that of man, is desperately wicked, and runneth to evil continually. Deplorable as this fact is, deplorably also and profusely has it been lamented. We are not now therefore, going to swell this deluge of lamentations. Instead of doing so, let us rather endeavour to review dispassionately the fact of our naturally depraved condition, in order to ascertain, if possible, the precise bearing which it has on the development and destiny of our species, and at the same time to carry ourselves still deeper into the philosophy of human consciousness.
To do good and sin not, is the great end of man: and, accordingly, we find him at his first creation stored with every provision for well-doing. But that this is his great end can only be admitted with the qualification that it is to do good freely; for every being which is forced to perform its allotted task is a mere tool or machine, whether the work it performs be a work of good or a work of evil. If, therefore, man does good by the compulsion of others, or under the constraining force of his own natural biases, he is but an automaton, and deserves no more credit for his actings than a machine of this kind does; just as he is also an automaton if he be driven into courses of evil by outward forces which he cannot resist, or by the uncontrollable springs of his own natural framework. But man will be admitted, by all right thinkers, to be not a mere automaton. But then, according to the same thinkers, man is a created being; and, therefore, the question comes to be, how can a created being be other than an
