Donal Grant, George MacDonald [classic novels for teens txt] 📗

far from being inactive. In the afternoon the butler brought a message that his lordship would be glad to see Mr. Grant when school was over.

Donal found the earl very weak, but more like a live man, he thought, than he had yet seen him. He pointed to a seat, and began to talk in a way that considerably astonished the tutor.

"Mr. Grant," he began, with not a little formality, "I have known you long enough to believe I know you really. Now I find myself, partly from the peculiarity of my constitution, partly from the state of my health, partly from the fact that my views do not coincide with those of the church of Scotland, and there is no episcopal clergyman within reach of the castle-I find myself, I say, for these reasons, desirous of some conversation with you, more for the sake of identifying my own opinions, than in the hope of receiving from you what it would be unreasonable to expect from one of your years."

Donal held his peace; the very power of speech seemed taken from him: he had no confidence in the man, and nothing so quenches speech as lack of faith. But the earl had no idea of this distrust, never a doubt of his listener's readiness to take any position he required him to take. Experience had taught him as little about Donal as about his own real self.

"I have long been troubled," continued his lordship after a momentary pause, "with a question of which one might think the world must by this time be weary-which yet has, and always will have, extraordinary fascination for minds of a certain sort-of which my own is one: it is the question of the freedom of the will:-how far is the will free? or how far can it be called free, consistently with the notion of a God over all?"

He paused, and Donal sat silent-so long that his lordship opened the eyes which, the better to enjoy the process of sentence-making, he had kept shut, and half turned his head towards him: he had begun to doubt whether he was really by his bedside, or but one of his many visions undistinguishable by him from realities. Re-assured by the glance, he resumed.

"I cannot, of course, expect from you such an exhaustive and formed opinion as from an older man who had made metaphysics his business, and acquainted himself with all that had been said upon the subject; at the same time you must have expended a considerable amount of thought on these matters!"

He talked in a quiet, level manner, almost without inflection, and with his eyes again closed-very much as if he were reading a book inside him.

"I have had a good deal," he went on, "to shake my belief in the common ideas on such points.-Do you believe there is such a thing as free will?"

He ceased, awaiting the answer which Donal felt far from prepared to give him.

"My lord," he said at length, "what I believe, I do not feel capable, at a moment's notice, of setting forth; neither do I think, however unavoidable such discussions may be in the forum of one's own thoughts, that they are profitable between men. I think such questions, if they are to be treated at all between man and man, and not between God and man only, had better be discussed in print, where what is said is in some measure fixed, and can with a glance be considered afresh. But not so either do I think they can be discussed to any profit."

"What do you mean? Surely this question is of the first importance to humanity!"

"I grant it, my lord, if by humanity you mean the human individual. But my meaning is, that there are many questions, and this one, that can be tested better than argued."

"You seem fond of paradox!"

"I will speak as directly as I can: such questions are to be answered only by the moral nature, which first and almost only they concern; and the moral nature operates in action, not discussion."

"Do I not then," said his lordship, the faintest shadow of indignation in his tone, "bring my moral nature to bear on a question which I consider from the ground of duty?"

"No, my lord," answered Donal, with decision; "you bring nothing but your intellectual nature to bear on it so; the moral nature, I repeat, operates only in action. To come to the point in hand: the sole way for a man to know he has freedom is to do something he ought to do, which he would rather not do. He may strive to acquaint himself with the facts concerning will, and spend himself imagining its mode of working, yet all the time not know whether he has any will."

"But how am I to put a force in operation, while I do not know whether I possess it or not?"

"By putting it in operation-that alone; by being alive; by doing the next thing you ought to do, or abstaining from the next thing you are tempted to, knowing you ought not to do it. It sounds childish; and most people set action aside as what will do any time, and try first to settle questions which never can be settled but in just this divinely childish way. For not merely is it the only way in which a man can know whether he has a free will, but the man has in fact no will at all unless it comes into being in such action."

"Suppose he found he had no will, for he could not do what he wished?"

"What he ought, I said, my lord."

"Well, what he ought," yielded the earl almost angrily.

"He could not find it proved that he had no faculty for generating a free will. He might indeed doubt it the more; but the positive only, not the negative, can be proved."

"Where would be the satisfaction if he could only prove the one thing and not the other."

"The truth alone can be proved, my lord; how should a lie be proved? The man that wanted to prove he had no freedom of will, would find no satisfaction from his test-and the less the more honest he was; but the man anxious about the dignity of the nature given him, would find every needful satisfaction in the progress of his obedience."

"How can there be free will where the first thing demanded for its existence or knowledge of itself is obedience?"

"There is no free will save in resisting what one would like, and doing what the Truth would have him do. It is true the man's liking and the truth may coincide, but therein he will not learn his freedom, though in such coincidence he will always thereafter find it, and in such coincidence alone, for freedom is harmony with the originating law of one's existence."

"That's dreary doctrine."

"My lord, I have spent no little time and thought on the subject, and the result is some sort of practical clearness to myself; but, were it possible, I should not care to make it clear to another save by persuading him to arrive at the same conviction by the same path-that, namely, of doing the thing required of him."

"Required of him by what?"

"By any one, any thing, any thought, with which can go the word required by-anything that carries right in its demand. If a man does not do the thing which the very notion of a free will requires, what in earth, heaven, or hell, would be the use of his knowing all about the will? But it is impossible he should know anything."

"You are a bold preacher!" said the earl. "-Suppose now a man was unconscious of any ability to do the thing required of him?"

"I should say there was the more need he should do the thing."

"That is nonsense."

"If it be nonsense, the nonsense lies in the supposition that a man can be conscious of not possessing a power; he can only be not conscious of possessing it, and that is a very different thing. How is a power to be known but by being a power, and how is it to be a power but in its own exercise of itself? There is more in man than he can at any given moment be conscious of; there is life, the power of the eternal behind his consciousness, which only in action can he make his own; of which, therefore, only in action, that is obedience, can he become conscious, for then only is it his."

"You are splitting a hair!"

"If the only way to life lay through a hair, what must you do but split it? The fact, however, is, that he who takes the live sphere of truth for a flat intellectual disc, may well take the disc's edge for a hair."

"Come, come! how does all this apply to me-a man who would really like to make up his mind about the thing, and is not at the moment aware of any very pressing duty that he is neglecting to do?"

"Is your lordship not aware of some not very pressing duty that you are neglecting to do? Some duties need but to be acknowledged by the smallest amount of action, to become paramount in their demands upon us."

"That is the worst of it!" murmured the earl. "I refuse, I avoid such acknowledgment! Who knows whither it might carry me, or what it might not go on to demand of me!"

He spoke like one unaware that he spoke.

"Yes, my lord," said Donal, "that is how most men treat the greatest things! The devil blinds us that he may guide us!"

"The devil!-bah!" cried his lordship, glad to turn at right angles from the path of the conversation; "you don't surely believe in that legendary personage?"

"He who does what the devil would have him do, is the man who believes in him, not he who does not care whether he is or not, so long as he avoids doing his works. If there be such a one, his last thought must be to persuade men of his existence! He is a subject I do not care to discuss; he is not very interesting to me. But if your lordship now would but overcome the habit of depending on medicine, you would soon find out that you had a free will."

His lordship scowled like a thunder-cloud.

"I am certain, my lord," added Donal, "that the least question asked by the will itself, will bring an answer; a thousand asked by the intellect, will bring nothing."

"I did not send for you to act the part of father confessor, Mr. Grant," said his lordship, in a tone which rather perplexed Donal; "but as you have taken upon you the office, I may as well allow you keep it; the matter to which you refer, that of my medical treatment of myself, is precisely what has brought me into my present difficulty. It would be too long a story to tell you how, like poor Coleridge, I was first decoyed, then enticed from one stage to another; the desire to escape from pain is a natural instinct; and that, and the necessity also for escaping my past self, especially in its relations to certain others, have brought me by degrees into far too great a dependence on the use of drugs. And now that, from certain symptoms, I have ground to fear a