The Angel in the Cloud. Edwin W. Fuller

healing salve of Truth.

      But grant that mind exists in fullest play:

       How does it work and what its modes of thought?

       Here consciousness may act, and hold to view

       A dim outline of powers, contraposed.

       In such a conflict, every one may seize

       The doctrine suits him best. Hence different creeds—

       Desire battling reason, reason will,

       And will the weathercock of motive’s wind;

       Motive the cringing slave of circumstance.

       And here Charybdis rises; no control

       Has man o’er circumstance, but circumstance

       Begets the motive governing the will;

       Then how can man be free? Yet some may say,

       Man can obey the motive, or can not.

       He can, but only when a stronger rules.

       That we without a motive never act,

       I do declare, though in the face of Reid.

       That that is strongest which impels, a child

       Might know, although Jouffroy exclaims,

       “You’re reasoning in a circle.” Let us place

       An iron fragment ’twixt two magnet-bars,

       What one attracts is thereby stronger proved.

       Or it may be the really weaker one,

       But yet, because of nearness to the steel,

       Possess a relatively greater force.

       And so of motives, howe’er trivial they,

       The one that moves is strongest to the mind.

       To illustrate: Suppose I pare a peach;

       A friend near by me banteringly asserts

       That I can not refrain from eating it.

       Two motives now arise—the appetite,

       And the desire to prove my self-control.

       I hesitate awhile, then laughing say,

       “I would not give the peach to prove you wrong.”

       But as my teeth press on it, pride springs up,

       And bids me show that I am not the slave

       Of appetite, and far away I hurl

       The tinted, fragrant sphere.

       Was not each thought

       Spontaneous? Could I control their rise?

       How perfectly absurd to talk of choice

       Between two motives offered to the mind!

       As if the motive was a horse we’d choose

       To pull our minds about. There is no choice

       Until the motive makes it; then we choose,

       Not ’tween the motives, but the acts.

       If, then,

       The spring of action is the motive’s power,

       The motive being far beyond our sway,

       Where is our freedom? But a fabled myth!

       And man but differs from a star in this—

       The laws of stars are fixed and definite,

       And every movement there can be foretold;

       Of man, no deed can be foreseen till done.

       At most we can but form a general guess

       How he will act, at such a time and place.

       Even if we knew the motives that would rise,

       We could not prophesy unless we knew

       Our subject’s frame of mind; for differently,

       On different minds, same motives often act.

       Hence, we can tell the conduct of a friend

       More surely than a stranger’s, since we know,

       By long acquaintance, how his motives work.

       But should new motives rise, we cannot tell

       Until experience gives us data new.

       Thus we will ride beside a friend alone,

       And show to him our money without fear,

       Because we know the motives—love for us,

       Honor, and horror of disgraceful crime—

       Are stronger with him than cupidity.

       But with a stranger we would feel unsafe;

       Nor would we trust our friend, were we alone

       Upon an island, wrecked, and without food,

       And saw his eye with hunger glare, and heard

       The famished motive whispering to him, “Kill!”

       If he were free, would we feel slightest fear?

       For all his soul would shudder from the deed,

       And never motive could impel such crime.

      Upon this principal all law is made;

       For were man free he could not be controlled,

       And all compliance would be his caprice.

       But since he is the tyrant-motive’s slave,

       The law to govern motive only seeks

       And builds its sanction on the base of pain,

       As motive strongest in the human heart.

       It only falls below perfection’s height,

       Because there are exceptions to the rule;

       When hate and passion, lust and greed of gold,

       Prove stronger than the fear of distant pain.

       And could the law know fully every heart,

       And vary sanction, there would be no crime.

      But law itself, and the obeying world,

       Are proofs against the grosser form of Fate:

       That all is preordained, nor can be changed.

       All human life is vacillating life;

       We make our plans each day, then alter them.

       We form resolves one hour that break the next,

       And no one dares assert that he will act,

       Upon the morrow, in a certain way;

       But cries, it all depends on circumstance.

       And this is strange, that while we cannot change

       Our lives one tittle by our own free will,

       We help, each day, to change our neighbor’s course;

       And he assists the motives changing ours.

       For all relations to our fellow-men,

       Are powers that form our lives, in spite of us.

       But we may change our motives, often do,

       By changing place, or circumstance of life,

       By hearing, reading, or reflective thought;

       Yet are these very things from motives done,

       And motives mocking all our vain commands.

       One motive made the object of an act,

       Another rises subject of the act;

       And to the final motive we can never reach.

      The world’s a self-adjusting, vast machine,

       Whose human comparts cannot guide themselves;

       And each is but