--Believe me
to be, Madam, with many assurances of respect, truly yours,--."
I cannot distinguish the precise proportion of cruelty in this
letter. Did the writer designedly torture Butts by telling his wife,
or did he really think that she would in the end be happier because
Butts would not have a secret reserved from her,--a temptation to
lying--and because with this secret in her possession, he might
perhaps be restrained in future? Nobody knows. All we know is that
there are very few human actions of which it can be said that this or
that taken by itself produced them. With our inborn tendency to
abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not
exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are
too simple, and which, in fact, have no being in rerum natura.
Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone.
There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician. I
see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not
unite in one resulting deed, and think it very probable that the
squire was both cruel and merciful to the same person in the letter;
influenced by exactly conflicting passions, whose conflict ended SO.
Pages:
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84