And conversely, the weakness of the intellect lies
in a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in their
logic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realize
such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity,
in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of
effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state
of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary,
whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example
from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or
distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain
himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto
himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge,
the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction
through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by
stage; this is God's justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to
most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society,
because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept
arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good,
including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own
intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives
it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account.
Pages:
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132