In every case you try and discover and act upon a
plausible equity that must necessarily be based on arbitrary
assumptions.
There is no equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our
minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever
engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard,
against finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed
in the balance and found wanting.
So, as the recognition of this has grown, Justice has been tempered with
Mercy, which indeed is no more than an attempt to equalize things by
making the factors of the very defect that is condemned, its
condonation. The modern mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between
these extremes, now harsh and now ineffectual.
To me there seems no validity in these quasi-absolute standards.
A man seeks and obeys standards of equity simply to economize his moral
effort, not because there is anything true or sublime about justice, but
because he knows he is too egoistic and weak-minded and obsessed to do
any perfect thing at all, because he cannot trust himself with his own
transitory emotions unless he trains himself beforehand to observe a
predetermined rule.
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