r your disappointments, then, and the
harm you receive from others without complaint; you are but
suffering the penalty you deserve. Not only our fortune but our
character, as has been said, is thus predetermined; we are what
we are, in virtue of what we have been. If a man is a mean miser, it
is because in a previous existence he was already unduly covetous
of wealth. 'Tis but the seed he sowed in the past, that blossoms out
in the present. If a man commit murder, it is because he was
already guilty of unchecked violence in previous lives. The
beginnings which he made in the past culminate in the awful
present.

This is indeed a plausible theory, and it would help us to read some
dark riddles if it were true, but there is not the slightest reason for
supposing that it is. If ever there was a theory in the air, this is
one. We not only have no recollections of any past incarnations,
but we have no ground for inferring that there were any. I have
mentioned the theory merely in order to exhibit its opposite. And
the opposite is this: that a man is not responsible for the attractive
or repulsive qualities with which he is born; that these are not to be
accounted as his, in the sense that he is accountable for them. The
son of the dipsomaniac, for instance, is not responsible for the
morbid craving that stirs in him. He begins life, so far as
responsibility is concerned, so far as merit or demerit is concerned,
with a fresh start. He is not responsible for the craving; he is
responsible only for assenting to it. True, the pull in his case is
incomparably stronger than in others; still he can resist. He is
responsible, not for the hideous thing itself, but for the degree in
which he yields to it. He is meritorious to the extent of the effort
he puts forth not to yield to it. The reason why this point is often
obscured is that from the first awakening of consciousness, from
the time when first we have been capable of deliberate choice, we
have more or less often assented to these evil propulsions and have
thus made them our own. It has therefore become impossible to
separate clearly between that element in our acts which is imposed
upon us from without, and that deliberate element in the act which
is our own. Nevertheless, no fair-minded person will dispute that
there are qualities or predispositions, for which--hideous as they
may be--we are no more responsible than we are for being born
with an unprepossessing face. Men a