"How long will she sleep, doctor?" asked Henry, after satisfying himself
by looking through the crack of the door that she was actually asleep.
"Patients do not usually wake under an hour or two," replied the doctor.
"She was very drowsy, and that is a good sign. I think we may have the
best hopes of the result of the operation."
Henry walked restlessly to and fro. After Dr. Heidenhoff had regarded him
a few moments, he said--
"You are nervous, sir. There is quite a time to wait, and it is better to
remain as calm as possible, for, in the event of an unsatisfactory
result, your friend will need soothing, and you will scarcely be equal to
that if you are yourself excited. I have some very fair cigars here. Do
me the honour to try one. I prescribe it medicinally. Your nerves need
quieting;" and he extended his cigar-case to the young man.
As Henry with a nod of acknowledgment took a cigar and lit it, and
resumed his striding to and fro, the doctor, who had seated himself
comfortably, began to talk, apparently with the kindly intent of
diverting the other's mind.
"There are a number of applications of the process I hope to make, which
will be rather amusing experiments. Take, for instance, the case of a
person who has committed a murder, come to me, and forgotten all about
it. Suppose he is subsequently arrested, and the fact ascertained that
while he undoubtedly committed the crime, he cannot possibly recall his
guilt, and so far as his conscience is concerned, is as innocent as a
new-born babe, what then? What do you think the authorities would do?"
"I think," said Henry, "that they would be very much puzzled what to do."
"Exactly," said the doctor; "I think so too. Such a case would bring out
clearly the utter confusion and contradiction in which the current
theories of ethics and moral responsibility are involved. It is time the
world was waked up on that subject. I should hugely enjoy precipitating
such a problem on the community. I'm hoping every day a murderer will
come in and require my services.
"There is another sort of case which I should also like to have," he
continued; shifting his cigar to the other side of his mouth, and
uncrossing and recrossing his knees. "Suppose a man has done another a
great wrong, and, being troubled by remorse, comes to me and has the
sponge of oblivion passed over that item in his memory. Suppose the man
he has wronged, pursuing him with a heart full of vengeance, gets him at
last in his power, but at the same time finds out that he has forgotten,
and can't be made to remember, the act he desires to punish him for."
"It would be very vexatious," said Henry..
"Wouldn't it, though? I can imagine the pursuer, the avenger, if a really
virulent fellow, actually weeping tears of despite as he stands before
his victim and marks the utter unconsciousness of any offence with which
his eyes meet his own. Such a look would blunt the very stiletto of a
Corsican. What sweetness would there be in vengeance if the avenger, as
he plunged the dagger in his victim's bosom, might not hiss in his ear,
'Remember!' As well find satisfaction in torturing an idiot or mutilating
a corpse. I am not talking now of brutish fellows, who would kick a stock
or stone which they stumbled over, but of men intelligent enough to
understand what vengeance is."
"But don't you fancy the avenger, in the case you supposed, would retain
some bitterness towards his enemy, even though he had forgotten the
offence?"
"I fancy he would always feel a certain cold dislike and aversion for
him," replied the doctor--"an aversion such as one has for an object
or an animal associated with some painful experience; but any active
animosity would be a moral impossibility, if he were quite certain that
there was absolutely no guilty consciousness on the other's part.
"But scarcely any application of the process gives me so much pleasure to
dream about as its use to make forgiving possible, full, free, perfect,
joyous forgiving, in cases where otherwise, however good our intentions,
it is impossible, simply because we cannot forget. Because they cannot
forget, friends must part from friends who have wronged them, even though
they do from their hearts wish them well. But they must leave them, for
they cannot bear to look in their eyes and be reminded every time of
some bitter thing. To all such what good tidings will it be to learn of
my process!
"Why, when the world gets to understand about it I expect that two men or
two women, or a man and a woman, will come in here, and say to me, 'We
have quarrelled and outraged each other, we have injured our friend, our
wife, our husband; we regret, we would forgive, but we cannot, because we
remember. Put between us the atonement of forgetfulness, that we may love
each other as of old,' and so joyous will be the tidings of forgiveness
made easy and perfect, that none will be willing to waste even an hour in
enmity. Raging foes in the heat of their first wrath will bethink
themselves ere they smite, and come to me for a more perfect satisfaction
of their feud than any vengeance could promise."
Henry suddenly stopped in his restless pacing, stepped on tiptoe to the
slightly opened door of the retiring room, and peered anxiously in. He
thought he heard a slight stir. But no; she was still sleeping deeply,
her position quite unchanged. He drew noiselessly back, and again almost
closed the door.
"I suppose," resumed the doctor, after a pause, "that I must prepare
myself as soon as the process gets well enough known to attract attention
to be roundly abused by the theologians and moralists. I mean, of course,
the thicker-headed ones. They'll say I've got a machine for destroying
conscience, and am sapping the foundations of society. I believe that is
the phrase. The same class of people will maintain that it's wrong to
cure the moral pain which results from a bad act who used to think it
wrong to cure the physical diseases induced by vicious indulgence. But
the outcry won't last long, for nobody will be long in seeing that the
morality of the two kinds of cures is precisely the same, If one is
wrong, the other is. If there is something holy and God-ordained in the
painful consequences of sin, it is as wrong to meddle with those
consequences when they are physical as when they are mental. The alleged
reformatory effect of such suffering is as great in one case as the
other. But, bless you, nobody nowadays holds that a doctor ought to
refuse to set a leg which its owner broke when drunk or fighting, so that
the man may limp through life as a warning to himself and others.
"I know some foggy-minded people hold in a vague way that the working of
moral retribution is somehow more intelligent, just, and equitable than
the working of physical retribution. They have a nebulous notion that the
law of moral retribution is in some peculiar way God's law, while the law
of physical retribution is the law of what they call nature, somehow not
quite so much God's law as the other is. Such an absurdity only requires
to be stated to be exposed. The law of moral retribution is precisely as
blind, deaf, and meaningless, and entitled to be respected just as
little, as the law of physical retribution. Why, sir, of the two, the
much-abused law of physical retribution is decidedly more moral, in the
sense of obvious fairness, than the so-called law of moral retribution
itself. For, while the hardened offender virtually escapes all pangs of
conscience, he can't escape the diseases and accidents which attend vice
and violence. The whole working of moral retribution, on the contrary, is
to torture the sensitive-souled, who would never do much harm any way,
while the really hard cases of society, by their very hardness, avoid all
suffering. And then, again, see how merciful and reformatory is the
working of physical retribution compared with the pitilessness of the
moral retribution of memory. A man gets over his accident or disease and
is healthy again, having learned his lesson with the renewed health that
alone makes it of any value to have had that lesson. But shame and sorrow
for sin and disgrace go on for ever increasing in intensity, in
proportion as they purify the soul. Their worm dieth not, and their fire
is not quenched. The deeper the repentance, the more intense the longing
and love for better things, the more poignant the pang of regret and the
sense of irreparable loss. There is no sense, no end, no use, in this law
which increases the severity of the punishment as the victim grows in
innocency.
"Ah, sir," exclaimed the doctor, rising and laying his hand caressingly
on the battery, while a triumphant exultation shone in his eyes, "you
have no idea of the glorious satisfaction I take in crushing, destroying,
annihilating these black devils of evil memories that feed on hearts. It
is a triumph like a god's.
"But oh, the pity of it, the pity of it!" he added, sadly, as his hand
fell by his side, "that this so simple discovery has come so late in the
world's history! Think of the infinite multitude of lives it would have
redeemed from the desperation of hopelessness, or the lifelong shadow of
paralysing grief to all manner of sweet, good, and joyous uses!"
Henry opened the door slightly, and looked into the retiring-room.
Madeline was lying perfectly motionless, as he had seen her before. She
had not apparently moved a muscle. With a sudden fear at his heart, he
softly entered, and on tiptoe crossed the room and stood over her. The
momentary fear was baseless. Her bosom rose and fell with long, full
breathing, the faint flush of healthy sleep tinged her cheek, and the
lips were relaxed in a smile. It was impossible not to feel, seeing her
slumbering so peacefully, that the marvellous change had been indeed
wrought, and the cruel demons of memory that had so often lurked behind
the low, white forehead were at last no more.
When he returned to the office, Dr. Heidenhoff had seated himself, and
was contemplatively smoking.
"She was sleeping, I presume," he said.
"Soundly," replied Henry.
"That is well. I have the best of hopes. She is young. That is a
favourable element in an operation of this sort."
Henry said nothing, and there was a considerable silence. Finally the
doctor observed, with the air of a man who thinks it just as well to
spend the time talking--
"I am fond of speculating what sort of a world, morally speaking, we
should have if there were no memory. One thing is clear, we should have
no such very wicked people as we have now. There would, of course, be
congenitally good and bad dispositions, but a bad disposition would not
grow worse and worse as it does now, and without this progressive badness
the depths of depravity are never attained."
"Why do you think that?"
"Because it is the memory of our past sins which demoralizes as, by
imparting a sense of weakness and causing loss of self-respect. Take the
memory away, and a bad act would leave us no worse in character than we
were before its commission, and not a whit more likely to repeat it than
we were to commit it the first time."
"But surely our good or bad acts impress our own characters for good or
evil, and give an increased tendency one way or the other."
"Excuse me, my dear sir. Acts merely express the character. The
recollection of those acts is what impresses the character, and gives it
a tendency in a particular direction. And that is why I say, if memory
were abolished, constitutionally bad people would remain at their
original and normal degree of badness, instead of going from bad to
worse, as they always have done hitherto in the history of mankind.
Memory is the principle of moral degeneration. Remembered sin is the most
utterly diabolical influence in the universe. It invariably either
debauches or martyrizes men and women, accordingly as it renders them
desperate and hardened, or makes them a prey to undying grief and
self-contempt. When I consider that more sin is the only anodyne for sin,
and that the only way to cure the ache of conscience is to harden it, I
marvel that even so many as do essay the bitter and hopeless way of
repentance and reform. In the main, the pangs of conscience, so much
vaunted by some, do most certainly drive ten deeper into sin where they
bring one back to virtue."
"But," remarked Henry, "suppose there were no memory, and men did forget
their acts, they would remain just as responsible for them as now."
"Precisely; that is, not at all," replied the doctor.
"You don't mean to say there is no such thing as responsibility, no such
thing as justice. Oh, I see, you deny free will. You are a
necessitarian."
The doctor waved his hand rather contemptuously.
"I know nothing about your theological distinctions; I am a doctor. I say
that there is no such thing as moral responsibility for past acts, no
such thing as real justice in punishing them, for the reason that human
beings are not stationary existences, but changing, growing, incessantly
progressive organisms, which in no two moments are the same. Therefore
justice, whose only possible mode of proceeding is to punish in present
time for what is done in past time, must always punish a person more or
less similar to, but never identical with, the one who committed the
offence, and therein must be no justice.
"Why, sir, it is no theory of mine, but the testimony of universal
consciousness, if you interrogate it aright, that the difference between
the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make
them different persons for all moral purposes. That single fact we were
just speaking of--the fact that no man would care for vengeance on one
who had injured him, provided he knew that all memory of the offence had
been blotted utterly from his enemy's mind--proves the entire
proposition. It shows that it is not the present self of his enemy that
the avenger is angry with at all, but the past self. Even in the
blindness of his wrath he intuitively recognizes the distinction between
the two. He only hates the present man, and seeks vengeance on him in so
far as he thinks that he exults in remembering the injury his past self
did, or, if he does not exult, that he insults and humiliates him by the
bare fact of remembering it. That is the continuing offence which alone
keeps alive the avenger's wrath against him. His fault is not that he did
the injury, for _he_ did not do it, but that he remembers it.
"It is the first principle of justice, isn't it, that nobody ought to be
punished for what he can't help? Can the man of to-day prevent or affect
what he did yesterday, let me say, rather, what the man did out of whom
he has grown--has grown, I repeat, by a physical process which he could
not check save by suicide. As well punish him for Adam's sin, for he
might as easily have prevented that, and is every whit as accountable for
it. You pity the child born, without his choice, of depraved parents.
Pity the man himself, the man of today who, by a process as inevitable as
the child's birth, has grown on the rotten stock of yesterday. Think you,
that it is not sometimes with a sense of loathing and horror unutterable,
that he feels his fresh life thus inexorably knitting itself on, growing
on, to that old stem? For, mind you well, the consciousness of the man
exists alone in the present day and moment. There alone he lives. That is
himself. The former days are his dead, for whose sins, in which he had no
part, which perchance by his choice never would have been done, he is
held to answer and do penance. And you thought, young man, that there was
such a thing as justice !"
"I can see," said Henry, after a pause, "that when half a lifetime has
intervened between a crime and its punishment, and the man has reformed,
there is a certain lack of identity. I have always thought punishments in
such cases very barbarous. I know that I should think it hard to answer
for what I may have done as a boy, twenty years ago.
"Yes," said the doctor, "flagrant cases of that sort take the general
eye, and people say that they are instances of retribution rather than
justice. The unlikeness between the extremes of life, as between the babe
and the man, the lad and the dotard, strikes every mind, and all admit
that there is not any apparent identity between these widely parted
points in the progress of a human organism. How then? How soon does
identity begin to decay, and when is it gone--in one year, five years,
ten years, twenty years, or how many? Shall we fix fifty years as the
period of a moral statute of limitation, after which punishment shall be
deemed barbarous? No, no. The gulf between the man of this instant and
the man of the last is just as impassable as that between the baby and
the man. What is past is eternally past. So far as the essence of justice
is concerned, there is no difference between one of the cases of
punishment which you called barbarous, and one in which the penalty
follows the offence within the hour. There is no way of joining the past
with the present, and there is no difference between what is a moment
past and what is eternally past."
"Then the assassin as he withdraws the stiletto from his victim's breast
is not the same man who plunged it in."
"Obviously not," replied the doctor. "He may be exulting in the deed, or,
more likely, he may be in a reaction of regret. He may be worse, he may
be better. His being better or worse makes it neither more nor less just
to punish him, though it may make it more or less expedient. Justice
demands identity; similarity, however close, will not answer. Though a
mother could not tell her twin sons apart, it would not make it any more
just to punish one for the other's sins."
"Then you don't believe in the punishment of crime?" said Henry.
"Most emphatically I do," replied the doctor; "only I don't believe in
calling it justice or ascribing it a moral significance. The punishment
of criminals is a matter of public policy and expediency, precisely like
measures for the suppression of nuisances or the prevention of epidemics.
It is needful to restrain those who by crime have revealed their
likelihood to commit further crimes, and to furnish by their punishment a
motive to deter others from crime."
"And to deter the criminal himself after his release," added Henry.
"I included him in the word 'others,'" said the doctor. "The man who is
punished is other from the man who did the act, and after punishment he
is still other."
"Really, doctor," observed Henry, "I don't see that a man who fully
believes your theory is in any need of your process for obliterating his
sins. He won't think of blaming himself for them any way."
"True," said the doctor, "perfectly true. My process is for those who
cannot attain to my philosophy. I break for the weak the chain of memory
which holds them to the past; but stronger souls are independent of me.
They can unloose the iron links and free themselves. Would that more had
the needful wisdom and strength thus serenely to put their past behind
them, leaving the dead to bury their dead, and go blithely forward,
taking each new day as a life by itself, and reckoning themselves daily
new-born, even as verily they are! Physically, mentally, indeed, the
present must be for ever the outgrowth of the past, conform to its
conditions, bear its burdens; but moral responsibility for the past the
present has none, and by the very definition of the words can have none.
There is no need to tell people that they ought to regret and grieve over
the errors of the past. They can't help doing that. I myself suffer at
times pretty sharply from twinges of the rheumatism which I owe to
youthful dissipation. It would be absurd enough for me, a quiet old
fellow of sixty, to take blame to myself for what the wild student did,
but, all the same, I confoundedly wish he hadn't.
"Ah, me!" continued the doctor. "Is there not sorrow and wrong enough in
the present world without having moralists teach us that it is our duty
to perpetuate all our past sins and shames in the multiplying mirror of
memory, as if, forsooth, we were any more the causers of the sins of our
past selves than of our fathers' sins. How many a man and woman have
poisoned their lives with tears for some one sin far away in the past!
Their folly is greater, because sadder, but otherwise just like that of
one who should devote his life to a mood of fatuous and imbecile
self-complacency over the recollection of a good act he had once done.
The consequences of the good and the bad deeds our fathers and we have
done fall on our heads in showers, now refreshing, now scorching, of
rewards and of penalties alike undeserved by our present selves. But,
while we bear them with such equanimity as we may, let us remember that
as it is only fools who flatter themselves on their past virtues, so it
is only a sadder sort of fools who plague themselves for their past
faults."
Henry's quick ear caught a rustle in the retiring-room. He stepped to the
door and looked in. Madeline was sitting up.