Page 190 - erewhon

spite of, rather than by the help of, those whom you are now
about to pester, and that you will only win your freedom af-
ter years of a painful struggle in which it will be hard to say
whether you have suffered most injury, or inflicted it.
‘Remember also, that if you go into the world you will
have free will; that you will be obliged to have it; that there
is no escaping it; that you will be fettered to it during your
whole life, and must on every occasion do that which on
the whole seems best to you at any given time, no matter
whether you are right or wrong in choosing it. Your mind
will be a balance for considerations, and your action will go
with the heavier scale. How it shall fall will depend upon
the kind of scales which you may have drawn at birth, the
bias which they will have obtained by use, and the weight
of the immediate considerations. If the scales were good to
start with, and if they have not been outrageously tampered
with in childhood, and if the combinations into which you
enter are average ones, you may come off well; but there
are too many ‘ifs’ in this, and with the failure of any one of
them your misery is assured. Reflect on this, and remember
that should the ill come upon you, you will have yourself to
thank, for it is your own choice to be born, and there is no
compulsion in the matter.
‘Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among
mankind; there is a certain show of sundry phases of con-
tentment which may even amount to very considerable
happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a man’s
life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and
few indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth

1