Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
telling us how we should behave. But we wait
for the neighbour without to tell us of some false,
easier way.' ' The greater part of what my neigh-
bours call good I believe in my soul to be bad.' To
be what we are, and to become what we are capable
of becoming, is the only end of life. It is ' when
we fall behind ourselves ' that ' we are cursed with
duties and the neglect of duties.' ' I love the wild,'
he says, * not less than the good.' And again : ' The
life of a good man wdll hardly improve us more than
the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear
as plainly in the infringement as in the observance,
and ' (mark this) ' our lives are sustained by a nearly
equal expense of virtue of some kind.' Even al-
though he were a prig, it will be owned he could
announce a startling doctrine. ' As for doing good,'
he writes elsewhere, ' that is one of the professions
that are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and,
strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does
not agree with my constitution. Probably I should
not conscientiously and deliberately forsake my
particular calling to do the good which society
demands of me, to save the universe from annihila-
tion ; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater
steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.
If you should ever be betrayed into any of these
philanthropies, do not let your left hand know
what your right hand does, for it is not worth know-
ing.' Elsewhere he returns upon the subject, and
explains his meaning thus : * If I ever did a man
any good in their sense, of course it was something
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