Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 28, 1898 - Appendix

REFLECTIONS AND REMARKS
and be continually reminded of my own weakness and the
omnipotence of circumstances. (5) If I from my spy-hole,
looking with purblind eyes upon the least part of a fraction of
the universe, yet perceive in my own destiny some broken
evidences of a plan and some signals of an overruling goodness ;
shall I then ,be so mad as to complain that all cannot be
deciphered ? Shall I not rather wonder, with infinite and
grateful surprise, that in so vast a scheme I seem to have been
able to read, however little, and that that little was encouraging
to faith ?
IX. BLAME. — What comes from without and what from
within, how much of conduct proceeds from the spirit or how
much from circumstances, what is the part of choice and what
the part of the selection offered, where personal character
begins or where, if anywhere, it escapes at all from the
authority of nature, these are questions of curiosity and eter-
nally indifferent to right and wrong. Our theory of blame is
utterly sophisticated and untrue to man's experience. We are
as much ashamed of a pimpled face that came to us by natural
descent as by one that we have earned by our excesses, and
rightly so ; since the two cases, in so much as they unfit us for
the easier sort of pleasing and put an obstacle in the path of
love, are exactly equal in their consequence. We look aside
from the true question. We cannot blame others at all ; we
can only punish them ; and ourselves we blame indifferently
for a deliberate crime, a thoughtless brusquerie, or an act done
without volition in an ecstasy of madness. We blame ourselves
from two considerations : first, because another has suffered ;
and second, because, in so far as we have again done wrong,
we can look forward with the less confidence to what remains
of our career. Shall we repent this failure ? It is there that
the consciousness of sin most cruelly affects us ; it is in view of
this that a man cries out, in exaggeration, that his heart is
desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. We all
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