[英國]拉爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生/Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think, or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another.
The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside;in its quality, and its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it;it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles:it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right and fair from the actor's point of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact.
生命可以被想象，但是不能被割裂，也不能被複製。生命的整體一旦被破壞就會引起混亂。靈魂不是孿生兒，而是獨生苗。雖然它最終以孩子的麵目示人，卻有著一種無敵的力量能決定命運，不會接受同一個生命。生命有著一種唯我獨尊的神聖，這種神聖無須掩蓋，每一天都顯露在人們的舉手投足之中。我們對自己深信不疑，同時去懷疑他人。我們可以讓自己為所欲為，但同樣的事，別人做，我們稱之為罪孽，我們都有這樣的嚐試。我們充滿自信的一個例子就是：人們從來不像他們想象的那樣蔑視罪惡。換句話說，人人都為自己想好一個不受約束的自由，而這個自由是不能讓別人來享用的。