[英国]拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生/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，也不能被复制。生命的整体一旦被破坏就会引起混乱。灵魂不是孪生儿，而是独生苗。虽然它最终以孩子的面目示人，却有着一种无敌的力量能决定命运，不会接受同一个生命。生命有着一种唯我独尊的神圣，这种神圣无须掩盖，每一天都显露在人们的举手投足之中。我们对自己深信不疑，同时去怀疑他人。我们可以让自己为所欲为，但同样的事，别人做，我们称之为罪孽，我们都有这样的尝试。我们充满自信的一个例子就是：人们从来不像他们想象的那样蔑视罪恶。换句话说，人人都为自己想好一个不受约束的自由，而这个自由是不能让别人来享用的。