Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/102

 THE hour-glass is a reminder not only of Time's quick flight, but concurrently also of the dust to which we shall at last return. In a case of crime, what the world thinks the crime is seldom what deserves the punishment; but it is that actionthe one among the many by which, as by roots, the affair became connected with our lifethat action, I say, which most depended on our will, and which had been easiest for us to have left undone. Habit might be described as a kind of moral friction--as something not allowing easy passage to the mind, but rather so binding it to things that to work loose from them is difficult. To become wiser means to become continually more and more acquainted with the failings to which our instrument of feeling and judgment may be subject. Caution in judgment is what is nowadays to be recommended to each and all. Did we but once every ten years attain to no more than a single incontestable truth at the hands of each philosophical writer, the harvest would even then be rich enough.