21 I get out of my bed

If man had been left alone in this world would he have fallen?

If there had been no Woman would Man have been his own tempter?

I see him now subject to infinite weaknesses, fallen into infinite sin without any outside temptations. Would he have had none if he had been alone?

O what a giant is Man when he fights against himself, and what a dwarf when he tries to help himself.

I cannot rise out of my bed till the physician helps me. Nay I cannot tell that I am able to rise till he tells me so. I do nothing, I know nothing of my self.

How little and how impotent a piece of the world is any man alone? He can sin alone and suffer alone but not repent, not be absolved without another.

Someone tells me I may rise and I do so. But I am readier to fall to the earth now I am up than I was when I lay in the bed.

O perverse way, irregular motion of man, when rising is the way to ruin.

How many men are promoted and then do not fill the place they are raised to?

If that man does not fill the place other men will.

Complaints of his insufficiency will fill it.

Even if there are only rumours, put about by who knows whom, that he is corrupt in his place or insufficient in his place another will be prepared to succeed.

A man can fall because he does not or is not believed to fill his place.

And sometimes he falls because he overfills his place. He may bring so much virtue, so much justice, so much integrity to the position as shall spoil it, burden it. His integrity may be a libel upon his predecessor and cast an infamy upon him, and a burden upon his successor to proceed by example, and bring the place itself to an undervalue and the market to an uncertainty.

I am up and I seem to stand, but I go round.

I am a new argument of the new philosophy that the earth moves round.

Why may I not believe that the whole earth moves in a round motion though it seems to me to stand still, when I look as if I am standing still and yet am carried in a giddy and circular motion as I stand?

Man has no centre but misery, there and only there he is fixed and sure to find himself.

However little he be raised he moves and moves in a circle giddily.

He is not so well as he was in the centre from which he was raised.

Everything serves to exemplify, to illustrate Mans misery. But I need go no further than myself.

For a long time I was not able to rise. At last I must be raised by others. And now I am up I am ready to sink lower than before