"True," said the doctor, "perfectly true. My process is for those who
cannot attain to my philosophy. I break for the weak the chain of memory
which holds them to the past; but stronger souls are independent of me.
They can unloose the iron links and free themselves. Would that more had
the needful wisdom and strength thus serenely to put their past behind
them, leaving the dead to bury their dead, and go blithely forward,
taking each new day as a life by itself, and reckoning themselves daily
new-born, even as verily they are! Physically, mentally, indeed, the
present must be for ever the outgrowth of the past, conform to its
conditions, bear its burdens; but moral responsibility for the past the
present has none, and by the very definition of the words can have none.
There is no need to tell people that they ought to regret and grieve over
the errors of the past. They can't help doing that. I myself suffer at
times pretty sharply from twinges of the rheumatism which I owe to
youthful dissipation. It would be absurd enough for me, a quiet old
fellow of sixty, to take blame to myself for what the wild student did,
but, all the same, I confoundedly wish he hadn't.

"Ah, me!" continued the doctor. "Is there not sorrow and wrong enough in
the present world without having moralists teach us that it is our duty
to perpetuate all our past sins and shames in the multiplying mirror of
memory, as if, forsooth, we were any more the causers of the sins of our
past selves than of our fathers' sins. How many a man and woman have
poisoned their lives with tears for some one sin far away in the past!
Their folly is greater, because sadder, but otherwise just like that of
one who should devote his life to a mood of fatuous and imbecile
self-complacency over the recollection of a good act he had once done.
The consequences of the good and the bad deeds our fathers and we have
done fall on our heads in showers, now refreshing, now scorching, of