'He Is a Different Being from Me'

“This morning I introduced the subject of the origin of evil.”

Men were made of sterner stuff in 1773. Even while vacationing in Scotland, Boswell and Johnson addressed weighty matters. Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) recounts their exchange on this date, Aug. 27:

“JOHNSON. ‘Moral evil is occasioned by free will, which implies choice between good and evil. With all the evil that there is, there is no man but would rather be a free agent, than a mere machine without the evil; and what is best for each individual, must be best for the whole. If a man would rather be the machine, I cannot argue with him. He is a different being from me.’”

Johnson’s reasoning is traditional but nuanced, not dogmatic. “A mere machine without the evil” is perhaps the ideal for advocates of social engineering, but repellant to Johnson and anyone else fond of his species. For Johnson, it’s essential to keep in mind that evil is a choice, albeit a very seductive one. No one is immune to its blandishments. Human nature is never binary: good or evil. The reality is spelled out by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The friends are in Forres, on the Moray coast in northern Scotland. Boswell replies to Johnson: “‘A man, as a machine, may have agreeable sensations; for instance, he may have pleasure in musick.’” Johnson disagrees:

“‘No, sir, he can not have pleasure in musick; at least no power of producing musick; for he who can produce musick may let it alone: he who can play upon a fiddle may break it: such a man is not a machine.’” Boswell, too often portrayed as an opportunist with a second-rate mind, concludes, reasonably:

“This reasoning satisfied me. It is certain, there cannot be a free agent, unless there is the power of being evil as well as good. We must take the inherent possibilities of things into consideration, in our reasonings or conjectures concerning the works of God.”

Later in the day, the men visit the home of a clergyman in Calder. Johnson, as usual, has his way with a Scotsman: “Dr. Johnson went up with Mr. Grant to the library, which consisted of a tolerable collection; but the Doctor thought it rather a lady’s library, with some Latin books in it by chance, than the library of a clergyman. It had only two of the Latin fathers, and one of the Greek fathers in Latin.”