He has a dim consciousness of ways whereby he may elude the consequences of his wickedness, and of the possibility of making amends to law.

“And now, auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkin’,
A certain Bardie’s rantin’, drinkin’,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin’
To your black pit;
But, faith, he’ll turn a corner jinkin’,
And cheat you yet.”

The more orthodox and less generous individual is prone to agree, as regards himself, with Burns; but, he sees, most probably, that such an escape is impossible to others.  He has secret solacement in a latent belief that he himself is an exception.  There will be a special method of dealing with him.  He is a “chosen sample”; and “God will think twice before He damns a man of his quality.”  It is just because there is such doubt as to the universality and necessity of the law which connects actions and consequences in the moral sphere, that man’s deeds have an ethical character; while, to disperse doubt and ignorance by the assurance of complete knowledge, would take the good from goodness and the ill from evil.

In this ingenious manner, the poet turns the imperfect intellect and delusive knowledge of man to a moral use.  Ordinarily, the intellectual impotence of man is regarded as carrying with it moral incapacity as well, and the delusiveness of knowledge is one of the strongest arguments for pessimism.  To persons pledged to the support of no theory, and to those who have the naivete, so hard to maintain side by side with strong doctrinal convictions, it seems amongst the worst of evils that man should be endowed with fallacious faculties, and cursed with a futile desire for true knowledge which is so strong, that it cannot be quenched even in those who believe that truth can never be attained.  It is the very best men of the world who cry

            “Oh, this false for real,
  This emptiness which feigns solidity,—­
  Ever some grey that’s white, and dun that’s black,—­
  When shall we rest upon the thing itself,
  Not on its semblance?  Soul—­too weak, forsooth,
  To cope with fact—­wants fiction everywhere! 
  Mine tires of falsehood:  truth at any cost!"[A]

[Footnote A:  A Bean-Stripe.]

The poet himself was burdened in no small degree with this vain desire for knowing the truth; and he recognized, too, that he was placed in a world which seems both real and beautiful, and so well worth knowing.  Yet, it is this very failure of knowledge—­a failure which, be it remembered, is complete and absolute, because, as he thinks, all facts must turn into phantoms by mere contact with our “relative intelligences,”—­which he constitutes into the basis of his optimistic faith.