Bernard Bosanquet

“ For the mind of man is open to us as the extension of our own, and has its own necessity, which weaves its great patterns on the face of the whole world. And in these patterns — the patterns of life itself — the fullest feeling finds embodiment.
If we now proceed to say something of what is involved in the classification of the arts, it is not for the sake of advocating any particular arrangement. Mere classification is always an idle study, but the general condition and essence of the difference between kindred things usually throws a searching light on their inmost nature. ”

“ But the community which has a youth, a maturity, and a decadence, as distinct as those of a single human being, and very nearly as self-conscious; which has a tone and spirit as recognisable in the words and bearing of its members as those of a character in a play; and which expresses its mind in the various regions of human action and endurance much as an artist expresses his individuality in the creations of his genius—such a community had existed, before the beginnings of the modern world, in the Greek city-state, and in the Greek city-state alone. ”

“ Nothing is so simple, nothing is so impossible. It is the cry from the heart of religion for all time, “Only believe.”
It is here that you must leave the distinctive ground of morality, while carrying with you its demands, and the social atmosphere which make it a halfway house to religion. For in the social whole the good is partly real, and partly, therefore, we are saved from the condemning “ought to be.” But, in principle, mere morality says, “You ought to be equal to the situation.” The good is imperative on you here and now, and you are to make it real in and by your will. ”

“ The course by which alone I can hope honestly to awaken a true logical interest among any who may be quite unfamiliar with the subject, is to approach the matter descriptively, and try to set before you fully and fairly what the problem is which the process of knowledge has to meet. And then it may be possible to claim a genuine theoretical curiosity—none the less genuine that it may be tinged with a sympathy for man’s common birthright of intelligence—for the detailed explanation of the means by which this problem is solved from day to day. Such an explanation is the science of Logic. ”

“ This same conception of the ideal is the lesson of our doctrine of art. The ideal of every art must be revealed, I take it, in terms of the art itself; and it must be what underlies the whole series of efforts which the artist’s imagination has made and is making, to create, in his own medium, an embodied feeling in which he can rest satisfied. It is the world as he has access to it through his art. ”

“ Religious faith has two inseparable sides of will and of judgement. They are hardly indeed sides, for each has the other in it. Both mean absorption in a good such that nothing else matters and nothing else is real. This is why religion “justifies” the religious man. It does not abolish his finiteness — his weakness and his sin. But what it does is to make him deny that they are real — to make his whole being, as he accepts and affirms it, a denial that they are real. This is the very crux and test of religion, and its combined simplicity and profundity are here most plain. ”

“ The sting of this suggestion is taken out when we thoroughly grasp the idea that recognition is a matter of logic, working on and through experience, and not of choice or fancy. If my mind has no attitude to yours, there is no interdependence and I cannot be a party to securing you rights. You are not, for me, a sharer in a capacity for a common good, which each of us inevitably respects. A dog or a tree may be an instrument to the good life, and it may therefore be right to treat it in a certain way, but it cannot be a subject of rights. ”

“ We are speaking merely of what the world is for us, and for us it is not only a system of reality but a system of purposes. Our world of will is a permanent factor of our waking consciousness, just as much as our world of knowledge. Now our will is made up of a great number of purposes, more or less connected together, just as our knowledge is made up of a great number of provinces and regions more or less connected together. And just as in our knowledge at any moment much is clear, much is dim, much is implied, and the whole forms a continuous context, so it is with our purposes. ”

“ It only requires us to rise above the appearance, and keep our unhesitating grasp on the reality which is wholly good.
Perhaps we may add, without straying too far from simplicity, that in keeping up this grasp on the complex fact of religion we are led to see that “good” is a hard thing both to appreciate and to realise. It is not some plain decalogue, some clear white against black. It is a life, a spirit, a meaning, to be wrought out and to be fought out. To each of us, religion seems to say, it is and must be offered in our own individual form. ”

“ Every work of art and every thing of beauty presents such a pattern, so to speak, on its surface. But we must contrive to understand how the same principle can extend into the sphere of the representation of things; of which things, prima facie, we know only what we have learned from experience, and can say, it would seem, little that is necessary or inevitable as to the connection of appearances with any character or quality which could help to embody feeling. For instance, a man’s laughing might be the expression of pain or anger, if we had not learned by experience that it is otherwise. ”

“ For the force of the State proceeds essentially from its character of being our own mind extended, so to speak, beyond our immediate consciousness. Not only is the conduct of life as a whole beyond the powers of the average individual at his average level, but it is beyond the powers of all the average individuals in a society taken together at their average level. We make a great mistake in thinking of the force exercised by the State as limited to the restraint of disorderly persons by the police and the punishment of intentional law-breakers. The State is the fly-wheel of our life. ”

“ We do not treat of Name, Proposition, Syllogism, or of Concept, Judgment, Inference, but only of the two latter parts. The name or concept has no reality in living language or living thought, except when referred to its place in a proposition or judgment. We ought not to think of propositions as built up by putting words or names together, but of words or names as distinguished though not separable elements in propositions. Aristotle takes the simple and straightforward view. “A term is the element into which a proposition is broken up, such as subject and predicate.” ”

“ The only thing that need be added is that by nature we mean, for aesthetic purposes, the fulness of the soul or semblance of external things, that which imaginative perception freely apprehends, and remodels in the interest of feeling. There is no reason to cut down our meaning to the attenuated constructions of physical science. They are not nature as it appears, and nature as it appears is what we love and admire. It is the living external world, as we relive it in our fullest imaginative experience. ”

“ Any system of institutions which represents to us, on the whole, the conditions essential to affirming such a will, in objects of action such as to constitute a tolerably complete life, has an imperative claim upon our loyalty and obedience as the embodiment of our liberty. The only question that can arise is whether the system is that which it pretends to be. But even if rebellion is a duty, it can only be so because the imperative obligation, as we recognise it, is irreconcilable with the particular system which claims our obedience in its name. ”

“ Here even the veteran expert in life must stand to his own mature experience somewhat as the younger generation stands to its predecessor’s. He finds himself necessarily negligent of its entanglements, its history, its controversy, and trying to take it at its centre simply as it is and for its own sake. To be one with the supreme good in the faith which is also will — that is religion; and to be thus wholly and unquestioningly is the religious temper. Then all the riches of the spirit may add themselves to the mood, on condition that nothing in them stands out to impair or to violate it. ”

“ In one sense my mind is in my head, in the other sense my head is in my mind. In the one sense I am in space, in the other sense space is in me. Just so, however rough the metaphor, from one point of view the microscope is one among a host of things seen from the outside; from the other point of view all that we see is in the microscope, which is itself not seen at all.
It is in this latter sense that our mental equipment is looked at, when it is regarded as knowledge; and it is in this sense that it forms a panorama which absolutely shuts in every one of us into his own circle of ideas. ”

“ If our view of the distinction and connection of the arts is right, and it is simply a question of the medium adopted by each, and the capacities of that medium as proved by experience, what is to be said of the distinctive character of poetry? It seems in a sense to have almost no material element, to work directly with significant ideas in which the objects of the imagination are conveyed. Language is so transparent, that it disappears, so to speak, into its own meaning, and we are left with no characteristic medium at all. ”

“ The neighbourhood is for the mind its immediate picture of the world, the frame into which its further vista of society as a whole must be fitted, or, in other words, its sphere of direct relations. The family is a group of natural relations; but the neighbourhood consists of relations which are as natural in a different way, not through blood, but through contact. It is not a selection, but rather a specimen of life as a whole, for it must include as a rule all the necessary elements of the social fabric. It includes all that comes to us by direct sense-perception from day to day ”

“ And what religion asks you to do is to keep your eye on that experience, and enter into it as fully as you can. For it is not like anything else, except the degrees of itself. "Out of weakness are made strong" — that is the story of all love and loyalty, all worship, devotedness, aspiration. Life and mind can do nothing by themselves. Their whole structure and way of working is to throw themselves into something greater, something inclusive. “As a little child,” this word will meet us on every side in religion. ”

“ This is a new factor, and it introduces not only quite a different motive in art, but the entire problem of what passes as the beauty of nature. Because obviously a drawing of a bull hunt recalls to us things rather than patterns. For a pattern, as a rule, you want the help of a draughtsman; but for things you can see all round you every day, you seem to want no help at all. Only they do not prima facie show you simple abstract patterns; and so, how do you bring them to act as an aesthetic embodiment of feeling? ”

“ Consider what the causal analysis of any problem demands; remember that all enumeration implies a ground or whole, on which its value depends; and contrast the exhaustive examination of an instance thoroughly known, with the enumeration of thousands of cases lumped under a general predicate. Determine always to know the truth; welcome all information and all suggestion, but remember that truth is always systematic, and that every judgment, when you scrutinise it, demands a fuller and fuller connection with the structure of life. It is not cleverness or learning that makes the philosopher ”

“ But, applied to responsible human beings, such a theory, if really kept to its distinctive contention, is an insult. It leads to the notion that the State may take hold of any man, whose life or ideas are thought capable of improvement, and set to work to ameliorate them by forcible treatment. There is no true punishment except where one is an offender against a system of rights which he shares, and therefore against himself. And such an offender has a right to the recognition of his hostile will; it is inhuman to treat him as a wild animal or a child, whom we simply mould to our aims. ”

“ We must be on our guard against fining down and explaining away our unity with the eternal in the very act, as we think too hastily, of insisting on it. We must not let go our main grasp of the values which, wherever brought into being in a world, so far make heaven of that place and time, and which all religion teaches us to cherish here and now as everywhere and always — love, beauty, truth. In these our unity is solid and plain — our unity with God and with the whole of being. ”

“ It is plain that the unity of myself with others in a common good is the same in principle as the unity of myself with myself which I aim at in aiming at my own good. Thought and language, we should bear in mind, unite me to myself just as they unite me to others, and they expand my being by binding my own life into a whole no less than by making intercourse possible between my fellow men and myself. ”

“ I think we shall be on the right lines if we demand in principle that the substratum of the critical attitude shall be the full imaginative experience, certainly of the spectator who enjoys, and as far as possible of the artist who creates. The true critic, indeed, is he, and he only, who can teach us rightly to enjoy. And we must bear in mind that the imagination itself is necessarily very sensitive to checks and failures in its efforts after satisfactory form — and this genuine sensitiveness, I should suppose, must be the basis of the true critical estimate. ”

“ This is what I call the common-sense theory of the Objective. Like common sense, it assumes that there is a world which the withdrawal of our individual consciousness does not affect, but which persists and acts all the same. Unlike common sense, it lays down an assertion as to the nature of this world, viz. that it is, apart from our consciousness, the same as it is for our consciousness. The world in consciousness, it assumes, is subjective, the world out of consciousness is objective, and the former is an imperfect copy of the latter in a feebler material. ”

“ We should fairly set these two attitudes of mind side by side with each other and with the full religious temper which simply rests on its oneness with what is deeper than anything temporal. When we begin to restrict and define, do we not begin to omit and to diminish?
But again, our purpose here is not to make any man doubt his religion; it is only to offer the suggestion that whatever his belief, he should take it so deeply, so in proportion, as not to lose contact with the complete attitude which makes it religion. What is united with the eternal is eternal. ”

“ It would be as true to say that reason is independent of civilisation, or the soul independent of culture. Right is not exhausted in the facts of past history; but it is at every moment embodied in facts; and to comprehend that the social phenomena which are among the most solid and unyielding of our experiences, are nevertheless ideal in their nature, and consist of conscious recognitions, by intelligent beings, of the relations in which they stand, is to make a great step towards grasping the essential task of science in dealing with society. ”

“ And if more is wanted, as an inclined plane for the common-sense intelligence, I say that any one who considers human nature in the light of the facts of love, loyalty, community, will see that the character which in religion comes to a climax, is its very essence or centre or vital knot. Nobody is anything except as he joins himself to something. “Be a whole or join a whole.” “You cannot be a whole unless you join a whole.” ”

“ Hegel calls such a critic—he is thinking especially of historians—“the psychological valet, for whom there are no heroes, not because they are no heroes, but because he is only a valet.” On the whole, a man is what he does. If his series of actions has the root of the matter in it, it is wrong either for him to be deterred, or for a critic to carp, because they bring him gain or glory, or gratify him by activity and excitement. To shrink from particular occasions of action because one’s self may find satisfaction in them is to fall back into the mere general willing of the abstract good. ”

“ We possess the mode which applies to us, and for religion that is all we want. If we are to argue and define, we must not stop short of philosophy, which just means keeping hold of the main certainty, while going into all the difficulties. But that is not our business here; we cannot all be trained philosophers, and it would be a queer world if we were. Our business is to see where and how you can really get the good which you trust in your religion to bring you.
In the unity of love and will with the supreme good you are not only “saved,” but you are “free” and “strong.” ”

“ But again, the instinct which, in looking for what has power to grow or come of itself, lays hold of what is merely primitive or merely general, has in all great epochs of thought been met by a deeper insight.
It is not merely what we are born as, or what the world begins with, that comes of itself. The most ordinary conception of growth involves maturity, and the term nature in Greek and Latin, as in English, can indicate not only what we are born as, but what we are born for, our true, or real, or complete nature. ”

“ That we are in fact sunk in sin, but are somehow real beyond and outside it, might even be a comfortable doctrine.
It is the old story. We are refining, and losing touch. Here is perhaps a plain though prosaic way of bringing home the simple fact. Bona fides is the ultimate need in all matters of conduct, and religion is the supreme bona fides. Your heart is really given to the best you can conceive. But your actual life is narrow and confused, and while willing the object of faith, you will, also, things that as you will them (for they need not be “bad”) are its enemy. ”

“ We have treated rights throughout as claims, the enforcement of which by the State is merely the climax of their recognition by society. Why do we thus demand recognition for rights? If we deny that there can be unrecognised rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or to popular caprice? ”

“ No one could have had a more ardent actual faith in the reality of the greater self than Bentham and Mill.
But Society and the State present themselves at first sight as indefinite multitudes of persons. Institutions are many-sided facts; and an unreflective citizen could hardly say of what he takes them to be composed. And though law and custom approach more nearly to what we commonly understand by a “will,” yet they again are apt to be regarded as a sort of dead external weight with which the living volition of the ordinary man has little or nothing to do. ”