Edwin E. Slosson

“ In Maeterlinck's writings, various though they be in form and topic, may be continuously traced the changing moods of the philosophy of the last twenty years, for he has always retained his sincerity of thought and courage of expression.
To look fearlessly upon life; to accept the laws of nature, not with meek resignation, but as her sons, who dare to search and question; to have peace and confidence within our soul—these are the beliefs that make for happiness. But to believe is not enough; all depends on how we believe. ”

“ But it must be confessed that man is dreadfully clumsy about it yet. He takes a thousand horsepower engine and an electric furnace at several thousand degrees to get carbon into combination with hydrogen while the little green leaf in the sunshine does it quietly without getting hot about it. Evidently man is working as wastefully as when he used a thousand slaves to drag a stone to the pyramid or burned down a house to roast a pig. Not until his laboratory is as cool and calm and comfortable as the forest and the field can the chemist call himself completely successful. ”

“ Imitate Nature? Yes, when we cannot improve upon her. Admire Nature? Possibly, but be not blinded to her defects. Learn from Nature? We should sit humbly at her feet until we can stand erect and go our own way. Love Nature? Never! She is our treacherous and unsleeping foe, ever to be feared and watched and circumvented, for at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she may wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence or earthquake and within a few centuries obliterate every trace of its achievement. ”

“ You would remedy all this by being made man's equal in politics. You would then, you say, develop your slumbering abilities, overtake, and possibly surpass, your immemorial enslaver—man.
But do you really need this political equality in order to attain this supremacy? Has the down-trodden among men ever needed it? His political equality has come as an effect not as the cause of his intellectual development. The mind that dominates in the artistic and scientific world ultimately arrives at political supremacy.
But what art or science has man closed to you? ”

“ If I were to sum up Shaw in two words it would be that his distinguishing characteristics are courage and kind-heartedness. The sight of suffering and injustice drives him mad, and then he runs amuck, slashing right and left, without much regard to whom he hits and no regard at all as to who hits him. He is, like Swift, a cruel satirist through excess of sympathy. If Ibsen is right, that "the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone", then George Bernard Shaw is not to be ignored. ”

“ Of even more vital moment is chemistry in the domain of health: the pitiful calls of our hospitals for local anesthetics to alleviate suffering on the operating table, the frantic appeals for the hypnotic that soothes the epileptic and staves off his seizure, the almost furious demands for remedy after remedy, that came in the early years of the war, are still ringing in the hearts of many of us. No wonder that our small army of chemists is grimly determined not to give up the independence in chemistry which war has achieved for us! ”

“ The dreamer of the future will not dare to build an air castle without at least an option on the site. The danger is not from men of science like Ostwald, Mach, and Poincaré, who are so well ballasted that they can carry more sail than ordinary men, but from those who are less qualified and less cautious. We have never, however, been free from the fancies of this latter class. Nature abhors a vacuum; and if any field of intellect is left empty by the wise but overwary, it will speedily be filled by those who have no fears where they tread. ”

“ I am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately—it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul. ”

“ The new epoch has hardly dawned, yet already a man may stay at home in New York or London and make his own rubber and rubies, his own indigo and otto of roses. More than this, he can make gems and colors and perfumes that never existed since time began. The man of science has signed a declaration of independence of the lower world and we are now in the midst of the revolution.
Our eyes are dazzled by the dawn of the new era. We know what the hunter and the horticulturist have already done for man, but we cannot imagine what the chemist can do. ”

“ By the help of science, art, and philosophy, we may achieve sympathy, a feeling of the kinship of nature, a consciousness of interpenetration, a realization of the meaning of evolution. Above all, philosophy has this aim and power, to develop another faculty, complementary to the intellect, that will open to us a perspective on the other half of reality, not capable of being confined in the rigid formulas of deductive logic.
There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone can find, but it will never seek them. ”

“ The will to have faith in a thing oft makes the faith come true. So it can be said in a way that we make truth for our own use. What we think must be of use to us in some way, else why should we think it? The truth is what is good for us, what helps us, what gives us joy and strength, what shows us how to act, what ties up fact to fact, so the chain will hold, what makes us see all things clear and straight, and what keeps us from stray paths that turn out wrong in the end. Thought is a tool, a means to an end. Man has to act, and so he must think. ”

“ Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is forever only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of duration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections and abrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past—from matter to life, from the animal to man—we have no authority again for claiming that we cannot observe to-day something analogous in the very essence of human life, that the point of view of the flesh, and the point of view of the spirit, the point of view of reason, and the point of view of charity are a homogeneous extension of it. ”

“ They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality of the best club in the world have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. ”

“ Or, on second thought, we see that man is the greatest spendthrift of all, for he wants to expend so much more energy than he has that he borrows from the winds, the streams and the coal in the rocks. He robs minerals and plants of the energy which they have stored up to spend for their own purposes, just as he robs the bee of its honey and the silk worm of its cocoon.
Man's chief business is in reversing the processes of nature. That is the way he gets his living. And one of his greatest triumphs was when he discovered how to undo iron rust and get the metal out of it. ”

“ Yes, I believe indeed that all our past life is there, preserved even to the most infinitesimal details, and that we forget nothing, and that all that we have felt, perceived, thought, willed, from the first awakening of our consciousness, survives indestructibly. But the memories which are preserved in these obscure depths are there in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to the light, but they do not even try to rise to it; they know that it is impossible and that I, as a living and acting being, have something else to do than to occupy myself with them. ”

“ Wells is inimitable in his ability to sketch a character in a few swift strokes, but he does not care much for the character afterward. He delights in taking such snapshots, but he hates to develop them. His mind is quick to change. He is liable to be disconcerted by a sudden vision of an opposing view. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he will be seized with a doubt of what he is saying, and being an honest man, he leaves it in air rather than finish it after he has lost confidence. He may double on his track like a hunted fox within the compass of a single volume. ”

“ He is a triple-starred scientist man who can bring down the highest flying scientific fact and tame it so that any of us can live with it and sometimes even love it. He can make a fairy tale out of coal-tar dyes and a laboratory into a joyful playhouse while it continues functioning gloriously as a laboratory. ”

“ But Bergson, coming in with his philosophic faith at the point where science leaves off, calls attention to the fact that while the eye is a complicated structure, seeing is one simple act. Why not begin our explanation with the simple, instead of the complex? The analytical method of the intellect, though useful in its place, does not lead us to the meaning of reality. It is as if we could only see a picture as broken up into a mosaic, or as if we could only consider a movement of the hand in the mathematician's way, as an infinite series of points arranged in a curve. ”

“ Democracy means that personality is the first and final reality.... It holds that the spirit of personality indwells in every individual, and that the choice to develop it must proceed from that individual. From this central position of democracy result the other notes of democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity—words which are not mere words to catch a mob, but symbols of the highest ethical idea which humanity has yet reached—the idea that personality is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that in every human individual there lies personality.... ”

“ But a layman is interested in the wonders of great bridges and of monumental buildings without feeling the need of inquiring into the painfully minute and extended calculations of the engineer and architect of the strains and stresses to which every pin and every bar of the great bridge and every bit of stone, every foot of arch in a monumental edifice, will be exposed. So the public may understand and appreciate with the keenest interest the results of chemical effort without the need of instruction in the intricacies of our logic, of our dealings with our minute, invisible particles. ”

“ Chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is given in his "Defense of Nonsense".
Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle....
Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. ”

“ Maeterlinck does not seem to me so much an original thinker as an exquisitely sensitive personality who is able to catch the dominant note of the times in which he lives, and to give it artistic expression, as a musician upon a high tower might take as his key the fundamental tone of the streets below, modulating his music as the rhythm of the city changes, not to obtain applause, but because his soul is in sympathy with the life around him. ”

“ If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and of appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp. ”

“ It is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and servitude, and desolates wide regions. It is a monster begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable share.
The abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward his ideal. ”