F. B. Jevons

“ That discoveries will be made and progress effected is as certain as that gold is to be found in a goldfield; the only practical question is, By whom? Who is to be the lucky man?
To us who have witnessed the advance which has given rise to this universal hope, the hope itself seems so reasonable and so justifiable that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is without parallel in the history of mankind. Never, of course, has any generation of men imagined its own lot perfect; all have had their ideals, and all have believed their ideals to be true. ”

“ The whole action of mankind, every action that every man performs, is based upon that conviction. It is the basis of all that we do, of everything that is and has been done by us and others. And it is Faith. In that sign alone can the world be conquered.
When, then, the man of religion proposes by faith to conquer the world, he is simply doing, wittingly and in full consciousness of what he is doing, that which every man does in his every action, even though he may not know it. To make it a sneer or a reproach that religion is a mere matter of faith ”

“ All that is necessary is to understand the theory of the evolution of the forms of life, as that theory is held by naturalists now; and to understand the lines which the evolution of life is now held to have followed. The process of evolution is no longer held to have followed one line alone, or to have described but one single trajectory like that of a cannon-ball fired from a cannon. ”

“ There is no morality except first there be faith.
We are nothing, know nothing, can do nothing without faith. And it is not in the dead past, which is what we mean by "evidence," but in the living future that faith has its well-springs. It is because we wish to do right henceforth that we put our faith in right-doing. It is not the ghosts of our misdeeds, rising from the charnel-house of the past in evidence against us, that give us good hope of the future—it is faith, not built on evidence, on a past that cannot be altered, but on hope, on the future, on what shall be as we will it. ”

“ It may, perhaps, be said—and it may be said with justice—that the reflections even of the immature mind are not all, of necessity, erroneous, for it is from them that the whole of modern knowledge has been evolved or developed, just as the steam-plough may be traced back to the primitive digging-stick: reflection upon anything may lead to better knowledge of the thing, as well as to false notions about it. But the nations, which have outgrown mythology, have cast it aside because in the long run they became convinced that the notions it embodied were false notions. ”

“ I imagine it was once more on the ground of the consequences: grant that Nature is uniform, and then all the marvellous discoveries, the revelations of the past and prophecies of the future, which science has made, become things that we can reasonably believe in. Refuse to believe, withhold your faith, and then you have no reason to believe anything whatever, thought and action alike are paralysed. It is between these consequences that we have to choose. Our choice is an act of will; and it is on our will that our beliefs and our actions depend. ”

“ To treat a minority of individuals as the end for which humanity is evolved, and the majority as merely means, is a strange pass for humanitarianism to come to.
Approaching the evolution of religion from the point of view that the individual must always be regarded both as an end and as a means, we find that Buddhism denies the individual to be either the one or the other, for his very existence is an illusion, and an illusion which must be dispelled, in order that he may cease from an existence which it is an illusion to imagine that he possesses. ”

“ It is vain to pretend that prayer, even the simple petition for our daily bread, is not religious. It may perhaps be argued that prayer is not essential to religion; that it has not always formed part of religion; and that it is incompatible with that acquiescence in the will of God, and that perfect adoration of God, which is religion in its purest and most perfect sense. Whether there is in fact any incompatibility between the petition for deliverance from evil, and the aspiration that God's will may be done on earth, is a question on which we need not enter here. ”

“ The humble confession of our illimitable ignorance is the foundation of our faith and will ever be its sure refuge, its inexpugnable stronghold. It is only when, being ignorant, we are tempted to deny our ignorance, that trouble begins. We drop the substance for the shadow when we believe not in God, but in some proof of God.
To the man of science all this talk about faith appears mere folly, sheer unreason, a morbid wallowing in ignorance from pure love of ignorance ”

“ The form which justice takes in the period which is almost, but not quite, the lowest stage of human evolution is the sense of the collective responsibility of the community for all its actions, that is to say, for the acts of all its members. And that responsibility in its earliest shape is felt to be a responsibility to heaven, to the supernatural powers that send disease and famine upon the community. In those days no man sins to himself alone, just as, in still earlier days, no man could break a taboo without becoming a source of danger to the whole community. ”

“ I have spoken of 'the moment of worship,' but worship is, of course, a habit: if it is not a habit, it ceases to be at all, in any effective sense. And it is a habit of the community, of the common consciousness, which is continuous through the ages, even though it slowly changes; and which, as continuous, is conservative and tenacious. Even when it has become monotheistic, it may continue to speak of the one God as 'a great god above all other gods,' in terms which are survivals of an earlier stage of belief. ”

“ If a moral system by itself, on its own merits, were capable of affording a sure foundation for religion, Buddhism would be built upon a rock. To the spiritual community by which man may be united to his fellow-man and to his God, morality is essential and indispensable. But the moral life derives its value solely from the fact that on it depends, and by means of it is realised, that communion of man with God after which man has from the beginning striven. If then that communion and the very possibility of that communion is denied, the denial must prove fatal alike to religion and to morality. ”

“ It is vain to tell us in the same breath that we must stake our all upon our moral judgments and that our moral judgments are not to be relied on. Every impeachment of their validity is an invitation to us to give up the struggle against the enemy of ethical nature. And if we are really resolved to fight the good fight and quit ourselves like men, we thereby affirm that our moral judgments are at least as valid as our judgments on matters of fact, and that, if our knowledge of what is is true objectively, our knowledge of what ought to be has in it at least an equal element of objective truth. ”

“ God is not far from us at any time. That truth was implicit at all stages in the evolution of religion—consciously recognised, perhaps more, perhaps less, but whether more or less consciously recognised, it was there. That is the conviction implied in the fact that man everywhere seeks God. If he seeks Him in plants, in animals, in stocks or stones, that only shows that man has tried in many wrong directions—not that there is not a right direction. It is the general law of evolution: of a thousand seeds thrown out, perhaps one alone falls into good soil. ”

“ Great as is the progress of the last fifty years, we count it as nothing compared with that which is in store for us. To the discoveries of science it is felt that no bounds can be set; what a day may bring forth in the way of the extension of man's control over the forces of Nature, what secrets of Nature the chemist in his laboratory may light upon at any moment, no man can surmise, but everyone is confident that things will be discovered as marvellous to us now as the telegraph and telephone to our predecessors of the pre-scientific age. ”

“ The truth that any one man—whatever his place in society, whatever the colour of his skin—has as much right as any other to be treated as an end and that no man was merely a means to the enjoyment or happiness or well-being of another, was the charter for the emancipation of slaves. ”

“ To admit that any evidence could suffice for such a purpose would be to admit that the uniformity of Nature is not the fundamental reality in the world of science, or the ultimate base of our knowledge of what does actually take place in Nature.
A little reflection is enough to show that this is an entirely self-consistent line to take up. No amount of evidence can shake what is itself built on no evidence. If the belief in the uniformity of Nature depended on evidence in its favour, then evidence against it might overthrow it. But, as it rests on faith, it is superior to evidence. ”

“ Must we not, however, go one step further and admit that one and the same form of words may be prayer and religion when breathed in one spirit, and vain repetition and mere magic when uttered in another? ”

“ Religion is based on faith that there is a God. To tell the religious mind that there is no scientific proof of the existence of God is to tell it nothing new. Those were not the terms on which we took up our faith—that we should have scientific proof of everything before we did anything. On the contrary, religion begins when, and only when, a man begins "to walk humbly with his God," to know that he knows nothing except that his soul cleaves to God and humbly trusts in Him. We do not bargain so much belief, and no more, for so much proof: we give "ourselves, our souls and bodies." ”

“ The individual, to do anything, must exist. If he is to desire nothing save to cease to exist, he must exist to do that. But the teaching of Buddhism is that this world and this life is illusion—and further, that the existence of the individual self is precisely the most mischievous illusion, that illusion above all others from which it is incumbent on us to free ourselves. We are here for no other end than to free ourselves from that illusion. ”

“ Now, with all respect to logicians like John Stuart Mill, and men of science like Huxley, we must point out that this begs the whole question. If we assume that Nature is uniform, then it is probable that what has often happened will happen again. But if we do not assume that Nature is uniform, then the repeated occurrence of a thing does not make it in the least probable that it will occur again. To assume without proof that Nature is uniform is to ask us to accept a statement without evidence, which, if we have learnt the lesson of science, we can hardly do. ”

“ To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. ”

“ The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly, what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be real. ”

“ Every man is entitled to answer that question for himself. Are they the only things that can be known? They are the only things that can be known—on her assumptions. Just as the world can only be explained scientifically on the assumptions of science, so it can only be interpreted morally or religiously on the assumptions made by religion and morality. The only end that could be subserved by assuming a Divine purpose would be at most to enable us in some slight degree to argue what the purpose of some things might be—and that is of no interest or value to science. ”

“ To this the reply will be that it is the manifestations which we know; they alone are known to us; they alone can be known to us. That which underlies them is not manifest; and that which is not manifested to us obviously cannot be known to us: it is the Unknowable. Obviously, therefore, it is impossible for us to say whether it is good or not. To affirm and to deny that it is good would both equally be to profess knowledge of the unknowable. Religion may profess—and, indeed, all religions have professed—to possess this inconceivable and impossible knowledge. But religion is not science. ”

“ The only reply to such loose talk is that it does matter, here and now, always and to all time, that right should triumph over wrong. It will not do to say that it matters now, but will not matter hereafter, for, if it is of no importance then, neither is it of any importance now. But if right-doing is the most important thing in the world, more important than happiness, more important to all time even than the perpetual redistribution of matter and motion, to whom is it important? ”

“ The ideal in morality, again, is not the mere desire to do good or to be good, just as the ideal in knowledge is not the mere desire to know the truth. And if goodness is the object of moral desire, as truth is the object of intellectual desire, in neither case is the object of desire purely imaginary, a mere idea or conception of something which might be, but as a matter of fact is not. We do not desire imaginary pleasures or imaginary goodness, we want the reality; and to tell us that that reality exists only in idea, only in our own imagination, is a misleading half-truth. ”

“ Thus the ultimate court of appeal for each one of us is not the ideal as manifested by man, but the ideal as revealed to each of us. True it is that, until we saw that particular work of art or that particular instance of love, we had no idea what beauty or love could be. But that makes no difference to the fact that we feel for ourselves how much nearer it comes to the ideal than anything we had any idea of before. It may henceforth be the standard by which we shall measure other things, but in adopting it we measure it ourselves, and measure it not by itself, but in relation to the ideal. ”

“ The object of science is not to conjecture why things happen, or with what purpose, but to describe positively the way in which they actually do happen, or perhaps merely to describe the motions of material things in space. It does not matter with what purpose a shot or a mine is fired, or even whether with any or none: the results are just the same, if it is fired in just the same way. Science neither assumes nor denies the existence of purpose, because neither the assumption nor its rejection would in the least help her to discover the things that she wants to know. ”