J. M. Robertson

“ Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself; For thou exist'st on many thousand grains Which issue out of dust: Happy thou art not; For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get, And what thou hast forget'st: Thou art not certain, For thy complexion shifts to strange effects, After the moon: If thou art rich, thou art poor; For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, And death unloads thee: Friend hast thou none ”

“ Not one day has passed since the penning of the Apocalypse without men’s hating each other in the name of Jesus. Wars generations long have been waged for interpretations of the lore. Hatred and malice and all uncharitableness stamp all the Sacred Books; and the literature of the Fathers imports into the dwindling intellectual life of the West all the rancour of battling Judaism. ”

“ Thus early have we seen in action, on the field of English history, most of those primary forces of strife whose play makes the warp of politics, ancient and modern; and the distinct emergence, withal, of that spirit which, rare and transient in ancient times, seems destined to inherit the later earth—the spirit of science, which slowly transmutes politics from an animal to an intellectual process, raising it from the stage of mere passional life to the stage of constructive art, and from the social relation of rule and subjection towards the relation of mutuality and corporate intelligence. ”

“ After all these testimonies to Montaigne's seminal virtue, and after what we have seen of the special dependence of Shakspere's genius on culture and circumstance, stimulus and initiative, for its evolution, there can no longer seem to an open mind anything of mere paradox in the opinion that the essays are the source of the greatest expansive movement of the poet's mind, the movement which made him—already a master of the whole range of passional emotion, of the comedy of mirth and the comedy and tragedy of sex—the great master of the tragedy of the moral intelligence. ”

“ The religion which began in private dissidence from Jewish and pagan orthodoxies had become the most iron dogmatism the world had ever seen; and the whole system of Christian credence had come to turn on the fiat of one man. At his sole veto the sciences must be dumb; and to him must come for sanction those who would found new schools. The faith that had begun as “liberty from the yoke of the law” had come to elevate the negation of mental liberty into a principle of universal polity, translating into the inner life the despotism which the older Rome had placed on the outer. ”

“ The Protestantism of the Protectorate was too much a matter of mere plunder to admit of a great religious literature; and nothing is more remarkable in the great imaginative efflorescence under Elizabeth than its un-Puritan secularity. It drew, indeed, from a soil too rich to be yet overrun by fanaticism. The multiplying printing-presses showered forth a hundred translations; the new grammar-schools bore their fruit; the nation grew by domestic peace, even while tillers of the soil were being made beggars; the magic of discovery and travel thrilled men to new exercises of mind and speech ”

“ The one emperor after Marcus Aurelius who attracts us as a human being and as a mind, he set himself a task which, whether he failed or succeeded, must lift his name high in the annals of a decadent civilization: his failure, in fact, makes him the most living figure in the long line of autocrats from Constantine to Charlemagne. It is by such contrast, indeed, that he becomes eminent. Measured by the standards of progressive civilizations, against the great minds of the pre-imperial world and the best statesmen of later realms, he is neither a great ruler nor a great intelligence. ”

“ Discourse of reason doth not only call and summon us unto it. For why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be moaned? But also, since we are threatened by so many kinds of death, there is no more inconvenience to fear them all than to endure one: what matter it when it cometh, since it is unavoidable?... Death is a part of yourselves; you fly from yourselves. The being you enjoy is equally shared between life and death ... The continual work of your life is to contrive death; you are in death during the time you continue in life ... during life you are still dying. ”

“ The aristocrats were but slighter egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy philosophy. And the philosophers par excellence, Plato and Aristotle, were equally incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of the entire process is that free Greece fell because her children never transcended, in conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism in which even love for one's country is only a reflex of hate for another people. This is clear in the whole play of the astounding hatreds of Athenians for Athenians through every struggle of Athens for her life. ”

“ For rationalism, on the side of thought, must forever mean liberty, equality, fraternity, ‘the giving and receiving of reasons,’ the complete reciprocity of judgment. To all races, all castes, it makes the same appeal, being as universalist as science, naming no master, proffering no ritual, holding out no threat. The rationalist, as such, can have no part in the errant Darwinism which would conserve struggle because struggle has yielded progress ”

“ Thou hast no youth nor age, But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limbs, nor beauty, To make thy riches pleasant. ”

“ The things on the other side of the shield—the religious wars, the consecration of error, the strangling of truth, the persecutions, the propagandist massacres, the countless cruelties wrought in the name and on the sanction of the faith—are from this point of view external to its history: things to be set down to the perversity of men. All the good that has happened is to be credited to Christianity; all the bad to human nature. ”

“ Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let us say that "the things that are most excellent" have no dependence on mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of 1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations—though it had to be a poet—who saw not hardship but happiness in the thought of "leaving great verse unto a little clan." ”

“ The time is for him even in sight, as it were, when most men will recognise and live by that law; and when that day comes there will be no more need to profess rationalism than to profess, as a creed, any of the daily reciprocities by which society subsists. But till that day comes he marks himself, and is marked—to his frequent discomfort, it may be—by his insistence, in the deepest matters, on that law of truth which so many still persistently subordinate to pleas or preferences of authority or habit, convention or subjective taste. ”

“ It is thus by culture and experience—culture limited but concentrated, and experience limited but intense—that the man Shakspere has been intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere as we find him when he comes to his greatest tasks. For the formation of the supreme artist there was needed alike the purely plastic organism and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond; culture that came without search, and could be undergone as spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge that needed no more wooing than Ann Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. ”

“ Boethius, the last of the ancient philosophers, was a Christian only in name, expounding its orthodox dogma as a lawyer might expound law: when he came to write his consolations in prison he went back to the ancient and universal ethic, putting aside his creed as he might a mask. The vogue of his book in the Dark Ages is the expression of thinking men’s satisfaction in a late Latin treatise which brooded gravely on life and death in terms of human feeling and wisdom, with no hint of the formulas of the priest. ”

“ James was a Scotchman—a member, albeit a king, of a hostile nation long evilly spoken of; a prince without personal dignity; a pedant without gravity; and the indulgence paid to falsehood and folly in the capriciously headstrong Elizabeth ceased to be accorded to the unmanly and unregal ways of her not unconscientious successor, whose plans for pacifying Europe were much more creditable to him than were her diplomacies to her. But the very preservation of peace served to undo the king's prestige, inasmuch as it furthered the growth of sects and the spirit of criticism. ”

“ And though the person of the emperor was seldom quite safe from assassination by his soldiery, the imperial cult played its part from the first in establishing the fatal ideal of empire. No sequence of vileness or incompetence in the emperors, no impatience of the insecurity set up by the power of the army to make and unmake the autocrat, no experience of the danger of a war of claimants, ever seems to have made Romans dream of a saner and nobler system. ”

“ It was simply the self-assertion of energetic men of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it—men bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of unscrupulous conquest. ”

“ If we talk of moral success, it must still be said that Christianity never gave any section of the Roman Empire a ruler worthy to stand by Marcus and Julian; and that on all the thrones of the world to-day there is no man who can be put above them for moral nobility. If, again, we keep our eyes on the age of Constantine, we cannot but be struck by the fact that Constantius “the pale,” the father of Constantine, a monotheist but not a Christian, and Julian, who turned away from Christianity to polytheism, are by far the best men in the series of rulers of that house. ”

“ A hundred times has the hope flowered, and withered again. Confident rebellions, eager revolutions, mark at once its rise and its fall. In our own age the new birth of hope arises in the face of what might have seemed the most definitive frustration; it becomes [Pg 470] an ideal of peaceful transformation under the sole spell of social science, with no weapons save those of reason and persuasion. The science of natural forces has widened and varied life without greatly raising it in mass. Yet the new science, we would fain believe, will conquer the heightened task. ”

“ When finally we seek to realize the aspect of the Hellenistic world in the time of Mohammed, in contrast with that of the age of Pericles; or the Rome of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) in contrast with that of Hadrian, we are conscious of an immense loss of human faculty for beauty and joy, no less than for action. It is not too much to say that the Christian ideal of sanctity meant not only self-mortification and sadness but squalor in the individual life. Physical uncleanliness became a Christian virtue; and the mark of a city built in the Christian period came to be the absence of baths. ”

“ The appearance of Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as in Greece they had been many!—a result both unexpected and difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that there never was a philosophical system of character or influence which prospered under the sky of Italy. No nation of civilised Europe has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had less genius for such pursuits. ”