Joseph McCabe

“ Paris loves to wander there on Sundays; to scatter floral symbols of a living memory on the youngest graves, and to hang wreaths of unfading honour over the ashes of those who have fought for it and served it. The memory of the dead soon fades, they say, yet you will see men and women of Paris, on many a summer’s day, take flowers and wreaths in solemn pity to lay on the tomb of a woman who was dust seven hundred years ago. It is the grave of Heloise, and of her lover, Abélard. ”

“ But the characteristic life, in water and on land, was the vast and diversified family of the reptiles. In the western and the eastern continent, and along the narrowing bridge that still united them, in the northern hemisphere and the southern, and along every ridge of land that connected them, these sluggish but formidable monsters filled the stage. Every conceivable device in the way of arms and armour, brute strength and means of escape, seemed to be adopted in their development, as if they were the final and indestructible outcome of the life-principle. ”

“ One would imagine that the great majority of the clergy conceived him as standing aside, for some inscrutable reason, and letting wicked men deploy their perverse forces. When the triumph comes, gilding the past sacrifices or driving them from memory, God will be on every lip. The whole nation will be implored to come and kneel before the altars. Royalty and nobility and military, judges and stockbrokers and working men—above all, a surging, thrilling, ecstatic mass of women—will gather round the clergy, and will avow that they see the finger of God in this glorious consummation. ”

“ The corrupt servants of Spain moved too quickly for us. Ferrer is dead. A man of fine character, high ability, and intense devotion to his ideals; a man who loved the sunlight, but was not happy save in the consciousness that he was bringing the sunlight into the darkened homes of the poorer Spaniards; a man whose work has stood the fiercest searching that his embittered enemies could devise, yet has proved to be one of peaceful devotion to a noble ambition—this man has sunk under a burden of calumny and hatred, and lies in the grave of a criminal. ”

“ I know both extremes of this social order, and I have felt, hundreds of times, that if it is permanently to retain this pyramidal form, the refined lives and great achievements of the few resting on this broad base of squalid and undeveloped lives, civilisation is an impossible dream. I have felt that, if men and women realised the full meaning and range of poverty, they would suspend the progress of art and science, of commerce and industry, for a hundred years, if need were, in order to concentrate the best intelligence of the race upon the search for the remedy of this vast disorder. ”

“ Talleyrand’s father and mother were both in the service of the Court. It was an age when a king could not go to bed without two or three nobles to hand him his night-dress; and when, on the other hand, nobles could not live without sharing the king’s purse to the extent of some forty million livres. Estates had been mortgaged and starved; Court life had become ever more luxurious and exacting. The system only held together by a frail structure of privileges, sinecures and commissions, that bound the nobility closer and closer to Versailles and left a yawning gulf between them and the people. ”

“ It is religion and morals in the making. It is from first to last, a massive testimony to evolution. Everything in the world testifies to it. Everything in the world is illumined by it.
Hence we cannot expect to put our finger on a point in the history of the race and say: Here religion begins, there morality begins. They rise gradually, with a long dawn. Peoples who do not even believe in spirits—and there are some—clearly have no religion; but at what precise point the belief in the shadow becomes religion no sensible man will try to say. ”

“ How far Alexander was to blame for the entry of his country into the struggle against Napoleon, or into Napoleon’s struggle against England, is a point on which opinions differ. His entire change of attitude—from neutrality to war against France, then to friendship with Napoleon, then back to the English alliance—annoyed his ministers and people, and lays him open to a charge of nervous instability. Such a charge he would have rebutted with warmth and astonishment. His portrait is familiar: a smooth-faced, dignified man, reflecting righteousness in every feature. ”

“ Such, therefore, is the history of the rise, conflict, and decay of systems in the nineteenth century. The same painful impression is felt in surveying the drama, for such it truly is, as in surveying the Greek activity from Thales to Carneades. The most gifted minds of the three most gifted nations of modern Europe have sought, in grim earnest, a solution of the ever-impending problem of the universe; yet it can hardly be claimed that any positive advance has been made in the direction of a solution—certainly no constructive system bids fair to endure save in the history of philosophy. ”

“ The immortal fires of the Greeks are dying. Piercing the depths with a dull red glow, here and there, are the dying suns; and if you look closely you will see, flitting like ghosts across the light of their luminous neighbours, the gaunt frames of dead worlds. Here and there are vast stretches of loose cosmic dust that seems to be gathering into embryonic stars; here and there are stars in infancy or in strenuous youth. You detect all the chief phases of the making of a world in the forms and fires of these colossal aggregations of matter. ”

“ I once met a pompous ass of a believer who had this religious-sense theory in an exaggerated degree. It is not at all my custom to obtrude the question of religion in conversation, but somebody maliciously tried to draw the man into debate about God with me. He would say nothing but, with comic solemnity: "I know there is a God." He would not explain further, but his meaning was clear. He felt it. He sensed it. And there is but one possible form in which he could have given precise expression to his actual experience. He was visibly annoyed, but still silent, when I put it. It is: ”

“ It is just as easy to state our situation in terms of reason as in terms of sentiment: it would not be easy to say in which guise it is ugliest. Let us talk no more nonsense about needing religion to help us to get rid of this atrocious nightmare. It drives both reason and sentiment to the brink of insanity. Both protest against it with every particle of their energy. Why Christianity failed to protest against it in fifteen hundred years may or may not be obscure; but there is no obscurity whatever about the probable effect on militarism and war of a cultivation of reason and sympathy. ”

“ Imagine these forests spread from Spitzbergen to Australia and even, according to the south polar expeditions, to the Antarctic, and from the United States to Europe, to Siberia, and to China, and prolonged during some hundreds of thousands of years, and you begin to realise that the Carboniferous period prepared the land for the coming dynasties of animals. Let some vast and terrible devastation fall upon this luxuriant world, entombing the great multitude of its imperfect forms and selecting the higher types for freer life, and the earth will pass into a new age. ”

“ Blending with other and not alarming sensuous feelings, veiling itself, and gently, subtly passing its sweet fire into the veins, the coming of love is unperceived until it is already strong to exert a numbing influence on the mind. Abélard awoke one day to a consciousness that a large part of the new sweetness that pervaded his life was due to the birth of a new power in his soul—a power as elusive to recognition as it is imperious in its demands. ”

“ We men and women of the twentieth century cling to one feature, at least, of an age on which we look back with high disdain: an age with which we would bitterly resent any comparison in point of intelligence and feeling. We may try to gild it with glittering phrases about a nation’s honour, but we know, all the while, that the honour of a nation no more demands that it shall dye its hands in the blood of a sister-nation than the honour of an individual requires so barbaric a consolation. ”

“ A teacher of merit in a small institution, unknown to the world, he moved restlessly under the burden of his ideal. The great contrast of France and Spain saddened him. The Spanish law of universal education was a comedy, as we shall see. Two-thirds of the Spaniards could neither read nor write at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only a few million could both read and write. One-third of the population of Madrid were utterly illiterate. In such a soil corruption throve vigorously. The reflection, the contrast, burned into Ferrer's mind, and made education his constant day-dream. ”

“ When the way of life is smooth, and our nation or home is prospering, we may be genially disposed to think that God is near and is looking after us as well as the sparrows. But when a black storm bursts suddenly and disastrously on us; when the earth shakes their roofs on ten thousand of our fellows, or a great ship strikes a rock and pours a laughing crowd suddenly into the lap of death ”

“ The earth now buries its dead, and from their petrified remains we conjure up a picture of the swarming life of the Cambrian ocean.
A strange, sluggish population burrows in the mud, crawls over the sand, adheres to the rocks, and swims among the thickets of sea-weed. The strangest and most formidable, though still too puny a thing to survive in a more strenuous age, is the familiar Trilobite of the geological museum; a flattish animal with broad, round head, like a shovel, its back covered with a three-lobed shell, and a number of fine legs or swimmers below. ”

“ History in all its branches confirmed the theory of the universal ascent of man. The history of art, of science, of social and political development, of ethics, of religion—all commence with the simple and proceed to the elaborate later forms. Thus a half-dozen sciences, all that could shed light on the past history of humanity, declared unequivocally that man had ascended from the rudest beginning, little removed from animal life, to the height of civilization. ”

“ Surely those old traditions did hold together the structure of our civilisation? And surely it is impossible to replace in a few generations the links of a planet-wide human society? The shades of dead Memphis and Babylon and Nineveh, of Athens and Rome and Bagdad, of Venice and Genoa and Florence, pass before their anxious eyes. In each case, they remind us, this same moral, social, and intellectual restlessness preceded death.
The inevitable specialism of our age adds to the confusion. Life is a connected whole, yet neither research nor reform can now be other than sectional. ”

“ We have relegated to the Middle Ages, to which it belongs, the notion that the criminal is a man who has affronted society, and that society may take a revenge on him. In the sane conception of our time the criminal is a mischievous element disturbing the social order, and, in the interest of that order, he must be isolated or put out of existence. It is not the guilt, but the social effect, which we regard. And from this point of view a single great war is far more calamitous than all the crime in Europe during whole decades. ”

“ An ingenious student of science once entertained his generation with a theory of how one might behold again all the stirring chapters that make up the story of the earth. The living scene of our time is lit by the light of the sun, and for every few rays that enter the human eye, and convey the image of it to the human mind, great floods of the reflected light pour out, swiftly and indefinitely, into space. Imagine, then, a man moving out into space more rapidly than light, his face turned toward the earth. ”

“ The modern scientific picture of the cosmos is too complete and too harmonious to justify such an inference. Human life is not now a field of light surrounded by an infinite mystery—a unique drama on the central stage of the universe. It is a bubble on the stream of time that flows on indefinitely before and after; a chance episode in the play of force on the bosom of a material immensity. A nebula, one of the countless myriads that people space, condensed and formed a sun with a retinue of planets. ”