Joseph Rickaby

“ Then there is the proverbial fickleness of democracy, one day all aglow, and cooled down the next, never pursuing any course steadily, in foreign policy least of all, though there the dearest interests of the State are often at stake. As one who lived under such a government once put it: "Sheer democracy is of all institutions the most ill-balanced and ill put together, like a wave at sea restlessly tossing before the fitful gusts of wind: politicians come and go, and not one of them cares for the public interest, or gives it a thought." ”

“ It is a saying, that "no mortal is always wise." There are times when reason's utterance is faint from weariness and vexation. Then, unless a man has acquired an almost mechanical habit of obeying reason in the conduct of his will and passions, he will in such a conjuncture act inconsiderately and do wrong. That habit is moral virtue. Moral virtue is as the fly-wheel of an engine, a reservoir of force to carry the machine past the "dead points" in its working. Or again, moral virtue is as discipline to troops suddenly attacked, or hard pressed in the fight. ”

“ Even the very highest of delights, the delight of contemplation, is not the highest of goods, but a concomitant of the highest good. The highest good is the final object of the will: but the object of the will is not the will's own act: we do not will willing, as neither do we understand understanding, not at least without a reflex effort. What we will in contemplating is, not to be delighted, but to see. This is the subjective end and happiness of man, to see, to contemplate. Delight is not anything objective: neither is it the subjective last end of humanity. ”

“ It is not true that the only motive which draws men into civil society is the fear of violence, as though there were no such facts and exigencies of human nature as sympathy, friendship, intellectual curiosity, art, religion. It is not true that the one reason for the existence of the civil power consists in this, that without the restraining hand of the magistrate men would bite and devour one another. Lastly, it is not true that all rights, notably rights of property, are the creation of the State. A man is a man first and a citizen afterwards. ”

“ The Magnanimous Man is the humble man. The secret of his marvellous virtue is his habit of practical discernment between the abyss of misery that he has within himself, as of himself, and the high gifts, also within him, which come of the mercy of God. Aristotle well says, "Magnanimity is a sort of robe of honour to the rest of the virtues: it both makes them greater and stands not without them: therefore it is hard to be truly magnanimous, for that cannot be without perfect virtue." ”

“ The perversion of a polity is the losing sight of this principle, and the conducting of the polity in the interest of the governing body alone. By such perversion monarchy passes into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into ochlocracy or mob-rule. It might appear strange that, where the power rests with the whole people collectively, government should ever be carried on otherwise than in the interest of the entire community, did we not remember that the majority, with whom the power rests in a democracy, may employ it to trample on and crush the minority. ”

“ A granite boulder lying on an upland moor stands indifferently the August sun and the January frost, flood and drought. It neither blooms in spring, nor fades in autumn. It is all one to the boulder whether it remain in the picturesque solitude where the glacier dropped it, or be laid in the gutter of a busy street. It has no growth nor development: it is not a subject of evolution: there is no goal of perfection to which it is tending by dint of inward germinal capacity seconded by favourable environment. ”

“ It is no doubt a sweet and agreeable medicine: this very agreeableness makes its medical virtue. It is a sweet antidote to the bitterness of life. But though a man may live by medicine, he does not live for it. So no man by rights lives for pleasure. The pleasure that a man finds in his work encourages him to go on with it. The pleasure that a man finds by turning aside to what is not work, picks him up, rests and renovates him, that he may go forth as from a wayside inn, or diverticulum, refreshed to resume the road of labour. ”

“ Has Aristotle, then, said the last word on happiness? Is perfect happiness out of the reach of the person whom in this mortal life we call man? However that may be, it is plain that man desires perfect happiness. Every man desires that it may be perfectly well with him and his, although many have mistaken notions of what their own well-being consists in, and few can define it philosophically. Still they all desire it. The higher a man stands in intellect, the loftier and vaster his conception of happiness, and the stronger his yearning after it. ”

“ Whoever has this virtue behaves well, not by himself merely, but towards others—a great addition. Many a one who has done well enough as an individual, has done badly in a public capacity: whence the proverb, that office shows the man. This Justice may well be called another man's good: though not in the sense of the sophists of old, and the altruists of our time, that virtue is a very good thing for everyone else than its possessor. Virtue, like health, may be beneficial to neighbours, but the first benefit of it flows in upon the soul to whom it belongs: for virtue is the health of the soul. ”

“ The right of self-defence even to the grievous harming of the aggressor, endures only while the danger from him is imminent, not when it is past, or the evil is already done. The right supposes no moral obliquity, no formal injustice on the part of the aggressor: he may be a madman making for you with a drawn sword. Nay further, not even material injustice—that is, the quality of an act which would be formally unjust, if only the agent knew what he was about—is required. All that is requisite is that your life, or something equivalent to life, be threatened, not in due course of law. ”

“ But in this world seductive reasonings sway the will, and fits of passion the sensitive appetite, prompting the one and the other to rise up and break away from what the intellect knows all along to be the true good of man. Unless moral virtue be there to hold these powers to their allegiance, they will frequently disobey the understanding. Such disobedience is more irrational than any mere intellectual error. In an error purely intellectual, where the will has no part, the objective truth indeed is missed, but the intelligence that dwells within the man is not flouted and gain-sayed. ”

“ Hobbes and Rousseau go upon this maxim, which has overrun the modern world, that no man can be bound to obedience to another without his own consent. The maxim would be an excellent one, were men framed like the categories of Aristotle—substance, quantity, quality, relation, and the rest—each peering out of his own pigeon-hole, an independent, self-sufficient entity. But men are dependent, naturally dependent whether they will or no, every human being on certain definite others,—the child on the parent, the citizen on the State whose protection he enjoys, and all alike on God. ”

“ The intrinsic scope and aim of civil government is the good of the citizens as citizens. That, we have to show, is not any good of the world to come; nor again the full measure of good requisite for individual well-being in this world. The good of the citizens as such is that which they enjoy in common in their social and political capacity: namely, security, wealth, liberty, commerce, the arts of life, arms, glory, empire, sanitation, and the like, all which goods, of their own nature, reach not beyond this world. ”

“ In a disembodied spirit, or an angel, there are no senses, no sensible appetite, no passions. The angel, or the departed soul, can love and hate, fear and desire, rejoice and grieve, but these are not passions in the pure spirit, they are acts of intellect and will alone. So man also often loves and hates, and does other acts that are synonymous with corresponding passions, and yet no passion is there. The man is working with his calm reason: his irrational soul is not stirred. To an author, when he is in the humour for it, it is a delight to be writing, but not a passionate delight. ”

“ Nor has Christianity dimmed the glory that invests a soldier's death. Only it points to a brighter glory, and a death in a still nobler cause, the death of the martyr who dies for the faith, and becomes valiant in battle for what is more to him than any earthly city, the Church, the City of God. Nor must the martyr of charity, who dies in succouring his neighbour, go without the praise of fortitude: nor, in short, any one who braves death, or other heavy affliction, in the discharge of duty, or when forwarding a good cause. ”

“ It may be asked, how much conformity to the natural law is requisite and sufficient, to exempt a person at the end of his trial from a final doom of misery, or to ensure his lasting happiness? The question resolves itself into three:—how do sins differ in point of gravity? is grave sin ever forgiven? is the final award to be given upon the person's whole life, a balance being struck between his good and evil deeds, or is it to be simply upon his moral state at the last moment of his career of trial? ”

“ At its strongest, the love of man for woman, where polygamy obtains, is a flame of passion, that quickly spends itself on one object, and then passes to another; not a rational, enduring, human affection. It is also a fact, that the increase of the race is not greater in polygamy than in monogamy. Thus, as a practice that runs strongly counter to one of the great purposes of marriage, and is, to say the least, no help to the other, and carries with it the humiliation of the female sex, polygamy is justly argued to be abhorrent to nature. ”

“ Calumny is a double sin, one sin against truth, and another sin, the heavier of the two, against justice. If the blackening tale be true, the first sin is absent, but the second is there. The truth of the story is no justification for our publishing it. Though it is wrong to lie, it is not always right to blurt out the truth, especially when we are not asked for it. There are unprofitable disclosures, unseasonable, harmful, and wrongful. But, it will be said, does not a man forego his right to reputation by doing the evil that belies his fair fame? ”

“ A law is defined to be: A precept just and abiding, given for promulgation to a perfect community. A law is primarily a rule of action. The first attribute of a law is that it be just: just to the subject on whom it is imposed, as being no harmful abridgment of his rights: just also to other men, as not moving him to injustice against them. An unjust law is no law at all, for it is not a rule of action. Still, we may sometimes be bound, when only our own rights are infringed, to submit to such an imposition, not as a law, for it is none, but on the score of prudence, to escape direr evils. ”

“ If punishment is never retributive, the human race in all countries and ages has been the sport of a strange illusion. Everyone knows what vengeance means. It is a desire to punish some one, or to see him punished, not prospectively and with an eye to the future, for his improvement, or as a warning to others, but retrospectively and looking to the past, that he may suffer for what he has done. ”

“ If man chooses to personify and body forth the powers of nature, he creates some monstrous uncouth figure, like the Assyrian and Egyptian idols; but if man makes a study of man, and brings genius and patient elaboration to bear on his work, there emerges the symmetry and perfect proportion of the Greek statue. No people ever made so much of the beauty of the human form as the ancient Greeks: they made it the object of a passion that marked their religion, their institutions, their literature, and their art. ”

“ The reason of a law lies deep down, lasting and widespread in the nature of the governed. A law, then, has these two further attributes of permanence in duration and amplitude in area. Every law is made for all time, and lives on with the life of the community for whom it is enacted, for ever, unless it be either expressly or implicitly repealed. A law in a community is like a habit in an individual, an accretion to nature, which abides as part of the natural being, and guides henceforth the course of natural action. ”

“ This is the first love of self even in man. But over and above this animal and sensible love, which no man lacks, there is in all men worthy of the name a second self-regarding affection of an intellectual cast, whereby a man loves himself as discerning with the eye of his soul the excellence of his own nature—"how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals." Intellectual self-complacence overflows from self to similars. ”

“ Anger is essentially a craving for vengeance on account of a wrong done. If then we have suffered, but think we deserve to suffer, we are not angry. If we have suffered wrong, but the wrong seems to have been done in ignorance, or in the heat of passion, we are not angry, or we are not so very angry. "If he had known what he was about," we say, or, "if he had been in his right mind, he could not have brought himself to treat me so." But when one has done us cool and deliberate wrong, then we are angry, because the slight is most considerable. ”

“ If any one held that the natural law of conscience was natural in the same way as the sense of temperature: if one held to the existence of a Moral Sense in all men, settling questions of right and wrong, as surely as all men know sweet things from bitter by tasting them: these stories, and they could be multiplied by hundreds, abundantly suffice to confute the error. There is no authentic copy of the moral law, printed, framed, and hung up by the hand of Nature, in the inner sanctuary of every human heart. ”

“ If we cannot, then is there no such thing as certainty upon any point of morals, politics, or religion. Assassination of tyrants, whether in public or private life, may be wickedness, or it may be a laudable outburst of public spirit, who knows? Which of us is sure that all property is not theft? Plato's views on marriage and infanticide may be correct: the Nihilist may be your true politician; and all our religious knowledge dwindles down to the confession of Protagoras: "Concerning Gods, I find no clear evidence whether they are or are not, or what manner of beings they are." ”