Mary Everest Boole

“ When you have found out a truth, then the question whether you shall or shall not tell it to other people is a matter of conscience. You will have to settle it alone with the Great Power which no man knows. Self-deception, slipshod logic, and bad algebra are things which it is the business of your elders to protect you from while you are young, in order that you may not lose the power of being honest in case you wish to be so. My business is not to judge what is good or bad conduct, but to see that you learn how to be perfectly honest with yourself. ”

“ Sabbath, Jubilee, Holy Days, Holidays, mean, in fact, time to renew our force for future work by getting our relations with unseen forces, with nature, with man, and even with tools, more true, more perfectly harmonious, more elastic and easy than is possible while the conscious mind is acting on the relation. Begin therefore as early as you can to set up in the child's mind what one may call a Sabbatical rhythm in science; a clear distinction between the time when he is being taught by man and the time when he is free to investigate or experiment as he pleases. ”

“ And its death, O! my love! will be union with you.
Death a Terror? Yes, surely. For Love is a Fire.
We children of earth know not what we desire.
The Eternal, in passing us, stretched out His Hand
That we might not be lightning-struck, here, as we stand;
And I think, O!. my dear one! 'tis only too true
That That Hand put a veil between Gentile and Jew.
Death a Terror? Ah! yes! of all terrors the King. ”

“ Those who offer you things written by other people by way of consolation, mistake, it seems to me, the whole lie of the situation. Can you imagine the delight of writing those verses; of feeling the music of them flow into one from some Source Unseen, and through one out into the world? The material out of which the man built up his verses consisted of:—stone walls and iron bars. Whatever the material, the joy of the artist in the act of creating harmony under inspiration is the same. ”

“ The leaders, many of whom are men of unquestioned ability, will pursue their course in a spirit of calm and patient inquiry, equally unmoved by the satire and antagonism, and by the over-excited curiosity and too ready belief, which will seethe around them. They will combine and utilise the work of isolated observers ; and in due time the world at large will profit greatly by their labours. But meanwhile a terrible amount of quite needless suffering will be caused to those who take no part in the movement, by the mere unsettling of their ordinary habits of thought. ”

“ He thinks in an incessant rhythmic pulsation of alternate "positing and denying," of constructing and sweeping away; a pulsation which produces the appearance of negation and the reality of power. It is in vain that we try to fight against, or to ignore, this rhythmic alternation of contrary notions. If we carefully embody it in our daily study, it becomes to us a source of constant power, like the movement of our lungs. If we forget it, it never forgets to sweep our work away. Unless it has helped to build the mind, their labour is but lost that built it. ”

“ He would have said to the people of Israel, "Now you see that I can teach you electricity; this land is going to be my class-room; make those shouting people hold their tongues, or else go away; so that we can go on with our lessons in peace. When they want to learn electricity properly, they can come back." But he was in too great a hurry to make a complete and final settlement. A good teacher sends a noisy, troublesome pupil out of his Class-room for the time, but does not expel her from the school merely for being troublesome. ”

“ A writer on education [2] has said that a human being comes into the world not chiefly to acquire knowledge or to develop his faculties, but to establish relations; and I would add that a child comes into science, not only to learn facts and to develop the faculty for doing things, but primarily to establish relations with the laws of nature, by which we mean—if we truly mean anything—the laws according to which the world is governed. And in order that relations may be properly established, the adults who are directing the child must, at proper times, keep silence even from good words. ”

“ If you once do that, believe me, you will somehow succeed in getting the world to understand you.
I want to help you, if you will allow me, to learn the art (for it is an art, quite as much so as music and painting) of the orderly arrangement of thought.
It is a common mistake to suppose that the Art of Thinking can be learned only by thinking of what are called "learned" topics. This is not the case. The finest music is made not by clashing together heavy masses of gems or of precious metals, but by "scraping the guts of a cat with hairs from the tail of a horse." ”

“ The main cause of the chaotic condition into which our thought-life has fallen, is the feverish impatience of teachers, each of whom wants to make his own voice heard. But any teacher who is weary of the conflict between Science and Religion, between Knowledge and Faith, between the valuable Lessons of Materialism and the consoling belief in the spiritual world; any teacher who sincerely desires, not to make a cheap and noisy fame for himself, but to find Truth and Peace for the young souls committed to his care, might do well to devote a quiet vacation to the study of Gratry's Logique. ”

“ Therefore it is well for us to reflect what effect it would have on the teaching of so simple a thing as Geometry, if teachers introduced into each other's classes the element which is so rife in our literature.
True Critique is one of the fine Arts; as sacred and beautiful as all true Art. There is no keener pleasure for a good teacher than genuine criticism from a pupil. If a question is asked which shows that the teacher has failed to make intelligible a fact perfectly clear to himself, even that is a source of great enjoyment. ”

“ They felt that as to a man is the regular pulsation of his heart and lungs, so is, to creative wisdom, the complex rhythm of Nature; and they thought too (and were they not right in so thinking?) that nothing is more likely to put man into rapport with living truth than getting his mind to beat in unison with the heart-beats of the unseen Father. ”

“ And as we might facilitate our work by unifying the Sciences into One Science, so we should also treat the revelations of all times as One Eternal Truth. This is best done by studying each Science according to the historical method; letting the culture of to-day flow into our minds in natural sequence from that of yesterday. It is vain that we rise early and late take rest, and anxiously devour many books ; to those who love The Great Unity, He gives knowledge even while they sleep. ”

“ It is the dislike of the Inquisition to Galileo; of the medical profession in Harvey's time to the doctrine of the circulation of the blood; the dislike of the stagnant mind to whatever forces it to recognize throughout creation the existence of that incessant rhythmic pulsation which is the appointed purifier of all that is foul, the liberator of all that is enslaved. Only those who doubt the power given to the Ark to keep its own place as the Centre of the world's march, need fear to see its accessories move round it as the earth moves round the Sun. ”

“ We are guilty of idolatry when we prefer speculations and mystical chimeras to reason and good sense; when we treat any legislative code as if it were dictated by the Almighty; when we endow with a divine character the servant of a theocracy; when we try to regulate the conduct of men here below by Laws suited only to Celestial beings; when we confuse heaven with earth; when we mistake our own position and pretend to be more than mortal ”

“ Those who, of old, attempted to base National Education on the principle of the Logos, or rhythmic pulsation, struck the true key-note at starting. The symbol of the covenant made with man by Infinite Knowledge was the Rainbow; which no man can capture or embalm or enshrine ; which is made by the breaking up of the One Light into many colours, to fade before long into the Unity of white light again; and leaves nowhere in all the world a trace of its ever having existed, except in Man's heart an impression of spiritual beauty, and in his mind a suggestion how to discover the Laws of Light. ”

“ The best work is that which combines Genius with Experience; therefore the way to do the best work is to live to be old. Original work is healthful exercise for the young; but the work of preparing one's own work for a public wears out the immature brain. Juvenile Genius is impatient, and clothes its own impatience in a disguise of devotion to Truth; but it would be better if that devotion took the healthy and unexhausting form of studying how to complete and preserve the work of predecessors. The consequence of impatience to be original is that the work of genius is done without experience ”

“ We have to live our own lives; and we must not so crowd up the world with memorials of the past as to leave no room for the present. We must sometimes make changes or there could be no progress. Which changes are real Reform, and which are mere foolish fashion? Then, again, just as an old carving left to itself gathers dust and damp and tends to decay, so everything that is old, if left to itself, tends to become obscure and to moulder. Everything needs care to keep it fresh. Much of our progress consists in refreshing or renewing things that have grown dusty with age ”

“ In ordinary times, Judaism keeps itself in the background, and leaves Gentile thought to develop in its own way. But when Philosophy has evaporated into the fourth dimension, when it has played with the Eternal till it has shrivelled out of itself the perception alike of locality and of epoch, of possibility and of sequence, of perspective and of proportion, then is a fitting occasion for Judaism to come to the front. ”

“ Judaism, as a sect, far from becoming more intelligible and more tolerated because of the progress of liberality and culture, must, on the contrary, become more impossible and more intolerable with every advance in civilization. It has no place in the modern world, unless it is the intellectual heart-and-lungs of Humanity, viz., an organ whose function is to receive all the thought-material gathered by the Gentile world; purify and aerate it by submitting it to the action of that circulating rhythm which is characteristic of Nature's vital processes and of the Jewish discipline ”

“ In a College where such disorder prevailed, would the pupils be in a frame of mind to receive instruction? Would the teachers themselves be likely to preserve the calmness necessary for the investigation of Truth? That the picture I have drawn is no exaggerated one, that those whose mission is to arouse the public to a perception of the relation between the essential and the accidental have to run the gauntlet of a style of criticism as senseless and frivolous as I have represented, no one can doubt. We are all aware of the absurdity of our present modes of receiving new truth ”

“ But slight as it is, all the delights and powers conferred by the Higher Mathematics are the reward of that simple trust! See how The Unity keeps His ancient covenant with man! Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it yet entered into the heart of man to conceive, what He hath in store for those that love Him! ”