Adeline Champney

“ Brought into this world by no act of one's own, does one inherit the obligations assumed by one's ancestors, much less those forced upon them? The sole justification of every authority is its power to enforce obedience; and therein lies the justification of every rebellion. Whatever obedience may be exacted, whatever allegiance may be voluntarily rendered, there is no obligation whatsoever. Duty is but a metaphysical cobweb. It has no foundation in fact. "But conscience? Surely I cannot deny the admonition of conscience!" ”

“ Being is more beautiful than acting; play is more beautiful than work. It is only when work is play that it is beautiful, when the worker enjoys it and puts himself into it. Nothing is beautiful which does not give joy, and all effort that does not tend toward joy is wasted.
We often seem to forget that man is an emotional creature as well as a reasoning being. But in truth our feelings are the important things in life, not our ideas. It is our feelings which impel us to action; our thoughts merely restrain. Even our judgments ultimately rest on feeling. ”

“ It is true that without society I can do nothing, but it is as true that without me—without every individual me—society can do nothing. Let us have done with the worship of society, for at the last there are but men and women, selves, separate and distinct but interdependent. And society progresses only as these progress. And society is great and good and prosperous and happy only with the greatness and goodness and prosperity and happiness of these men and women. ”

“ Of the fetish, Duty, with Conscience as its private watchman, investigation leaves not one shred. It follows the gods, the heavens and the hells, and all the spooks that infest intellectual darkness. Not so with conscience as a profound sense of self-judgment. That is an attribute of the mind which is of inestimable value. To the Man Awake it becomes a veritable court of last appeal. There is no greater honor to win than the approval of our own souls. There is no greater faith to keep than faith with ourselves. ”

“ He may go hand-in-hand with a comrade, he may join himself to a company, he may even follow a leader; but the comrades must be of his own choosing, related in thought and purpose, and not mere accidents of the wayside; and he will see to it that he is driven by no compulsion save the impulse of his own nature.
Let it not be thought that I disparage ideals. It is not the Ideal but the deification of it that stultifies growth. The leaders of men are always idealists; all the periods of great moral and social uplift have been periods of idealism. ”

“ The worship of this blessed trinity is called Duty. By the unpremeditated and involuntary act of being born we are supposed to have incurred a three-fold obligation: our duty to God, our duty to man, and our duty to ourselves—named in the order of their importance. Preacher, teacher, poet and sage alike speak to us of Duty. The world's literature is full of beautiful tributes to Duty, and stirring exhortations of Conscience—a spiritual faculty the function of which is to admonish us of Duty. Conscience is the voice of God in the soul, say the religious. ”

“ The Man Awake is not going off at a tangent. The conduct of life, now that he no longer gets it ready-made, has become of vastly greater importance to him. It is his own concern, now; he will ask himself as never before—"What is really worth while?" And the answer must be a personal one. Not that out of his inner consciousness he will dig up a set of rules and precepts unrelated to the thought and feeling of the world about him. Not every man is called to blaze a new trail. ”

“ This is the childish age of Bugaboos and Authority, which is succeeded by the Metaphysical period; the worship of entities, ideals, principles; things to be valued in and for themselves. To this age belongs the reign of Conscience, which especially characterizes our own day. And as our knowledge and understanding of the material universe passes from the realms of mystery into the region of exact knowledge, so must the conduct of life take on the scientific method, and, leaving the darkness of tradition and the fogs of metaphysics, become truly rationalized. ”

“ Have you studied the conscience of a savage? Have you made a comparative analysis of conscience among varying peoples and at various periods of history? Have you ever observed the conscience of a very little child? The dictates of conscience are purely and simply a matter of education. Conscience itself is neither more nor less than one's satisfaction in himself. A clear conscience is the pleasurable sense of self-approval; guilty conscience, the disquieting sense of self-censure. ”

“ The finest type of human development is strongly self-centered, but the self-limited individual is deficient in essential humanity, for man is a social being, not merely a gregarious animal. He does not merely hunt in packs like the wolves, nor herd together for protection like weaker animals; but before man was possible a species of social creatures had appeared, who, living together, sharing in weal and woe, and especially through close association in play, developed a community of feeling which taught them speech and thought and made them the ancestors of the civilizations. ”

“ Restraint is the essence of our governments, and largely the aim of our education, but restraint is not power but the denial of power. Expression is the vital thing, expression of feeling; and the function of restraint is intellectual, the preservation of balance. Reason is normally the handmaid of feeling, developed by the endeavor to fulfill our desires. To discount our emotional life and attempt to live by intellect alone is to dehumanize ourselves just as surely as to abdicate reason and live from impulse alone is to brutalize ourselves. ”

“ The Man Awake recognizes nothing which he may not analyze, nothing which he may not weigh in the balance. Though one by one his cherished idols fall and crumble, he must apply the tests of truth.
With the downfall of the God-idol I shall not here concern myself. It is the simplest, the easiest liberation. When one bears the torch of Reason and uses the compass of Science, all roads lead to Freedom. Many have made this journey, but many have stopped here and lain down again and slept. I concern myself with the Man Awake who sees his liberation but begun ”

“ When God vanishes from the skies he takes a great many things with him, some of which are not commonly recognized as pertaining to the God-idea. Not only does his departure into the limbo of past superstition remove the authority of bibles and churches and temples, and the divine authorities of priests and rulers, but it also removes all ultimate authorities whatever, and takes the sanctity from all principles of conduct. The departure of God places man face to face with the material universe, and men face to face with each other. ”

“ If there be any exclusively human characteristic, essentially distinguishing the man from his fellow-animals, it is this power to frame ideal conceptions, to picture better things and to strive toward them. Many of the finest types of manhood which society has produced have been men of vision as well as of insight, ardent dreamers of dreams, with the daring to follow their dreams. These have been strong men, men of striking personality, of resolute self-determination, these idealists. When a man loses himself, when he becomes subservient to an ideal ”

“ In the life of each man and woman sooner or later there comes an awakening. I am inclined to think it comes to all, but very many go to sleep again. The stupor of years of acquiescence, the apathy bred of the habit of conformity, overcomes them. And there are many who count the cost and shut their eyes again. It takes a certain sturdy strength to cross the current, to steer for unknown seas. ”

“ We have a science of things, but not as yet a science of men. There are many cobwebs to be swept away before the conduct of life takes on the scientific form. Any ideal which becomes an object of worship, which in and for itself compels observance; any principle, obedience to which is forced upon men, either by violence, by legal enactment, or by the coercion of public opinion, becomes a fetish. ”

“ When a serious crisis arrives, the veneer cracks and the savage appears. And the whole effort of civilization seems to be, not to develop and improve the savage, but to thicken the veneer. Surely society would be more secure if the savage were not veneered at all.
The whole structure of society must rest either on conflict or on confidence, and confidence is not born of veneer. Any system of education which relies upon the imposition of ideas rather than the development of individualities must result in a hypocrisy which is none the less demoralizing for being well-intentioned ”

“ Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things which our minds could entertain, we should close all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other."
In this alleged reign of reason we are apt to overlook this fact. It is frequently remarked how thin is the veneer which civilization has laid upon the primal savage. ”

“ Then, only, does my living them become of value to my greater self, the social whole. The man in whose being a race-ideal becomes, as it were, focused, becomes from that moment a veritable savior, a leader and maker of history and social destiny; and he becomes this just in the measure of the independence of his thought and action. It is often remarked that great men are the product of their time, expressions of the mass of society ”

“ Is it not plain that their religious training has not given them moral stamina, or a rational view of life? That it has weakened their resistage by the constant suggestion of weakness and dependence, and given them only an arbitrary rule of conduct and not a vital purpose in life? Believing themselves "vile worms of the dust," they act the part! ”

“ I am eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree, the tree of others' labor!"
Can anyone find humanity and find himself and not become a revolutionist? I cannot. I declare that greater than custom and convention, greater than the laws of the land, greater than schools and philosophies, is the need of human joy. ”

“ The most and the least which society demands of us is that we be ourselves. We speak of the race-ideals, but the race-ideals are of value to me only as I make them mine, my very own; as I follow them, love them and live them for myself. ”

“ Failing in these, the individual becomes, more or less according to the measure of his deviation, an undesirable.
These standards of conduct, accepted by religious and irreligious alike, are presented to the youth as things sacred in themselves, not to be questioned. One who should ask: "Why should I be honest?" would be suspected of moral degeneracy. It is true they tell us that honesty is the best policy, but that is given us rather as an assuaging circumstance than as a motive. Of course one must be honest. One must be honest for honesty's own sake. ”

“ Life and love and treasure offered up to please and placate Deity; and the crowning sacrifice of Deity himself in the person of his son to satisfy his own wrath and save a sinning but well-beloved and eternally damned people! It is doubtless this sacrificial atonement of the ancient churches which has passed into the metaphysical concept of self-sacrifice as a laudable and beautiful thing, a holy and righteous thing, a kind of sublimated duty. ”

“ Self-mutilations, mortifications of the flesh, are not all in the past. The religious frenzy of the old-time saint is rare, and we call it by its right name now. But in its more subtle form sacrifice unto sanctification is not uncommon among high-strung nervous temperaments. No one can estimate the injury to health, the distortions of mind and character, and that among the finer, more highly developed types of men and women, particularly women. No one can know the loss to society of strong sane womanhood and motherhood, from this sacrifice. ”

“ For, mark you, for all this sacrifice the world is scarcely the kinder. Indeed, as Oscar Wilde so keenly says, "It takes a thoroughly selfish age like our own to deify self-sacrifice." "Living for others," we say, but deliver us from the arrogance, the insufferable despotism of many of those who insist on living for us. ”

“ This isolation of individuals in the human race, a species in which each member is more utterly dependent upon his fellows than in any other, is one of the most remarkable of paradoxes. Indeed, self-reliance is an eminent social virtue, but self-limitation is a pitiful individual weakness. ”

“ Is he not poor with the poverty of the poorest, and lonely with the desolation of the outcast? So long as some must be cold and hungry and wretched, are there not tears in all his joy, and thorns in all his luxury? ”

“ If he attempts to apply it literally, he will speedily discover the arrogance of the assumption that other men are like himself, that what pleases him will be acceptable to them. If he endeavors to disregard the letter but carry out the spirit of it, he will soon be engulfed in the fathomless task of determining what others, actuated by the Golden Rule, would do unto him with a view of having him do so even unto them! ”