Chautauqua Institution

“ Biology is the science of life, the true doctrine concerning all living things. Animal biology is that branch of the science which relates to animals, as distinguished from plants. It tells of these animals what we know about them, where and how they live, what food they eat, how it is received, and how they grow and multiply. Of all the sciences, this seems most extensive, having for its field a world of numberless forms, alike in that they all live, and have some characteristics in common, yet showing great diversity in their structure, appearance, and mode of life. ”

“ To a hypothetical astronomer on a distant star, this world would be too minute for observation. In that shining pathway of the heavens, called the “milky way,” there have been discovered eighteen millions of stars, each hundreds of times larger than our earth; yet our atom in immensity is, just now, of marvelous interest to us. Indeed, it must be of interest to the highest intelligences, for such are the harmonies of God’s universe that the minutest planet is in many of its forces and laws representative of the whole. So that our world is, in a sense, both a microcosm and a cosmo. ”

“ Repudiated debts are baptised in the self-renouncing spirit which is at the heart of our religion, and repudiators make war on the foundations of character and society. In so far as England protects her money lenders, she protects her noble middle class, whose honest thrift lies at the foundation of her wealth. It is among the strangest perversions of feeling that prodigals and prodigal governments should get the sympathy of mankind. Let England foreclose her mortgage on Egypt, and the honest world will thank her for abolishing one nest of spendthrifts. ”

“ The science of the beautiful is an important and delightful branch of study; the knowledge gained being mostly through immediate perceptions and sensible impressions. Beauty, wherever discovered, appeals to the sensibilities, and raises pleasant emotions. As a means of culture it elevates and refines. Communings with nature in her lovelier moods subdue asperities, and inspire gentle, kindly dispositions, while the beautiful creations of architecture, statuary, and painting, of poetry and music, fill the souls of discerning, susceptible persons with indescribable pleasure. ”

“ Very near the Devereux Tower is a plain, unpretentious building—the chapel of St. Peter Ad Vincula. It is small, having but one nave and one side aisle, and is quite without ornamentation. But marvelous interest invests it. Here Lady Jane was buried; here the body of poor Anne Boleyn was thrust into an old chest and hastily interred in the vaults; here lies the dust of Northumberland, Thomas Cromwell, Somerset, Surrey, and Essex, teaching the terribly solemn lesson that ambition, talents, fame, form no sure bulwark against death. ”

“ A humanitarian war is a difficult conception; but it is not impossible to conceive of wars that produce beneficent results. We could conceive of the subjugation of Islam to British sway, and rejoice to see the Soudan like India, slowly but surely rising into civilization under English rule. But an army thrusting down no imperial stakes, going home after each slaughter to be paid, promoted and fêted, is not doing work which opens any vistas of smiling peace and advancing light. ”

“ This thought of oneness in work gives feelings of kinship and companionship. The solitary student in the little room—kitchen, sitting room, library, or bed chamber—is surrounded by thousands of fellow-students. They seem to look over the page with you. They seem to whisper words of good will and faith, and some of them, I assure you, are royal people. They would give you such greeting, if they had opportunity, as would make you proud and glad of your connection with the Circle. ”

“ It is complained every year in New York, when the art exhibitions come on for criticism, that the pecuniary motive for work, and the avidity of artists for good sales, depress the imagination of the lovers of good work. In substance, then, our trouble as to art—that we are a commercial race—seems to get into the schools and infect their atmosphere. The evil is not that success is rewarded; but that success is not possible to an artist who thinks always of his reward. Art, like religion, requires a spirit of self-renunciation. ”

“ We would not be insensible to the value of the columns and capitals, the statuary and tablets before our eyes, and yet the very grandeur of these ruins would evoke the genius who would lead our thought by an irresistible constraint to look upon the prior vision of those cities in the day of their pristine perfection.
My friends, we do stand amid ruins. We walk day after day amid shattered greatness, in comparison with which the prized relics of Nineveh and Babylon, of Thebes, and Luxor, [1] and Troy, sink into insignificance. ”

“ We all know how long, in families which have lost position or power, the memory of former greatness is cherished. You will find in your charitable institutions, in the depths of poverty, and, perhaps, of wickedness, those who will tell you by the hour of the fortunes of their house in remote days, of the distinction which some ancestor, far removed, conferred upon the name. Such memories are preserved with care, and transmitted from generation to generation, and they become more and more precious as the descendants themselves have less and less honor of their own. ”

“ As a life of earnest purpose, of continued struggle for a high living, of deepest desire to make the most of everything, and for everybody, there is none more marked than that of George Eliot. Non-conformity to the religion and the law in which we believe, must sadden her life for all, but an honest student of her character must, after reading this “Life,” accord to her what she herself never failed to give to the erring—charity. ”

“ If the true explanation of man’s condition to-day, in the civilized countries, is that he has gradually raised himself from a state of absolute barbarism, we certainly ought to have in the records of authentic history the account of at least one nation, which, as matter of fact, before the eyes of the world, has done the same thing. But no such instance can be found, not one of a people, entirely barbarous, lifting themselves unaided, to the higher plane of even a comparative civilization. ”

“ Think of the ages through which the intellect of the most favored portion of the world has been struggling to its present attainments. Think particularly of the moral and spiritual condition of the race, in comparison with that heavenly vision of Godlikeness which stands at the beginning of our history. I need not delay then to prove that mankind has fallen. I will, however, ask you to remember when you reflect upon the sad disorders of the present state, upon the sorrows and weaknesses and wickednesses of men to-day, that God did not thus create the progenitors of the race. ”

“ Success in art is not possible to one who consumes his energy in thinking about the sale of his pictures. To become rich by art one must be first willing to starve to death in the service of art truth. We are not demanding such sacrifices; we are only suggesting that without the spirit of them the pure art of this country will not attain the eminence which our enthusiasm seeks to reach. ”

“ We may, without danger of mistake, consider him to have been physically a being of magnificent stature, and of matchless perfection of feature and form, with a body ignorant of weakness or disease, free from the seeds of sickness and of death. That a change would afterward have been necessary to fit his body of flesh and blood for its immortality is possible, but such change would not have been what we understand by death. Age would not have brought infirmity to him. Nature would have had no debt to pay to the grave. ”

“ THE CIRCLE OF THE SCIENCES. MENTAL SCIENCE
Is the mind’s knowledge of itself, of its faculties, and states. Psychology is now generally accepted as the most appropriate term to indicate that knowledge, and the studies that lead to its attainment. The psyche, as used by those ignorant of man’s higher nature, means the vital principle supposed to animate all living bodies, whether of men or the lower animals. It is, with them, the same as life, and is regarded as a result of the organizations they see, and not their cause. ”

“ Man is a religious animal, and ever prone to worship. He has capacities that are not filled, longings unsatisfied, and must go out of himself for help and rest. Of all the sciences that concern him most, no other is half so important as the science of God, an infinite, all-wise, ever-present, personal God; our Creator, Redeemer, Benefactor. This science is transcendent, and confirmed by indubitable evidence. It satisfies and saves. “This is eternal life, to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent.” ”

“ And we may follow the course of civilization from our own land back to western Europe, from western Europe to Italy, from Italy to Greece, from Greece to Egypt and the farther East, and still, as far as history takes us we see the barren portions of the earth continuing to be barren—continuing to bear only the wild fruits of barbarism, until the stream of knowledge, and culture, and civilization, is led to it from some other place. ”

“ Men did lose the moral beauty of our first parent; they did lose much of the intellectual and physical strength which lingered for a season in his immediate descendants—and sin was the despoiler that remorselessly stripped from them those glorious robes! You and I might have been as Adam—ignorant of sorrow and of suffering, and the world still an Eden about us, but sin has cast us down. ”

“ The body is even more simple, being apparently without layers or cavity. The processes thrown out as arms and legs are not blunt or massive, but long and slender. And, moreover, small as it is, it has the wonderful property of secreting about itself an envelope, whose thin walls are built of the carbonate of lime. The delicate little structures are often singularly beautiful. Some are monads, having but a single shell; others, by a process of budding add new cells or chambers, often in a spiral coil. These are marine shells, and their numbers in many parts of the ocean are astounding. ”

“ Through this gate went Elizabeth, expecting naught but death; dreaming little of the hour when all England should lie within the hollow of her white hand. Under these portals three short years after she issued from the Tower in all the full flush of her pride and triumph, received by lords and dukes, amid the blare of trumpets, and peal of bells and roar of guns. Elizabeth’s hapless mother, Anne Boleyn, returned to the Tower. No nobles in her train now; no burst of music ”

“ These things are the impress of the joys of that golden age which all these centuries have been powerless to erase from the souls of Adam’s sons. Morally, we know we are not what we ought to be; we are conscious of our degradation. As regards intellect, we retain powers which have, indeed, accomplished marvelous results; and yet, let some abnormal stimulus affect the brain—whether it be that produced by sudden excitement or passion, or that caused by powerful artificial agencies, and we see flashes of power yet in reserve which intimate what this wondrous human mind may once have been. ”

“ Mistaken views of life’s best aims, in days when opportunities were possible, have been dispelled when the opportunities have long been left behind. To each of these classes the Chautauqua University brings the correspondence system of teaching, and says: for you, it is possible to supplement the lack of early years; for you, to realize your ambitions, even within the bond by which circumstance has bound you; and for you, in the new light which experience has given, to see other opportunities for obtaining that culture which, years ago, you neglected and passed by. ”

“ The real body is that which retains its organic sameness, amidst the incessant change of its materials. It is not the aggregation of gross substances, visible and tangible, but rather their connection and the life that unites them, that constitute a human body. We need not hesitate to say this life is the gift of God to man, made in his own image, and in his purpose an endowment far higher than mere animal life. When it is withdrawn, the organic structure built up as its earthly habitation is a ruin, and its material elements are scattered, the dust returning to dust again. ”

“ The intelligent study of the outer world, of nature, having the divine impress on every feature, will also do much to cure the weakness that many are ready to confess, to themselves at least. Nature does not think—has not reason, as man has, but the phenomena presented are full of reasons, the embodiments of God’s thoughts, that are above ours, high as the heavens are above the earth. ”

“ But why do not hundreds of ministers who have all gifts of intellect utter spiritual thought and emotion? Why are they forever dealing rather with opinions than facts of the spiritual life? We ask such questions in no censorious spirit; they are pressed home to many anxious hearts, and the wonder grows whether modern Christianity is tongueless respecting its experience because it is backslidden and even skeptical. ”

“ But socialism is not “social science.” It is utterly and perversely unscientific; it discusses effects, carefully leaving causes out of view; and would reform communities by corrupting and debasing individuals. With a vague notion that every man has a natural right to whatever he needs, it allows that the problem of equalization may be solved by violence, and thus all brought to a common level. The crimes against society, which have lately appalled us, are doubtless the result of the pernicious principles and teaching of “socialistic reformers.” ”