Edwin E. Slosson

“ I am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately—it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul. ”

“ If I were to sum up Shaw in two words it would be that his distinguishing characteristics are courage and kind-heartedness. The sight of suffering and injustice drives him mad, and then he runs amuck, slashing right and left, without much regard to whom he hits and no regard at all as to who hits him. He is, like Swift, a cruel satirist through excess of sympathy. If Ibsen is right, that "the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone", then George Bernard Shaw is not to be ignored. ”

“ Democracy means that personality is the first and final reality.... It holds that the spirit of personality indwells in every individual, and that the choice to develop it must proceed from that individual. From this central position of democracy result the other notes of democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity—words which are not mere words to catch a mob, but symbols of the highest ethical idea which humanity has yet reached—the idea that personality is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that in every human individual there lies personality.... ”

“ It is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and servitude, and desolates wide regions. It is a monster begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable share.
The abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward his ideal. ”

“ When the rest of the world was looking for the advent of cosmopolitanism and the reign of peace, the earth lapped in universal law and all the local idiosyncrasies ironed out, wherein all obstacles to freedom of movement had been crushed out and one could buy a tourist ticket to Timbuktu with the same accommodation all along the route, Chesterton set his bugle to his lips and blew a fanfare of audacious challenge to the spirit of the times in the form of a nonsensical romance, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." ”

“ Either religion is merely a product of human wishes and ideas under the sanction of tradition and social convention—and then neither art nor might nor cunning can prevent so frail a fabrication from being whelmed by the advancing spiritual tide—or else religion is based on facts of a suprahuman order, and in that case the most violent onslaught cannot shake her; rather will it help her in the end, through all the stress and toil of human circumstance, to discover where her true strength lies, and to express in purer ways the eternal truth that is in her. ”

“ Chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is given in his "Defense of Nonsense".
Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle....
Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. ”

“ They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality of the best club in the world have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. ”

“ Balsquith—Yes. Theres no such thing as security in the world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal. England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him. When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon.
Mitchener—Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. ”

“ The will to have faith in a thing oft makes the faith come true. So it can be said in a way that we make truth for our own use. What we think must be of use to us in some way, else why should we think it? The truth is what is good for us, what helps us, what gives us joy and strength, what shows us how to act, what ties up fact to fact, so the chain will hold, what makes us see all things clear and straight, and what keeps us from stray paths that turn out wrong in the end. Thought is a tool, a means to an end. Man has to act, and so he must think. ”

“ He had evidently read Schopenhauer's theory that the only happiness is the pursuit of happiness, and, what is more, he acts upon it by letting go what he most delights in that he may recapture it. He goes round the world in search of his own home, and his series of amorous adventures are conducted in strict accord with monogamous morality. By getting outside of himself he can gain the joy of coveting his own possessions. The economic law of diminishing returns applies to all our habitual pleasures, and to escape it we must be continually seeking new investments. ”

“ At the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization. The energy we need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. ”

“ Aristocracy is blasphemy against personality.
Even in those days when socialism had hardly begun to be whispered, at least in academic circles, Dewey was not afraid to say that: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political.... A democracy of wealth is a necessity." Twenty-five years later I saw Professor Dewey giving a public demonstration of his faith in democracy when I found him marching with a small body of men at the tail end of a suffrage procession while the crowds that lined Fifth Avenue jeered and hissed at us. ”

“ Our culture must be consonant with realistic science and with machine industry, instead of a refuge from them.... It is for education to bring the light of science and the power of work to the aid of every soul that it may discover its quality. For in a spiritually democratic society every individual would realize distinction. Culture would then be for the first time in human history an individual achievement and not a class possession. ”

“ This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on forever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. ”

“ It is good to have a giant's strength and it is not at all tyrannous to use it like a giant provided you are a decent sort of giant. What on earth is strength for but to be used and will any reasonable man tell me that we are using our strength now to any purpose?
Let us get the value of our money in strength and influence instead of casting every new cannon in an ecstasy of terror and then being afraid to aim it at anybody. ”

“ I never met a man who talked more easily or more interestingly. "There are no uninteresting subjects," he says, "there are only uninterested persons." Start any idea you please as unexpectedly as a rabbit from its lair, and he will after it in a second and follow all its turns and windings until he runs it down. His mind is as agile as a movie actor. Epigrams, paradoxes, puns, anecdotes, characterizations, metaphors, fell from his lips in such profusion that I, who knew the market value of such verbal gems, felt as nervous as a jeweler who sees a lady break her necklace. ”

“ Through labor and love we attain our true selves. The fulfilling of duty is inner freedom. The unrest and stress of the present day are the signs of a new spiritual birth. The function of philosophy is not to afford intellectual or esthetic gratification, but it is to deepen and enrich life. To the fine old German saying, "A man is more than his work", Eucken added "Mankind is more than his culture." It is a Lebensanschauung rather than a Weltanschauung that he teaches, for to him a theory of life is more important than a theory of the cosmos. ”

“ Whatever it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual, or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible. Usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is advantageous, even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and the retardation of progress. Certainly no one is good enough or wise enough to be trusted with irresponsible power. ”

“ In its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation and justification. By this alone it tests its conclusions and demonstrates its usefulness. In fact, the sole object of science is prophecy, as Ostwald and Poincaré make plain. The mind of the scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project into the future. It is, therefore, not a chance direction of his fancy that so many of Wells's books, both romances and studies, deal with the future. ”

“ Man is not altogether the creature of his environment, nor are his moral standards determined by society. The individual is able in the light of his own conscience to approve and value something which all around him reject; and conversely to condemn and reject something which all around him esteem and respect. This opposition of individuals to the condition of things in the social environment has been the main source of all inner progress in matters of morality.
This line of thought leads Eucken to the conclusion that a new life distinct from that of nature arises in our soul. ”

“ So the gentlemanly old general—the polished drover to the shambles—rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that haunts my mind.
I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do against modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever they come against a sanely organized army. There is nowhere they can come in; there is nothing they can do. ”

“ Chesterton's ideal is a complete democracy, not merely democracy in politics but democracy in science, religion, literature, sport, and art. If you say this is impracticable he doubtless would retort that it was the essence of an ideal to be impracticable, otherwise it would be confounded with dull reality. He always champions the opinion of the many against that of the few, the laymen against the expert. ”