George Iles

“ For lack of that decent hesitation, statute-books are filled with laws which are evaded, or work results opposed to those expected from them, all tending to establish in the popular mind an injurious contradiction between law and common sense. And what supreme diffidence should there be when we are endeavoring to arrive at, not some knowledge in a special science, not the best policy in a matter of law or state, but when we approach the highest questions: How best can we interpret Nature so as to form a conception of its informing spirit? If a man die, shall he live again? ”

“ The strong pleas made by the railroad interest do not silence the voice of murmuring. Every great railroad serves without competition important breadths of country, and proofs abound that the interest of a road may not always be a consenting parallel with the interests of its patrons. Charges much higher than justice would fix are exacted from customers, who must submit, and who are not sufficiently injured to be driven from their field. There is something ominous, too, in the way in which coarse and unscrupulous men are getting more and more control of the railroad system of the country. ”

“ Evolution is underlaid, as is all change, by the greater law of the persistence of force, ever holding the even balance through all complexity, maintaining throughout all a just compensation. Every new faculty and enjoyment is earned by its equivalent of work, trouble, or ill; with every addition to power comes an addition to wants, to labor, and the possibilities of pain. As the stores of the mind increase so also do ideals craving satisfaction become higher and wider: ever "on the isthmus of a middle state," man is at once a record of the past and a prophecy of the future ”

“ Instead, however, of assuming certainty because it is desirable, we would endeavor to earn it, by recognizing it as every man's duty and privilege to add to truth, in the justness, completeness, and clearness of his knowledge of it. And, since the scope of the unknown is infinite, the incitement to the fulfillment of this duty is full of hope and promise. Science, unlike dogma, does not point to fields harvested and gleaned long ago, but to continents awaiting their Columbus to pressing problems of individual, social, and political life demanding solutions by thoughtful men. ”

“ The records of science show us the common case where men of extraordinary genius have risen so high above their fellows as to excite reverence for their results, rather than emulation of their methods. The price paid by mankind for towering ability has often been the production of generations of mere quoters and commentators, who revered the work of a master as too sacred to require addition or improvement. Ptolemy's system of the universe was so great an advance on the explanations which preceded it, that for sixteen dreary centuries it was imposed upon students of the heavens. ”

“ One result of science will be profoundly influential here—its arrival at the idea of Law, its perception of uniformity and constancy in Nature; the proof which, in large part, it now possesses, that the history of the universe, from nebular mist to man, illustrates causation and continuity. This idea, excluding as it does the miraculous and the supernatural, leads us to regard the history of the universe as an unbroken and consistent unfolding. In this view, every item of knowledge we attain is secure from any interference from break in the natural order. ”

“ Nature presents to our view and study a mechanism of infinite complexity. Its rules of action we may know in part, and, when we obey that knowledge, happiness can be ours; but, however diligent we may be in study or willing in our obedience, all its laws we can never discern, and its wheels may seize us and painfully mar or quench our lives at any moment—the lurking germs of disease by inheritance within us, or floating in the air around us, the incalculable forces of earthquake or tornado ”

“ Yet so widely and in our view so unjustifiably have the ideas of God and Nature diverged, that we find Tennyson asking, as he depicts the agony of the struggle for existence and the profuse waste of organic life, "Are God and Nature then, at strife?" Any theory of the universe which endeavors to be comprehensive must subdue the impulses of sentiment and emotion and face all the facts of experience. The natural order shows us redundant life as necessary for the competition whereby the fittest individuals and species may survive and advance. ”

“ The scientific method ignores no faculty of man or fact in Nature; it recognizes to the full our emotions, affections, and sentiments, but subordinates all these to the intellect, whose dictum alone is given command over the educated will. Authority relies on inspiration, revelation, the miraculous, and the supernatural; science relies on brain, on experience, the mastery of facts by accurate and patient thought. ”

“ Humanity remains, though the supreme cause continue undefined. In the spirit of much of what the theologians say, we find ourselves acknowledging our inability to rise from phenomena to ultimate cause or essence. Declining to attempt solutions of the origin and destiny of the universe, we would endeavor to attack undone work for mankind near at hand, neglecting in the mean time all discussion of the remote and impossible. ”

“ Fourthly, our present inability to obtain the movement of masses from, the motion of molecules or small masses—that is, the derivation of work from uniformly heated matter—does not decide that such conversion is impossible in Nature, or even to science in the future. While it is perfectly right to reason from what we know, it is of yet higher importance to constantly bear in mind how little we know. It would require infinite knowledge to say that the motion of uniform heat may not be transformable into phases of energy quite as diverse as high and low temperatures. ”

“ The history of Christianity, from the time of the apostles to that of Theodore Parker, manifests first the gradual evolution of authority, and then tells us how by abusing its power and becoming corrupt and arbitrary it incited the rebellion of bold and free men, who point by point have taken the citadels of assertion and dogma. Theology proves on examination to be no more than the views of Nature entertained by observers in the remote past. ”

“ It is true that coöperation seeks to abolish many of the hazards which make modern business require unusual talent for its management; judgment will be relieved from many questions when credit is curtailed, and consumers are federated to a factory conducted by their own capital and directors; yet in the actual present, while coöperation still remains in its infancy, the existing conditions of competition beset capitalists with difficulties of which only experience has made workmen aware. ”

“ The great artists of the world, whose masterpieces fill the generations with wonder, have lamented how far execution has lagged behind conception. The supreme dramatist does not seem to have thought his work sufficiently valuable to take any special care to hand it down to posterity.
Religious feeling by its arrival at the theistic idea has done mankind incalculable service. How potent the thought that the universe is one, and represents one uncontradicted will! ”

“ Our conception, then, of knowledge leads us back to the early similitude which likened it to a tree. Knowledge does not increase, like a honey-comb, cell simply added to cell, but, like an oak, whose every year of growth implies not addition merely, but vital transformation of structure. Nothing is fixed but the axis from which the branches and boughs spread out, as if they felt they had all the universe for their expansion. ”

“ Workmen who have toiled to save a few pounds, and have lost them in a coöperative workshop, have awakened to the fact that the gains of the capitalist are not merely interest on his money, but also payment for the exercise of his judgment, foresight, and executive ability, without which his wealth, however great, would fast melt away in the strifes of business. ”

“ Often remote from the great centers of production, and purchasing in small quantities through a committee or manager of defective knowledge of qualities and prices, much hard-earned money was wasted. Now, in buying through the Wholesale, a society avails itself of the services of expert buyers, who obtain, through their vast purchases, goods at the lowest current prices. Stores are not obliged, as they used to be, to buy more goods than they immediately require, to reach the minimum prices of the market; hence they can carry on business with less capital than they needed formerly. ”

“ The good will of a business year by year declines in value in the market. In some measure needless competition arises from the improved modern facilities of locomotion by virtue of a curious illusion: merchants and manufacturers seem to think that the mere aggregation of the small districts in which business was done in the past increases the area of the total market, as if taking down fences affected the aggregate acreage of contiguous farms. ”

“ Insanity, gout, and melancholia, frequently skip a generation and reappear when hopes have been entertained that the evil trait had died out in the family. A son may resemble his mother very markedly, and have children with the features and character of his father. The evidence of heredity is thus borne out frequently in the long-run, when to a contracted view it would seem at fault. An individual inherits not only from his parents but from all their predecessors in the line of life, and just what of them shall appear evidently in him, and what be hidden in unconsciousness, none can tell. ”

“ Now, if iron, which is comparatively so simple a thing, presents such a multitude of properties and powers, if it be shown to have relations with all else in Nature, if very important knowledge respecting it has but recently come into our possession, how very cautiously should we proceed when our subject of thought is not a chemical element, but, say, some large question of human nature or public policy! ”

“ NO purpose in the study of history is more instructive than that by which we trace the progress of freedom against authority, of inquiry as opposed to dogmatic assertion, of reason and right against arbitrary power. ”

“ How influential for good the thought that a Supreme Mind, too great to be deceived, and absolutely righteous, knows every thought and act! "Thou God seest me," has, I think, restrained evil in the mind of conscientious theists, with a directness which might have been denied to reflections as to consequence. It is not because some of us may be dissatisfied with theology that we fail to recognize its value in the past and present. ”

“ The costly war and waste of isolated competition are signs and tokens that men can not trust each other, and have not mutual forbearance enough to combine for common ends in securing for themselves competence and content.
The leaders of English coöperation, while busily engaged in forwarding their plans of distribution, are constantly striving to apply their principles to the more important field of production. If the identification of the interests of buyer and seller is fraught with advantage, still greater advantage awaits the successful fusion of the interests of capital and labor. ”

“ It seems strange, too, that the management of railroads should so widely permit an evil which causes so much just censure, namely, the cutting of rates, by a staff of agents scattered throughout the whole country. When control by the owners of railroad property remains as imperfect as it is in important particulars, it certainly seems an idle task to attempt the State control of the largest and most complicated business in existence. ”