H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ Darwinism it was that struck the first real blow at a personal God, and men, in their minds at least, have nearly extinguished the chemical hell.
And Darwinism, destroying the old rigid, childlike faith, handed the world not Atheism, but a new Faith, which the world never seems to have grasped.
The Faith in a world ever progressing toward the good.
Once you have grasped the great truth that your life is a part of this miracle of growth, as long as you conform as far as in you lies to the growth of good in yourself, you will have a Faith that will fill you with new force. ”

“ I BELIEVE in dreams, but I have no faith except in hard facts. Those hard facts tell me that the sun, toward which everything grows to-day, is the same sun toward which the seas and the hills and the rocks grew before life exhibited itself first, and toward which life has grown since its birth; and that sun is the sun of Amelioration, Benignity, Good, and Gentleness. ”

“ That is the doctrine of the spirit of the world whose great hands laboured to make the hills and seas, and flung the moon to the skies for a lamp and a tide-maker, who moulded the chimpanzees into men, and men into civilised men. Dreams and theories and doctrines, preachers, transcendental philosophers and teachers, and even priests—we want all of them, but they are by-products. The work of the world remains the essential thing, and the pioneers of the world are the workers, not the dreamers. ”

“ Perhaps not actively, but just as I carry in my material brain the eye of the extinct monster I once was, so do I carry in my mind the remnants of the passions of the reptile that once was me, the lust of the reptile and the hatred. I do not tear other human beings with my teeth, but I have torn them by deeds and words. ”

“ A morality which, by the influence of the press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine, those three Apostles, will spread to the uttermost depth of China and to the last temple of that hideous black blot, India; and which, in the course of ages, will change the individual brain of man and raise it ethically far above its present advanced position. No; development has not ceased. Development has only begun. Give the world a thousand years more. ”

“ The remotest country village to-day thinks with the greatest town. A giant of thought has suddenly arisen in the place of a thousand pigmies; he has developed in the short space of eighty or a hundred years, and his development has been on the line leading to Beneficence. And this giant is a new creation, as important as the creation of earth from fire, and of life from earth. ”

“ It may be a few flowers—it may be this or that, but the æsthetic touch is there; and in the home it is chiefly the woman who brings it. Now, why has woman developed this delightful attribute? It is a property of the mind; but men have it, too. Why has she developed it out of proportion to the man’s development in this particular?
“Since she shares it with the man, it is a common attribute, and it is the purest common-sense to believe that she developed it simply because the conditions affecting her life were more favourable to its growth than the conditions affecting the life of the man. ”

“ And the gist of the meaning is this: that side by side with the evolution of world forms, from the liquid lava wave to the solid rock, from the rock to the saurian, and from the saurian to man, has gone the evolution of world character and the development of a world spirit; and that the beauty of kindliness and benignity and good receives its deep, deep significance from the fact that all the labour of the world since the first cooling of its fires has been directed along the path leading to these three gods. Nothing is more clear than that, and nothing can be more definitely proved. ”

“ Have I impressed you logically with one simple fact, that the journey of atoms from a mass of blazing gas to a world where life was just beginning to bud was along one path, and one path only, the path of development? ”

“ If you will examine any great engineering plan, whether it be the plan for a bridge or a marine engine, you will find that it is a simple bouquet of natural laws, all brought together by the engineer for a definite purpose, and every law is stamped with the + or - stamp of nature. They are the laws of weakness and the laws of strength, and these wonderful laws that preside over matter so interpenetrate one another that you cannot divorce them one from the other. ”

“ The unmarried woman-genius may influence the art or the thought of her time; the labourer’s wife who produces a bouncing boy that lives has produced the future. More than that, she has sent forth her own attributes to dwell in the future. More than that, by her care and education of that child she is laying the foundation for vast world effects.
“That is the woman’s triumphant position in the scheme of things. She is a partner in world-building, and the duties lying on her share of the partnership are patent and obvious to the meanest intelligence. ”

“ Take the press of the civilised world, which is an expression of the universal mind. Where is the place of lust there? Where is the place of Cruelty? Where is the place of Hate? Where is the place of Tyranny? I tell you this, that the mind universal is as far above the mind individual as the mind of a man is above the mind of a chimpanzee—in ethics.
“An ordinary man dare not advance into the pure world of the mind universal one half of the thoughts, nay, one-fourth of the thoughts that fill his individual mind. ”

“ Does sorrow affect men less than women? Does great joy affect women more than men?
“Is love a thing apart from man, and is it woman’s whole existence? It is not. That claptrap was born of Fancy, and the passion for saying a catchy thing. The love of men for women is just as powerful and as intimately connected with their existence as the love of women for men. Fidelity, the only true sign of real love, is exhibited by men in just the same proportion (allowing for the greater temptations of men) as it is by women. ”

“ You cannot injure the community without injuring the home, and you cannot injure the home without injuring the community.54 You cannot improve the condition of the community radically by pooling all the money and distributing it among the homes, or by pooling all the means of production and wealth creation and distributing work tickets to the Home-makers. Such a distribution of the means of living would leave utterly untouched the diseases that prey on the homes of the nation and would touch with a killing hand the vitality of the Home. ”

“ The world, as you say, is a big head, with its brains on the outside. But during the last hundred years an astounding development has taken place in the world of ethics. Philosophically speaking now, there is no such thing as an individual brain; every brain in the western world is only a cell in the universal brain. And the universal brain is developing on lines of its own, and in precisely the same way as the individual brain developed. ”

“ Do you fancy that Inertia is confined to metals, and friction to working parts of machinery? Do you fancy that the social engineer, dealing with powerful and explosive forces, can plot out a social machine without taking into consideration the weaknesses which are complementary to the forces with which he has to deal?
“Yet, in all the plans I have examined, from Socialism to Syndicalism, not one engineer has submitted to me a plan in which human passions and energy, strength and weakness, are allowed for. ”

“ Every thought that man has ever thought, every dream that man has ever dreamed was lying unborn yet in the essence of that globe of incandescent vapour. Every form that ever sketched itself on earth was there, too—from the daisy to the hippopotamus. But as yet there was nothing definite, nothing but the dance of the atoms and the atoms themselves. ”

“ Men. Roman, Norman, and Norse women had nothing to do with the matter. Their duty was to stay at home and be moral. Armed and roaming men fertilised the world, just as bees fertilise a field of clover, crossed the races, and made the vitality of them.
“Roman, Norse, and Norman virtues that make England great were born of Roman, Norse, and Norman license. The same fact applies to all Europe. But the day of the free-lance in love is gone. He who was once a world-maker is now a world-curse. He is not now a world-maker, but a Home-wrecker and a woman-wrecker. ”

“ In my experience, judging from the men I have met in life and the men whose lives I have read about, the really strong men of the world have been men of strong belief—and mostly men with a strong belief in a personal God.
Faith is a very wonderful thing, call it what you please. There is in Faith an enormous dynamic energy the origin of which, analyse it as much as I will, leaves me utterly baffled and bewildered. ”

“ Every home is a tiny nation built exactly on the plan of the big nation, of which it forms a unit and which, in fact, is its counterpart in large.
“The home has its head, just as the nation has its head. Like the nation, it is bisexual; it has its exchequer, its fighting force, its ethical laws, its ambitions, its alliances, and its frontiers. It trades with other homes and combinations of homes just as the nation trades with other nations. ”

“ The man who is crushed beneath ruinous labour, the man whose poverty condemns him not to think, the man who shivers without a fire, who goes with an empty stomach—all of that vast crowd of what we call the Poor—each one of these is cut off, more or less, from the mind universal and can never receive its light except through material means. ”

“ And I speak for those people when I say that faith with us is impossible unless based on a sure foundation of reason; that we must understand before we can worship, that we do not deny God, but that we do not see Him, and that if He, the maker of the world, does exist as an individual entity, we have implicit faith that He is the fountain and origin of all goodness, and that goodness is His robe ”

“ We have vertebrates in businesses, business with brains, spinal cords, sympathetic nervous systems all complete. In states, armies, and more vaguely in philosophies, policies, and all structures of thought, whether they be theories, or poems, or plays, or novels, the vertebrate idea is found.
Why is the life history of a man so extraordinarily like the life history of a nation, and the story of a man’s day a little poetical simile of a man’s life? ”

“ A home, or a family, if you like the term better, is a ganglion of forces. Love and Pride, Economy (or the saving instinct) and Ambition, not to speak of Affection, are the best of these forces, just as the best forces in the nation are Love, Pride, Ambition, not to speak of Patriotism. ”

“ More than that—because a flower is of such slow growth. If one could see a seed sprouting, a stalk rising, a bud forming, bursting, and expanding all in five minutes, the wonder of the thing would bring one on one’s knees. The world is just the same. ”

“ Every male artist inherits this sense from his mother. I am speaking from long observation and experience. It is the woman in the artist that paints; the woman in the poet that feels; the woman in the novelist that colours the work. Every man has the æsthetic sense more or less developed, but women have it, as a mass, more developed than men. Who, for instance, puts the flowers in the cottager’s window?
“I do not believe that the æsthetic sense in the greatest artist is more developed than it is in hundreds of thousands of women who never touch art. ”

“ Look back at the earth struggling up from chaos, and always and always advancing toward the good; set back now, perhaps, for a million years by the ferocity of life fighting for its foothold in the age of the saurians and the monsters, breaking past that fearful period till those terrible forms are utterly destroyed and there is moulded from them the kindlier animals, and, from them, animals more kindly still ”

“ Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the “struggle for life” the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. ”

“ A woman has no right to motherhood unless she can provide a home for her child. A father has no right to fatherhood who cannot do likewise. And by a home I do not mean shelter and food; I mean everything sacred that lies in that word Home. Love, affection, self-restraint, mutual respect, and family respect.
“Of course, if the Feminist says,100 Destroy the home, one has nothing more to say. ”

“ I use the word Benignity for all that makes for development of the simple into the complex, and the word Malignity for all that retards it. I will use the words Good and Evil if you like them better,18 and say that Good in those days was anything that helped forward the evolution of matter, Evil anything that retarded it. The sunray falling on the first jelly-fish was good, the storm that injured it was evil; and Good was good just because it enabled matter to build one storey higher, and Evil was evil just because it tried to pull that storey down. ”

“ It may be said that the struggle for life is the “survival of the fittest,” or the “victory of the best”; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense) . Moreover, the whole history of the organic world goes to prove that, besides the predominant advance toward perfection, there are at all times cases of retrogression to lower stages. Even Baer’s notion of “design” has no moral feature whatever.
Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call “the history of the world”? ”

“ The first great act of creation was accomplished, and on that vast day when, Mercury left definitely behind, the budding of worlds was finished, the sun and the planets around it might have been seen like14 a golden bee surrounded by its golden children, shining in the night of space.
“The earth was a much brighter place then, for it was simply a globe of incandescent vapour, and yet that glowing vapour held everything. Man and woman, and love and war, beauty and sorrow. Art, poetry, music, hunger, and cruelty. ”