James Thomson

“ And after all, should the Society succeed and become the ruling power, what a tenfold more terrible tryanny would this unknown phantom Chief exercise than any known Czar, Sultan, Emperor, King, Oligarchy, Timocracy, or Ochlocracy.
Thus it appears to me that the best Secret Societies (earnest and not sportive in their ends) must inherently be bad. They are based on the erroneous assumption that the thoughts and sentiments of mankind, that human nature, can be improved by machinery; that the Spirit of the Ages, the Zeitgeist, can be hurried forward by cunningly devised wheels and pistons. ”

“ The watchwords and symbols change from generation to generation, the supreme secrets are immutable from the beginning to the end of Time. Exactly what they cherish and adore as the inmost mystery of their being, their whole being ever strives to utter most clearly abroad to the senses and hearts and intellects of the whole world; thus the mystery still inviolate must for ever be inviolable, for there can be no new or better means of expression and interpretation: only the initiated ever truly hear and read it, to all others it is sound without meaning and letters without significance. ”

“ Let us praise the impartiality of our Mother Nature, the most venerable, the ever young, the fountain of true democracy, the generous annunciator of true liberty and equality and fraternity; who bestoweth on all her children alike all things most necessary to true health and wealth, the sunshine, the air, the water, the fruits of the earth; and opens to rich and poor alike the golden doors of enfranchisement and initiation into the mysteries of heroism, purity, wisdom, beauty, and infinite love. ”

“ Now, how stood the case as between Socrates and Xantippe, husband and wife? This is the sole point for us here, and the public relations of Socrates, the sage and martyr, to the world in general are quite beside the question. An unfortunate woman (would that she had left her own statement of the case!) who appears to have been no less warm-hearted than hot-tempered, has the foolish goodness to marry a man who is not only much older than herself and absurdly ugly, but who is also a public character and a philosopher. ”

“ The educated, the intelligent, the clever, by thousands, hear these songs sung, and read them in books, and think that they perfectly enjoy and comprehend; and they can discourse very profoundly about metres and diction and canons of art; but they never hear the undertone, and never have vision of the interior illumination, and are never rapt away in the ecstasy: thus the very soul of the poetry must, in truth, ever remain for them a music unheard, a light unseen, a language unknown embodied in their familiar mother-tongue. ”

“ But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age. When, at long intervals, we turn over their abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great spiritual lords, who have walked in the world—these of the old religion—dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity look parvenues and popular ”

“ That in the whole range of the universe, from highest heaven to deepest hell, there is no thing or circumstance, creature or being, dreadful to a man; that out of himself there is nothing which a man need fear; that no nature can be born into a realm unconquerable by that nature; and, moreover, that the most dazzling lightning of ecstasy leaps from the blackest storm of danger. But neither he who writes nor he who reads is any nearer to the heart of the mystery through this interpretation: if he is of the brotherhood his pulse beat in unison with the throbs of this heart before ”

“ Though, his parents being thoroughly English, Swift was in no sense Irish save by accident of birth-place and the mockery of fortune which banished him to Ireland for the last thirty years of his life, the warm-hearted Irish have never ceased to love and revere the memory of the Dean, who was not only a model of sagacious private charity, but who championed the cause of their then oppressed and outraged country with a courage and constancy equalled by few, with a power and effect equalled by none, for no one else has approached him in massiveness and energy of genius. ”

“ They lived superb and luxurious as a race apart and above their kind, trampling on the necks of their fellows; they were fat with the insolence of unearned wealth; their choice wines were the blood of the poor, their choice meats were the flesh of those who toiled for them; they scorned and denied human brotherhood: they moan their worse than frustrate lives. And we went onward continually from moaning unto moaning. ”

“ A man discovering some new truth or some new aspect of an old one, will probably only strain and distort it in trying to expand it into a complete system. For to him such truths are not as splendid jewels which he may cut and polish, and set in star or cross or circlet, as his taste may prefer; this is the work of the poet; the philosopher undertakes to cut and set them in the sole best form and order, harmonious with the form and order of sun and moon and stars, and failing in this he damages them for other use. ”

“ And the truth adopted and professed by the Society will be even narrower than the intellect of almost any one of its members; for all will assent only to some proposition shorn of everything very offensive to one or the other; hence the result is a maimed, mutilated, semi-vital compromise; it will not soar with the birds, it will not walk with the beasts, so it flits about bat-like in the dusk lower air. For a meeting is always less wise than a man. ”

“ Secret Societies whose aim is direct action, as the overthrow of political tyranny, are likely to fail yet more conspicuously. The energy and skill which should be employed in pressing onward are mainly absorbed in the endless work of keeping the complex machine and its intricate gear in order. If the Society be swayed by a council, it will go to wreck by internal incoherences; and, at any rate, with the utmost possible harmony, a council of war never equals the inspired daring of a general. If it be wielded by one man, it may hold together and prove a most formidable engine ”

“ How can man, whose life is an inappreciable moment in eternal time, comprehend the laws of that eternity? A critic may be very small, and a philosopher or theologian very great (according to our petty human standards) , yet the former in relation to the latter must be immeasurably greater than the latter in relation to the universe he has the audacity to expound. Therefore even the most stupid of men is quite justified in rejecting decisively and without examination any universal system whether of theology or philosophy, for beyond doubt it is ludicrously inadequate. ”

“ A Secret Society must come into being with a glow of enthusiasm and a vigorous activity; but the enthusiasm becomes a narrow fanaticism or dies out altogether, the activity degenerates into busybodyism or sets into an unprogressive routine like that of a squirrel in its cage. The spirit of fraternity either discovers that it cannot harmonise the little world of the Society, and gradually perishes of atrophy, or in its hunger grasps at husks and straw in the absence of grain ”

“ Scarcely had they blossomed into the world of life than they withered away out of it; and for too early death they have no rest: they wail their frustrate lives. We left the poor little ones and walked on silent; and as their wailing sank, a sound of saddest moaning grew upon our ears; and in a broad glade we discerned a multitude of youths and maidens, wan or fever-flushed ”

“ Then a new architect sets to work with the same sublime aspirations, the same indomitable self-sufficiency; a fresh metaphysical tower with a brand-new terminology loses its head in the clouds, to be regarded with awe and reverence by its bystanders, to crumble away and fall to ruin in its turn; for the legend of Babel and the confusion of tongues is the legend of system-building in all ages. ”

“ If, however, these their poems be read silently in books, instead of being heard chanted by the human voice, then for the eye which has vision an underlight stirs and quickens among the letters, which grow translucent and throb with life; and this mysterious splendour entering by the eyes into the soul fills it with spheric illumination, and like the mysterious music swells to infinity, consuming with quick fire all the bonds and dungeon-walls of the soul, dazing it out of consciousness and dissolving it in a shoreless ocean of light. ”

“ Thus the sublime and fruitful doctrine withers into an abstract formula, the sacred watchwords become jargon and cant; the conservation which was enterprised in the spirit of progress is continued in the spirit of obstructiveness. In the meantime the outward air has become milder, the temperature of the human zone has ameliorated; and while this tree of knowledge has been cut and trimmed lest it should shatter the glass walls of its conservatory, and has languished in the lack of natural warmth and light, not all the similar germs left to the rough nursing of open nature have perished ”

“ What, then, is the worth of these absolute systems which have fascinated some of the profoundest intellects and noblest spirits among mankind? The fascination itself is not to be wondered at, for no fascination can be stronger to such intellects and such spirits than the hope of securing certitude beneath the transitory and illusive shows of this world and life. ”

“ The iniquity which a man draws and tugs painfully to him, that is the abomination; not the iniquity which itself draws him. The so-called sin which glows with hot fire of passion, one does not detest even when it is such sin as one's self is not inclined to. But they who violate their own nature, who force themselves to sin for which they have no liking but which happens to be fashionable, who sacrifice themselves to show and tickling vanity, these are the poor dupes and fools one finds it hard to keep temper with. ”

“ They will build out of pure thought a faithful counterpart of the world, a microcosm the pefect image of the macrocosm; believing that the laws and processes of the human mind correspond with those of the universe. With gigantic self-sufficiency each labours at his task, in no wise daunted by the manifold and manifest failures of all who have hitherto made the same attempt, in no wise doubting that his mind is a true mirror of the world, though he sees that its reflections are more or less different from those of all other minds. ”

“ Many, however, who are not learned and who are quite without profitable talents, shepherd youths and farm maidens, men in great cities who will never get on in the world, rude mountaineers familiar with sounding storms, sailors with the rhythm of the ocean-tides in their blood, can hear this undertone of the cosmic harmony, and see this light transfiguring the world, and enter with these true Poets into the mysterious trance ”

“ As I have elsewhere had occasion to express it, such a creed or system is a little strait-waistcoat wrought by some little man, and in which he would fain confine Titanic Nature: she laughs with immense good-nature at the puny fellow at first, but if he seriously persists in attempting to force it on her, she inevitably makes him fit for a strait-waistcoat himself. ”

“ Too strong and terrible for Thackeray and Macaulay, Swift is much more so for the average middle-class John Bull, who, while among the bravest of the brave in many respects, is one of the most timorous of mortals face to face with disagreeable truths, truths that perturb his eupeptic comfort, truths hostile to his easy old-fashioned way of thinking without thought, especially if these truths affront his fat inertia in religious, moral, or social questions. ”

“ The fact is, that mysticism, being intimate with the soul of the world in its own right, knows that it is beyond the law, proves its prerogative by dignifying the most despised objects (as a Sultan who makes a slave his Vizier) , and cannot help now and then riotously shocking the formalists. For mysticism is the identity of the purest faith and the purest scepticism; the extremes not only meet, they intermingle and grow veritably one. ”

“ The wine of existence passed to them was drugged or poisoned, and they drank stupor or madness; death has no nepenthe for these whose wine of love was as a philter of hate: they curse and mock their frustrate lives. ”