James W. Lee

“ Michael Angelo’s “Moses” augments the world’s fund of conviction and courage. By changing facts into ideas, the mind gives us science. By changing ideas back to facts, it gives us art. Without science, life would be without bread; without art, it would be without ideals.
Science ministers to the body, art to the spirit. Men who go from things to ideas are practical; those who go from ideas back to things are the seers. Practical men conserve, but never venture. Seers throw the light of their genius into the dark beyond, disclosing new worlds for men. ”

“ There are no light waves in the universe that the eye cannot turn into vision, if they strike the retina. Are we going to fall out with the eye, and discredit the beauty it does see, because it is not as large as the rim of immensity, and cannot see everything disclosed by the light of suns and stars at once? Are we to hold the ear in contempt after it takes in the harmonies of Beethoven and Mozart, because it cannot hear all the music the stars are making as they move through the heavens? ”

“ The universe lends itself in its totality to the scale and the dip of the particular capacity or power through which man, for the time being, seeks to appropriate it. It stands before the sense of hunger in terms of bread. It stands before the social nature in terms of power. It stands before the intellect in terms of truth. It stands before the will in terms of law. It stands before the æsthetic nature in terms of beauty. The person who has related himself to the world through all the powers of his nature, finds it capable, by turns, of feeding every faculty with which he is endowed. ”

“ We can never understand the nature of light, or the laws of light, by the study of things which light enables us to see. If all knowledge is but the sum of the impressions which the external world has made on the mind, then the cause of knowledge is matter, and knowledge is but the image or reflection of material things. Knowledge, then, would sustain the same relation to the outside world, that the shadow of a tree does to the tree. One would come as near lifting up the tree by its own shadow as lifting up the truth by Locke’s system of sensational philosophy. ”

“ TRUTH.
“A century is a formula; an epoch is an expressed thought. One such thought-expressed civilization passes to another. The centuries are the phrases of civilization; what she says here she does not repeat there. But these mysterious phrases are linked together: logic—the logos—is within them, and their series constitutes progress. In all these, phrase expressions of a single thought, the divine thought, we are slowly deciphering the word fraternity.
“All light is at some point condensed into a flame; likewise every epoch is condensed in a man. ”

“ By hitching the sun’s heat to the flying train, and the canvas to the favoring winds, and the lightning to human thought, all races on the globe stand face to face. The world is being encompassed, and no natural obstacles are now permitted to stand in the way of railway lines, or of submarine cables. All mountain chains are being tunneled, all chasms spanned, all oceans traversed, and all straits bridged. The continents of the earth are now connected by 125,000 miles of submarine electric cable, and countries are crossed by thousands of miles of railroad lines. ”

“ Beauty is to feed enthusiasm. Tones and colors are to be used to jostle the elements of mind, and will, and emotion into harmony with the high and holy life of our Father who art in Heaven. Beauty is to nerve the soldier for the battle, the martyr for the stake, and the hero for his work. There is a height of development to which the human spirit aspires, that the logical understanding is unable to reach. Here, then, where truth in logical form fails, beauty comes, and helps the human spirit to disentangle itself from the sphere of contradictions and antagonisms. ”

“ No definition of man is large enough to accommodate the facts of his nature, that does not embrace what he is without as well as what he is within, what he is objectively as well as what he is subjectively. It must not only embrace the intellect, but the truth which it thinks; not only the will, but the right which corresponds to it; not only the eye, but the light which gives it meaning; not only the ear, but the sound which matches it; not only the lungs, but the atmosphere to which they are correlated. ”

“ It is not mete that men should be sacrificed to the beauty and perfection of machinery, or to things machinery turns out. It is not necessary either. What we gain is not worth what we give. The machinery should be so manipulated as to get the things, and at the same time secure the perfection of men through the process. It is not necessary for the painter to lose himself in his art, and sacrifice his manhood to make his vision glow on the canvas. A proper regard for the methods and uses of art will result in leaving in the living spirit a picture more perfect than any painted by the brush. ”

“ We know not what the sun’s resources are. We know not by what methods it has been replenishing its supplies of light and heat for ages past; whether by chemical combination, meteoric impact, or condensation; we only know by so much as it has in the ages past parted with, by so much less force it has to-day. That it has been able to supply our world and others like it, however, with heat and light and physical life for ages, is not at all strange when we remember what an immense ball of fire the sun is. ”

“ If the radiant civilization of Greece, that filled the earth with the eloquence of thought and the melody of song, with the Republic of Plato and the Ethics of Aristotle, that clothed itself in the Parthenon of Phidias and the Iliad of Homer, was as natural among the nations as the uprising of Gibraltar among the mountains, why is it that Gibraltar still stands as the solemn sentinel of the Ocean and the Sea, while the civilization of Greece is but a memory of the past? ”

“ It is the edifice man has built in which to house the social side of his nature. It contains and will conserve all contributions ever made to human weal.
In walking the streets of Rome, one has a strange and melancholy sense of the traditions and memories which cluster about every ruin and every spot. But around the myriad facts and forces of civilization there hang associations more pathetic still. Here we walk, not amid the ruins of the past, but amid the achievements, the victories, and the glories of the past. ”

“ The spirit, then, must be out of time to know succession, and out of space to know procession, and self-conscious, so as to distinguish itself from the succession and the procession. The human spirit is something in the midst of time, yet passes not with the tides of time. It is to the succession of things ever passing through it, and to the procession of sensations ever passing before it, like some mighty Teneriffe with its peak of Teyde in the midst of the sea, pushing its proud head up 12,000 feet above the sea, and contrasting with its ever changing waves, the immutability of eternity. ”

“ The other of man’s spirit, then, is not something else, but it is the same spirit. Man is subject and object, active and passive, determiner and determined. Man, as subject, may externalize himself, and thus make of himself his own object, and by this self-separation enrich himself and advance within himself. Beethoven, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought in the symphonies, and thus regaled and thrilled his own spirit. By putting his own thought into the form of sound waves, it came back to him in the rain, and storm, and thunder, and sigh, and murmur of music. ”

“ The foot, the hand, and the tongue find themselves and their uses as they unite together in one living whole. The lone Bedouin, with no laws and no relations, seems to have all liberty, but in reality he has none. He is as completely without meaning as would be the finger separated from the hand. The man of whom nature is a prophecy is not the being in the woods whose home is a cave and whose food is wild meat; but it is the man in society, whose home all woods and metals and stones have helped to build, and whose food all soils and skies and seas have helped to produce. ”

“ Just as the organic forces of the plant take up the elements from the outside environment upon which it subsists, so the synthesizing, living power of the mind takes the matter of sensation and turns it into the whole called knowledge. Knowledge is a unifying process. It combines the manifold into one. It reduces multiplicity to unity. All that is real and all that is true in the heavens above or in the earth below, in mind or in matter, in time or in space, in man or in external world, are capable of being reduced to unity in knowledge. ”

“ It is the triumph of the social nature of man, and stands upon the soil which has been made by the crumbling dust of all generations of brave men. Its pinnacles and towers pierce the skies, and declare to the immeasurable heights, the force, the faith, the sentiment, and the love of man. It defies the elements of disintegration and change, and around the tops of its lofty pillars there cluster the buds of eternal spring. ”

“ Spencer’s theory of knowledge are shut up to absolute ignorance or absolute error. If we are to know the truth of reality, of mind, of external existence, we must have knowing faculties up to the style of the truth we are to know. If we are to know light, we must have eyes capable of taking in the light, of analyzing it, and turning it into vision. The disposition to limit our power to know, by telling us, on the strength of Mansel and Hamilton and Kant, that all our knowledge is relative, is innocent enough when stripped of its seeming wisdom. ”