John Fiske

“ Or, in other words, we may say that every living person is an organized whole; consciousness is something which pertains to this organized whole, as music belongs to the harp that is entire; but when the harp is broken it is silent, and when the organized whole of personality falls to pieces consciousness ceases forever. To many well-disciplined minds this conclusion seems irresistible; and doubtless it would be a sound one—a good Baconian conclusion—if we were to admit, with the materialists, that the possibilities of existence are limited by our tiny and ephemeral experience. ”

“ The wave of emotion answering to the sensuously dramatic element having partly spent itself, the wave of lyric emotion gathers fresh strength, and one feels that one has reached the height of spiritual exaltation, while, nevertheless, there is not so much which one can describe to others who may not happen to have gone through with the same experience. Something of the same feeling one gets in studying Dante's "Paradiso," after finishing the preceding divisions of his poem: there is less which can be pictured to the eye of sense, or left to be supplied by the concrete imagination. ”

“ We lack culture because we live in a hurry, and because our attention is given up to pursuits which call into activity and develop but one side of us. On the one hand contemplate Sokrates quietly entertaining a crowd in the Athenian market-place, and on the other hand consider Broadway with its eternal clatter, and its throngs of hurrying people elbowing and treading on each other's heels, and you will get a lively notion of the difference between the extreme phases of ancient and modern life. ”

“ So the sounds which in a symphony of Beethoven are woven into a web of such amazing complexity may exist in different combinations in nature; but when a musician steps out of his way to imitate the crowing of cocks or the roar of the tempest, we regard his achievement merely as a graceful conceit. Art is, therefore, an imitation of nature; but it is an intellectual and not a mechanical imitation; and the performances of the camera and the music-box are not to be classed with those of the violinist's bow or the sculptor's chisel. ”

“ The modern city is hardly more than a great emporium of trade, or a place where large numbers of people find it convenient to live huddled together; not a sacred fatherland to which its inhabitants owe their highest allegiance, and by the requirements of which their political activity is limited. What strikes us here is that our modern life is diffused or spread out, not concentrated like the ancient civic life. If the Athenian had been the member of an integral community, comprising all peninsular Greece and the mainland of Asia Minor, he could not have taken life so easily as he did. ”

“ Since our ability to conceive anything is limited by the extent of our experience, and since human experience is very far from being infinite, it follows that there may be, and in all probability is, an immense region of existence in every way as real as the region which we know, yet concerning which we cannot form the faintest rudiment of a conception. Any hypothesis relating to such a region of existence is not only not disproved by the total failure of evidence in its favour, but the total failure of evidence does not raise even the slightest prima facie presumption against its validity. ”

“ If Spain has produced one of the lowest characters in history, she has also produced one of the highest. That man was every inch a Spaniard who, maimed, diseased, and poor, broken down by long captivity, and harassed by malignant persecution, lived nevertheless a life of grandeur and beauty fit to be a pattern for coming generations,—the author of a book which has had a wider fame than any other in the whole range of secular literature, and which for delicate humour, exquisite pathos, and deep ethical sentiment, remains to-day without a peer or a rival. ”

“ Since the United States present only an exaggerated type of the modern industrial community, since the turmoil of incessant money-getting, which affects all modern communities in large measure, affects us most seriously of all, shall it be said that we are, on the whole, less highly cultivated than our contemporaries in Western Europe? To a certain extent we must confess that this is the case. In the higher culture—in the culture of the whole man, according to the antique idea—we are undoubtedly behind all other nations with which it would be fair to compare ourselves. ”

“ All but a very small portion of the sun's heat goes day by day into what we call empty space, and it is only this very small remainder that is made use of by the various planets for purposes of their own. Can anything be more perplexing than this seemingly frightful expenditure of the very life and essence of the system? That this vast store of high-class energy should be doing nothing but travelling outwards in space at the rate of 188,000 miles per second is hardly conceivable, especially when the result of it is the inevitable destruction of the visible universe. ”

“ A man like Sokrates, living in such a community, did not need to write down his wisdom. He had no such vast public as the modern philosopher has to reach. He could hail any one he happened to pass in the street, begin an argument with him forthwith, and set a whole crowd thinking and inquiring about subjects the mere contemplation of which would raise them for the moment above matters of transient concern. For more than half a century any citizen might have gratis the benefit of oral instruction from such a man as he. ”

“ Nobody felt it necessary to economize. Every one bought as much bread, and ate it as freely, as if the government by insuring its cheapness had insured its abundance. So the city lived in high spirits and in gleeful defiance of its besiegers, until all at once provisions gave out, and the government had to step in again to palliate the distress which it had wrought. It constituted itself quartermaster-general to the community, and doled out stinted rations alike to rich and poor, with that stern democratic impartiality peculiar to times of mortal peril. ”

“ Our highest notions of physical beauty, down to the present day, have been bequeathed to us by the Greeks. The earliest modern sculptors who abandoned the bony, hideous, starveling figures of the monkish Middle Ages, learned their first lessons in better things from Greek bas-reliefs. And if, to-day, forgetting our half-developed bodies, inefficiently nourished, because of our excessive brain-work, and with their muscles weak and flabby from want of strenuous exercise, we wish to contemplate the human form in its grandest perfection, we must go to Hellenic art for our models. ”

“ It is all labour and no fruition. We work till we are weary; we carry our work home with us; it haunts our evenings, and disturbs our sleep as well as our digestion. Our minds are so burdened with it that our conversation, when serious, can dwell upon little else. If we step into a railway-car, or the smoking-room of a hotel, or any other place where a dozen or two of men are gathered together, we shall hear them talking of stocks, of investments, of commercial paper, as if there were really nothing in this universe worth thinking of, save only the interchange of dollars and commodities. ”

“ Let us first remember, says Taine, that the evils which depress the public will also depress the artist. His risks are no less than those of less gifted people. He is liable to suffer from plague or famine, to be ruined by unfair taxation or conscription, or to see his children massacred and his wife led into captivity by barbarians. And if these ills do not reach him personally, he must at least behold those around him affected by them. In this way, if he is joyous by temperament, he must inevitably become less joyous; if he is melancholy, he must become more melancholy. ”

“ On warm June mornings in green country lanes, with sweet pine-odours wafted in the breeze which sighs through the branches, and cloud-shadows flitting over far-off blue mountains, while little birds sing their love-songs, and golden-haired children weave garlands of wild roses; or when in the solemn twilight we listen to wondrous harmonies of Beethoven and Chopin that stir the heart like voices from an unseen world; at such times one feels that the profoundest answer which science can give to our questionings is but a superficial answer after all. ”

“ But even to-day the popular conceptions of heaven are by no means freed from the notion of matter; and persons of high culture, who realize the inadequacy of these popular conceptions, are wont to avoid the difficulty by refraining from putting their hopes and beliefs into any definite or describable form. Not unfrequently one sees a smile raised at the assumption of knowledge or insight by preachers who describe in eloquent terms the joys of a future state; yet the smile does not necessarily imply any scepticism as to the abstract probability of the soul's survival. ”

“ To the dog under the knife of the experimenter, the world is a world of pure evil; yet could the poor beast but understand the alleviation of human suffering to which he is contributing, he would be forced to own that this is not quite true; and if he were also a heroic or Christian dog, the thought would perhaps take away from death its sting. The analogy may be a crude one; but the reasonableness of the universe is at least as far above our comprehension as the purposes of man surpass the understanding of the dog. ”

“ We find England, fresh from her stupendous victory over the whole power of Spain, again in the front rank of nations; France, under the most astute of modern sovereigns, taking her place for a time as the political leader of the civilized world; Spain, with her evil schemes baffled in every quarter, sinking into that terrible death-like lethargy, from which she has hardly yet awakened, and which must needs call forth our pity, though it is but the deserved retribution for her past behaviour. ”

“ So, at least, we may hope; such is the probability which the progress of events, when carefully questioned, sketches out for us. "Need we fear," asks Mr. Greg, "that the world would stagnate under such a change? Need we guard ourselves against the misconstruction of being held to recommend a life of complacent and inglorious inaction? We think not. We would only substitute a nobler for a meaner strife,—a rational for an excessive toil,—an enjoyment that springs from serenity, for one that springs from excitement only..... To each time its own preacher, to each excess its own counteraction. ”

“ With all its weird unearthliness, there is hardly another book in the whole range of human literature which is marked with such unswerving veracity as the "Divine Comedy." Nothing is there set down arbitrarily, out of wanton caprice or for the sake of poetic effect, but because to Dante's imagination it had so imposingly shown itself that he could not but describe it as he saw it. ”

“ But there still remains the consciousness of a divine Life in the universe, of a Power which is beyond and above our comprehension, whose goings out and comings in no man can follow. The more we know, the more we reach out for that which we cannot know. ”

“ Only on the first supposition, I think, do we get a universe which began in time and must end in time. Between such stupendous alternatives we have no grounds for choosing. But it would seem that the third, whether strictly true or not, best represents the state of the case relatively to our feeble capacity of comprehension. Whether absolutely infinite or not, the dimensions of the universe must be taken as practically infinite, so far as human thought is concerned. They immeasurably transcend the capabilities of any gauge we can bring to bear on them. ”

“ In view of these various but nearly related points of difference between ancient and modern life as studied in their extreme manifestations, it cannot be denied that while we have gained much, we have also lost a good deal that is valuable, in our progress. We cannot but suspect that we are not in all points more highly favoured than the ancients. And it becomes probable that Athens, at all events, which I have chosen as my example, may have exhibited an adumbration of a state of things which, for the world at large, is still in the future,—still to be remotely hoped for. ”

“ In old times the best methods which philosophy had at its disposal for this purpose were such as now seem very crude, and accordingly ancient philosophers bungled considerably in their task, though now and then they came surprisingly near what would to-day be called the truth. It was natural that their methods should be crude, for scientific inquiry had as yet supplied but scanty materials for them to work with, and it was only after a very long course of speculation and criticism that men could find out what ways of going to work are likely to prove successful and what are not. ”