John William Draper

“ To operate by expedients is for the creature, to operate by law for the Creator; and so far from the doctrine that creations and extinctions are carried on by a foreseen and predestined ordinance—a system which works of itself without need of any intermeddling—being an unworthy, an ignoble conception, it is completely in unison with the resistless movements of the mechanism of the universe, with whatever is orderly, symmetrical, and beautiful upon earth, and with all the dread magnificence of the heavens. ”

“ Science, capital, and machinery conjoined are producing industrial miracles. Colossal projects are undertaken and executed, and the whole globe is literally made the theatre of action of every individual.
Nations, like individuals, are born, pass through a predestined growth, and die. One comes to its end at an early period and in an untimely way; another, not until it has gained maturity. One is cut off by feebleness in its infancy, another is destroyed by civil disease, another commits political suicide, another lingers in old age. ”

“ In vain the Spaniards excuse their atrocities on the plea that a nation like the Mexican, which permitted cannibalism, should not be regarded as having emerged from the barbarous state, and that one which, like Peru, sacrificed human hecatombs at the funeral solemnities of great men, must have been savage. Let it be remembered that there is no civilized nation whose popular practices do not lag behind its intelligence; let it be remembered that in this respect Spain herself also was guilty. In America, human sacrifice was part of a religious solemnity, unstained by passion. ”

“ Twice every day, under the conjoint influences of the sun and moon, as if the inanimate globe itself were breathing, the tide would rise and fall again upon the bosom of the deep.
The eddy, the ripple, the wave, the current, are accidental forms through which the originally imparted force is displayed. They are all expending power. Their life, if such a term can be used, is not the property of themselves, but of the ocean to which they belong. ”

“ The Age of Reason in Europe was ushered in by an astronomical controversy.
Is the earth the greatest and most noble body in the universe, around which, as an immovable centre, the sun, and the various planets, and stars revolve, ministering by their light and other qualities to the wants and pleasures of man, or is it an insignificant orb—a mere point—submissively revolving, among a crowd of compeers and superiors, around a central sun? ”

“ The dark cloud which for a thousand years has hung over that beautiful peninsula is fringed with irradiations of light. There is not a department of human knowledge from which Italy has not extracted glory, no art that she has not adorned. ”

“ As a cloud, which is composed of myriads of separate and isolated spherules of water, so minute as to be individually invisible, on a summer's afternoon changes its aspect and form, disappearing from the sky, and being replaced in succeeding hours by other clouds of a different aspect and shape, so the universe, which is a cloud of suns and worlds, changes in the immensity of time its form and fashion, and that which is contemporary with us is only an example of countless combinations of a like kind, which in ancient times have one after another vanished away. ”

“ The refined society of Cordova prided itself in its politeness. A gay contagion spread from the beautiful Moorish miscreants to their sisters beyond the mountains; the south of France was full of the witcheries of female fascinations, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Light literature spreads into Sicily and Italy. Even in Italy and Sicily the love-song became the favourite composition; and out of these genial but not orthodox beginnings the polite literature of modern Europe arose. The pleasant epidemic spread by degrees along every hillside and valley. ”

“ To Eastern Asia, where philosophy has been accustomed to the abstract idea of force, the pleasures we derive from this contemplation are denied, the cheerless doctrine of Buddhism likening the life of man to the burning of a lamp, and death to its extinction. Perceiving in the mutation of things, as seen in the narrow range of human vision, a suggestion of the variations and distribution of power throughout nature, it rises to a grand, and, it must be added, an awful conception of the universe. ”

“ Man, when he looks upon the countless multitude of stars—when he reflects that all he sees is only a little portion of those which exist, yet that each is a light and life-giving sun to multitudes of opaque, and therefore, invisible worlds—when he considers the enormous size of these various bodies and their immeasurable distance from one another, may form an estimate of the scale on which the world is constructed, and learn therefrom his own unspeakable insignificance. ”

“ To many a sincere heart must many an ominous reflexion have occurred. In Western Europe there was a strong common sense which quickly caught the true position of things—a common sense that could neither be blinded nor hoodwinked. The astuteness of the Italian politicians was insufficient to conceal altogether the great fact, though it might succeed in dissembling its real significance for a time. The Europe of that day was very different from the Europe of ours. ”

“ A grand and imposing religious unity implies tyranny to the individual; the increasing emergence of sects gives him increasing latitude of thought—with their utmost multiplication he gains his utmost liberty. In this respect, unity and liberty are in opposition; as the one diminishes, the other increases. Emergence of liberty of thought. The Reformation broke down unity; it gave liberty to masses of men grouped together in sufficient numbers to insure their position; it is now invisibly, but irresistibly making steps, never to be stayed until there is an absolute mental emancipation for man. ”

“ And so it turns out that our earth is a globe of about twenty-five thousand miles in circumference. The voyager who circumnavigates it spends no inconsiderable portion of his life in accomplishing his task. It moves round the sun in a year, but at so great a distance from that luminary that, if seen from him, it would look like a little spark traversing the sky. It is thus recognized as one of the members of the solar system. ”

“ Nay, more; if each of the innumerable fixed stars is, as our sun, a central focus of light, [338] attended by dark and revolving globes, is it not necessary to admit that they also have their inhabitants? But among so many families of intelligent beings, how is it that we, the denizens of an insignificant speck, have alone been found worthy of God's regard?
It was this reasoning that sustained the geocentric theory, and made the earth the centre of the universe, the most noble of created things; the sun, the moon, the stars, being only ministers for the service of man. ”

“ Changes in the constitution of the air or its pressure, in the composition of the sea or its depth, in the brilliancy of light or the amount of heat, in the inorganic material of a medium, will modify old forms into new ones, or compel their extinction. Birth and death go hand in hand; creation and extinction are inseparable. The variation of organic form is continuous; it depends upon an orderly succession of material events; appearances and eliminations are managed upon a common principle; they stand connected with the irresistible course of great mundane changes. ”

“ After an attentive consideration of the facts of the case, I agree in the conclusion of Carli, that at the time of the conquest the moral man in Peru was superior to the European, and I will add, the intellectual man also. Was there in Spain, or even in all Europe, a political system carried out into the practical details of actual life, and expressed in great public works, as its outward visible and enduring sign, which could at all compare with that of Peru? Its only competitor was the Italian system, but that for long had been actively used to repress the intellectual advancement of man. ”

“ The earth, which had hitherto seemed to be the very emblem of immobility, was demonstrated to be carried with a double motion, with prodigious velocity, through the heavens; the rising and setting of the stars were proved to be an illusion; and, as respects the size of the globe, it was shown to be altogether insignificant when compared with multitudes of other neighbouring ones—insignificant doubly by reason of its actual dimensions, and by the countless numbers of others like it in form, and doubtless, like it, the abodes of many orders of life. ”

“ In truth, there is not in national life any real epoch, because there is nothing in reality [152] abrupt. Events, however great or sudden, are consequences of preparations long ago made. In this there is a perfect parity between the course of national and that of individual life. In the individual, one state merges by imperceptible degrees into another, each in its beginning and end being altogether indistinct. No one can tell at what moment he ceased to be a child and became a boy—at what moment he ceased to be a youth and became a man. ”

“ On the contrary, it is the inevitable result of what has been taking place under the law of development, and the sure precursor of what is about to follow. In the organic world, the successive orders, and genera, and species are the counterparts of these temporary embryonic forms of the individual. Indeed, we may say of those successive geological beings that they are mere embryos of the latest—embryos that had gained a power of reproduction. How shall we separate the history of the individual from the history of the whole? ”

“ Cosmo, the richest of Italians, who had lavished his wealth on palaces, churches, hospitals, libraries, was comforted on his death-bed, not, as in former days would have been the case, by ministers of religion, but by Marsilius Ficinus, the Platonist, who set before him the arguments for a future life, and consoled his passing spirit with the examples and precepts of Greek philosophy, teaching him thereby to exchange faith for hope, forgetting that too often hopes are only the day-dreams of men, not less unsubstantial and vain than their kindred of the night. ”

“ The free-will of the individual is supplanted by instinct and automatism in the race. To each individual bee the career is open; he may taste of this flower and avoid that; he may be industrious in the garden, or idle away his time in the air; but the history of one hive is the history of another hive; there will be a predestined organization—the queen, the drones, the workers. ”

“ The death of Servetus was not without advantage to the world. There was not a pious or thoughtful man in all reformed Europe who was not shocked when the circumstances under which that unhappy physician had been brought to the stake at Geneva by John Calvin were made known. For two hours he was roasted in the flames of a slow fire, begging for the love of God that they would put on more wood, or do something to end his torture. Men asked, with amazement and indignation, if the atrocities of the Inquisition were again to be revived. ”