Mary Everest Boole

“ They felt that as to a man is the regular pulsation of his heart and lungs, so is, to creative wisdom, the complex rhythm of Nature; and they thought too (and were they not right in so thinking?) that nothing is more likely to put man into rapport with living truth than getting his mind to beat in unison with the heart-beats of the unseen Father. ”

“ We have to live our own lives; and we must not so crowd up the world with memorials of the past as to leave no room for the present. We must sometimes make changes or there could be no progress. Which changes are real Reform, and which are mere foolish fashion? Then, again, just as an old carving left to itself gathers dust and damp and tends to decay, so everything that is old, if left to itself, tends to become obscure and to moulder. Everything needs care to keep it fresh. Much of our progress consists in refreshing or renewing things that have grown dusty with age ”

“ It is the dislike of the Inquisition to Galileo; of the medical profession in Harvey's time to the doctrine of the circulation of the blood; the dislike of the stagnant mind to whatever forces it to recognize throughout creation the existence of that incessant rhythmic pulsation which is the appointed purifier of all that is foul, the liberator of all that is enslaved. Only those who doubt the power given to the Ark to keep its own place as the Centre of the world's march, need fear to see its accessories move round it as the earth moves round the Sun. ”

“ Those who, of old, attempted to base National Education on the principle of the Logos, or rhythmic pulsation, struck the true key-note at starting. The symbol of the covenant made with man by Infinite Knowledge was the Rainbow; which no man can capture or embalm or enshrine ; which is made by the breaking up of the One Light into many colours, to fade before long into the Unity of white light again; and leaves nowhere in all the world a trace of its ever having existed, except in Man's heart an impression of spiritual beauty, and in his mind a suggestion how to discover the Laws of Light. ”

“ Therefore it is well for us to reflect what effect it would have on the teaching of so simple a thing as Geometry, if teachers introduced into each other's classes the element which is so rife in our literature.
True Critique is one of the fine Arts; as sacred and beautiful as all true Art. There is no keener pleasure for a good teacher than genuine criticism from a pupil. If a question is asked which shows that the teacher has failed to make intelligible a fact perfectly clear to himself, even that is a source of great enjoyment. ”

“ Now if we watch the wind-storm, we see that to go East to-day may be real progress, but to go East tomorrow because some one else went East yesterday may be not progress but a departure from it. All the outer life of the world, political, educational, social, philosophic, moves onward by incessant change of direction. There is no real misfortune in this; we should miss much that is valuable if we restricted ourselves to going always in one direction. The danger is that if we have no standard of right direction, we may lose our way altogether, and fly off into isolation. ”

“ The best work is that which combines Genius with Experience; therefore the way to do the best work is to live to be old. Original work is healthful exercise for the young; but the work of preparing one's own work for a public wears out the immature brain. Juvenile Genius is impatient, and clothes its own impatience in a disguise of devotion to Truth; but it would be better if that devotion took the healthy and unexhausting form of studying how to complete and preserve the work of predecessors. The consequence of impatience to be original is that the work of genius is done without experience ”

“ The main cause of the chaotic condition into which our thought-life has fallen, is the feverish impatience of teachers, each of whom wants to make his own voice heard. But any teacher who is weary of the conflict between Science and Religion, between Knowledge and Faith, between the valuable Lessons of Materialism and the consoling belief in the spiritual world; any teacher who sincerely desires, not to make a cheap and noisy fame for himself, but to find Truth and Peace for the young souls committed to his care, might do well to devote a quiet vacation to the study of Gratry's Logique. ”

“ If the Spirit of which the universe is but an expression—of whose frame the stars are the infinite molecules— can be supposed ever to interfere with the laws of matter and reach down into the doings of men, would it not be to save from the wreck and waste of time the most sublime fruit of the civilization of the drowned Atlantis —a belief in the one, only, just God, the father of all life, the imposer of all moral obligations? ”

“ We are guilty of idolatry when we prefer speculations and mystical chimeras to reason and good sense; when we treat any legislative code as if it were dictated by the Almighty; when we endow with a divine character the servant of a theocracy; when we try to regulate the conduct of men here below by Laws suited only to Celestial beings; when we confuse heaven with earth; when we mistake our own position and pretend to be more than mortal ”

“ And as we might facilitate our work by unifying the Sciences into One Science, so we should also treat the revelations of all times as One Eternal Truth. This is best done by studying each Science according to the historical method; letting the culture of to-day flow into our minds in natural sequence from that of yesterday. It is vain that we rise early and late take rest, and anxiously devour many books ; to those who love The Great Unity, He gives knowledge even while they sleep. ”

“ Humanity toys and coquets with its own bliss; it dares not let itself know what the Logos has prepared for those who love Him.
For no one really doubts the doctrine of Pulsation. Every new birth is a witness to the truth that conception (whether physical or mental) is the result of re-uniting at a suitable moment elements that have been suitably differentiated. We all know it; but we fear to let ourselves believe. History, as the Apocalyptic Seers knew, is the story of the alternate withdrawal of man's mind from the Logos-doctrine and re-union with it. ”

“ In ordinary times, Judaism keeps itself in the background, and leaves Gentile thought to develop in its own way. But when Philosophy has evaporated into the fourth dimension, when it has played with the Eternal till it has shrivelled out of itself the perception alike of locality and of epoch, of possibility and of sequence, of perspective and of proportion, then is a fitting occasion for Judaism to come to the front. ”

“ Judaism, as a sect, far from becoming more intelligible and more tolerated because of the progress of liberality and culture, must, on the contrary, become more impossible and more intolerable with every advance in civilization. It has no place in the modern world, unless it is the intellectual heart-and-lungs of Humanity, viz., an organ whose function is to receive all the thought-material gathered by the Gentile world; purify and aerate it by submitting it to the action of that circulating rhythm which is characteristic of Nature's vital processes and of the Jewish discipline ”

“ This conversion into the normal is the second birth of genius, the Regeneration which converts mere inspiration into Revelation; for inspiration is at best partial; Revelation comes at the moment of the combination of opposites.
As the spiral shows, all inspirations are inadequate; and nearly all are, in themselves, actually misleading.
A dim suggestion makes itself felt as we think of the spiral wire. The whole coil might, if long enough, be treated as if it were a wire, and wrapped in its turn round and round into a larger coil. ”

“ He who has seen the Law of reaction vibrating down the ages, lives henceforth under a spell; for him, fate has no terrors, solitude no loneliness, and curses no meaning; he can go on his way notwithstanding any antagonism; he knows that, whatever may happen during his life, he will rule posterity from his grave. Those who can be stopped had better be stopped; they have not seen God. One who knows so little about the ways of the Creator that he cares what contemporaries think, had better work on lines laid down beforehand; he should not go wandering off into the Infinite to seek new Truth. ”

“ In that Ark is preserved what the Rainbow leaves behind when it fades into white light:—the Keys of the Infinite Store-house of Science; the canons of the Art of Thinking; the Secret of the Method whereby man may draw down Truth from Heaven, without blighting either his body or his soul Life lives in that empty Ark; the true life of man's brain. For we are the children of the Creator ”

“ And some clever young lecturer, who happens to have heard that our solar system, as a whole, is in motion, and who fancies that such knowledge is his own peculiar property, triumphantly asserts that the earth-path is not an ellipse, but an elliptical spiral; and that any statement based on the premise that the ellipse represents a planet-path must be false throughout. Now what chance would any of us have of teaching anything to a class subject to such interruptions of the normal current of thought? ”

“ In a College where such disorder prevailed, would the pupils be in a frame of mind to receive instruction? Would the teachers themselves be likely to preserve the calmness necessary for the investigation of Truth? That the picture I have drawn is no exaggerated one, that those whose mission is to arouse the public to a perception of the relation between the essential and the accidental have to run the gauntlet of a style of criticism as senseless and frivolous as I have represented, no one can doubt. We are all aware of the absurdity of our present modes of receiving new truth ”

“ We may sum up the reflections suggested by the Logique of Gratry, by saying that the feverish feebleness of ephemeral Scientism is a part of that grand process of Natural Selection by which irreverence, impiety, and conceit are, in each age, weeded out, to leave room for something more worthy to endure. Excessive specialization is always more or less idolatrous. Those who alternate an intelligent interest in the Science of their own day with seasons of pious meditation on the aspirations of the mighty dead, renew their strength like young eagles, and their days shall be long in the land. ”

“ What creative Energy is, in Its own Nature, we do not know; It is The Ineffable I Am. What we do know about It is the fact that It pulsates. The very life of all that lives consists of some mode or other of Pulsation or alternate action. Without this Pulsating action, nothing grows. As the old writers said, It was in the world, and the world obeyed It by compulsion but knew it not. Then It made man, free to know It. Man, being free, sought out many inventions, all intended to substitute some fixed condition for incessant pulsation in human affairs ”

“ The brain of the best kind of Jew is an instrument which catches the property of rhythmic thought by constant contact with the periodic movements of Nature; and at last it becomes an instrument which, when a set of facts is presented to it, the special laws of which are as yet unknown, proceeds to deal with them, spontaneously, according to the laws of Nature and of Logic. It repeats, at every slightest touch, the true rhythm of creative truth. Such a real Jew was called, in old days, a "Prophet." Moses wished that all the Lord's people should be Prophets. ”

“ This truth we all know. It lies deep down in all our hearts. We Gentiles know it, but are powerless to carry our knowledge into action; for impatience clouds our perceptions, and we lose Love by premature unifications. ”

“ And here we find the answer to the question, why Isaiah was more truly a Prophet than Boulanger. A Prophet is a plain utterer; i.e., he not only sees truths ahead of his age, and thinks that the people ought to know them, but is so filled with the love of truth and right that he cannot lead a life of studious calm while self-interested charlatanism is misleading the masses; he feels that he must endeavour, at all cost to himself, to make what he knows accessible to whoever desires to learn it. ”

“ As the mathematician teaches us to see the actual path of a planet, in contrast, on one hand, with the tangent conceived by imagining an impossible state of things from which the action of Gravity is suspended, and, on the other hand, with the Axes which are well-arranged measuring-rods, so the Reformer teaches us to look at the actual Life of Humanity, in contrast, on one side, with the Vision of an impossible Idea made simple by the omission of certain elements, and, on the other side, with that convenient mechanism by which the comprehension of our duty is facilitated for us. ”

“ The truth is that, in the desperate struggle on behalf of the principle that Education means educing faculty the supporters of that principle are too much losing sight of the vital question:—What faculties is it most important to educe? Where the advocates of Education versus Examination get their own way, the result often is that too much mental force is absorbed into a minute and monkey-like inquisitiveness about visible phenomena, and often the production of a skill, more wonderful than useful, in the observation of certain classes of facts to the neglect of all other facts ”