“ Thither the mind of man has always turned when the burden of the mystery of its nature and fate has weighed all but intolerably upon it, and turning has never found itself betrayed, but from knowledge of itself has drawn fresh hope and strength to resume the uninterrupted march of Progress which is its life and its history, its being, its self-formation, in courage moving forwards in and towards the light. ”

“ The progress of Government in this second sphere may be defined as the deepening and extension of man's duty towards his neighbour. It is to be reckoned, not in terms of knowledge and organization, but of character. The ultimate goal of human government, in the narrower sense, as of all social activity—let us never forget it—is liberty, to set free the life of the spirit. 'Liberty,' said Lord Acton, who could survey the ages with a wealth of knowledge to which no other man, perhaps, ever attained, 'Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. ”

“ When we look back at history in this mood we think not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal, and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous, but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. ”

“ As we look back the history of Philosophy seems strewn with the debris of outworn or outlived errors, but out of them all emerges this clear and assured truth, that in self-knowledge lies the master-light of all our seeing, inexhaustibly casting its rays into the retreating shadow world that now surrounds us, melting all mists and dispelling all clouds, and that the way to it is unveiled, mapped and charted in advance so that henceforward we can walk sure-footedly therein. ”

“ We have the most wonderful museums that ever were, and the most wonderful power of enjoying all that is in them, but, with all our riches from the past, our present is barren; and it is barren because our rich men would rather pay great prices for past treasures than encourage artists to produce masterpieces now. If that is so, if that is all that is coming to us from our freedom of all the ages, there is certainly not progress in it. Better that we should produce and enjoy the humblest genuine art of our own than that we should continue in this learned impotence. ”

“ Now the Republic is a Utopia, and no one writes a Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime importance to man and helps him to advance.
Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of history, as the modern faith in progress asserts. The life on earth, for Plato, is like a school through which men pass and in which they may learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. ”

“ There is surely in the world enough suffering and sorrow and sin to engage all our energies in dealing with them, nor are our endeavours to do so so plainly fruitless as to discourage from perseverance in them. Where in this task our hearts do faint and fail, are there not other means than the discredited nostrum of Philosophy to revive our hopes and recruit our forces? It was only, we are sometimes reminded, in the darkest days of human history that men turned desperately to Philosophy for comfort and consolation—how surely and demonstrably, we are told, in vain! ”

“ Even the light within is enclosed in an opaque screen which prevents or counteracts its outflow, so that the spirit within is as it were entombed or imprisoned. 'Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems us in,' we cannot communicate with one another or join with one another in thought or deed; and the hope of progress seems defeated by the recalcitrant matter that shell upon shell encases us. The world of our bodies, of the bodies and spirits of others, and all the vast compages of things and forces which we call 'Nature' blinds and baffles us, mocks our hopes and breaks our hearts. ”

“ Rome gave the world, what it greatly needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty. Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose efficiency. ”

“ Still another view, abandoning even that hope, proclaims one last choice open to us, namely, that of sullen submission to, or glad and loyal acquiescence in, its irresistible sway. But surely all these suggestions are idle, and but for a moment conceal or postpone the inevitable conclusion that if Progress was, is and must or will be, that is, is necessary, what we think or do makes no difference, and can make no difference to or in it. Whether or no we convert the fact into an ideal, whether or no we set it before as our aim and exert ourselves to work for it, it goes on its way all the same. ”

“ But my object is to insist that in our age, because of its effort, an effort which has never been made so consciously and resolutely before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the same nature as progress in other human activities. If we can escape from what has seemed to some men this inexorable process of decadence in art, we shall have accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the human will. We shall have redeemed art from the tyranny of mere fate. ”

“ If I am antecedently assured that the world is good, I shall naturally rejoice on hearing that it is advancing from a less to a more complete state of itself. But if the nature of the world is evil, what reason can I possibly have for rejoicing in its evolution? Assuming the world to be evil in its essential nature, I for my part, if I were consulted in the matter, would certainly give my vote against its being allowed to advance from a less to a more complete state of itself. The less such a world progresses the easier it will be for moral beings to live in it. ”

“ Representation is a device by which, and by which alone, the area of effective government can be extended without the sacrifice of liberty. It is a device by which the scattered many can make their will prevail over the few at the centre. Under any non-representative system, whether in a State or a Church or a Trade Union or any other association, men always find themselves set before the inexorable dilemma between freedom and weakness on the one hand and strength and tyranny on the other. ”

“ It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or rather the increasing complication, of things, rather than of the advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as the Kingdom of Man—still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great [191] mass of mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living ”

“ In the Gothic revival we tried to make use of the art of the Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We imitated without understanding, and we could not understand because we were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages. Art, in fact, is always a growth of its own time which cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell why it grows in one time and among one people and not in another.
That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a dream. ”

“ As long as we do not allow our material achievements to blind us to the need of an education that keeps the spiritual well to the fore, then progress is assured so far as it depends on culture.
Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's chances, I believe, would be bettered by as much again or more. But how is this to be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature is even more of an ass, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. ”

“ We have always first to ask: What kind of Government? On what principles will it be based? What ideal will it set forth? What kind of common life will it provide or allow to its citizens? If the whole world were organized into one single State, and that State, supreme in its control over Nature, were [169] armed with all the knowledge and organization that the ablest and most farseeing brains in the world could supply, yet mankind might be worse off under its sway, in the real essentials of human life, than if they were painted savages. ”

“ Government is needed in order to enable human life to become, not efficient or well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and Lord Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen believed before him, that it is only in the soil of liberty that the human spirit can grow to its full stature, and that a political system based upon any other principle than that of responsible self-government acts as a bar at the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the highest objects of civil society or of private life'. ”

“ It is folly, we are told, to adventure ourselves upon the uncharted seas into which philosophers invite us, to waste our lives and perhaps break our hearts in the vain search for a knowledge that is for ever denied us. After all, there is much that we can know, and in the knowledge of which we can better the estate of Man, relieving him from many of his most pressing terrors and distresses. To cherish other hopes is to deceive ourselves to our own and our fellows' undoing, to refuse them our help and fail to play our part in the common business of mankind. ”

“ But for all, the contemplation of a universe where man's mind has worked for ages in unravelling its secrets and describing its wonders, must bring a sense of reverence as well as trust. It is no dry category of abstract truths to which we turn and would have others turn, but a world as bright and splendid as the rainbow to the savage or the forest to the poet or the heavens to the lonely watcher on the Babylonian plain. ”

“ True to the principle which I have stated, ancient Philosophy proclaimed that the only knowledge in the end worth having was knowledge of Fact—of what lay behind all seeming however fair—Fact unmodified and unmodifiable by human wish or will; it bade us know the world in which we live and move and have our being, know it as it is truly and in itself, and knowing it love it, loyally acquiescing in its purposes and subserving its ends. ”

“ Slavery involves the denial of freedom, and as such it can never be good. But other systems besides slavery implicitly involve the denial of freedom. Some of the finest artistic work in the world has been done by slaves—and by slaves not working under compulsion but in the company of free men and on terms of industrial equality with them. This should serve to remind us that, in judging of systems of industry, we must look behind the letter of the law to the spirit of the times and of social institutions. Slavery at its best merges insensibly into wage-labour at its lower end. ”