Sir Henry Jones

“ It plays, in his philosophy of life, the part that Reason fills for Hegel, or the Blind Will for Schopenhauer; and he is as fearless as they are in reducing all phenomena into forms of the activity of his first principle. Love not only gave him firm footing amid the wash and welter of the present world, where time spins fast, life fleets, and all is change, but it made him look forward with joy to "the immortal course"; for, to him, all the universe is love-woven. All life is but treading the "love-way," and no wanderer can finally lose it. ”

“ Wherever the frontiers of knowledge may be it is certain that there is nothing beyond them which can either arouse feeling, or be a steadying centre for it. Emotion is like a climbing plant. It clings to the tree of knowledge, adding beauty to its strength. But, without knowledge, it is impossible for man. There is no feeling which is not also incipient knowledge; for feeling is only the subjective side of knowledge—that face of the known fact which is turned inwards. ”

“ If, in the form of a religious conviction, its assurance is more confident, then, too often, it rests upon the treacherous foundations of authoritative ignorance, which crumble into dust beneath the blows of awakened and liberated reason. Nay, if by the aid of philosophy we turn our optimism into a faith held by reason, a fact before which the intellect, as well as the heart, worships and grows glad, it still is for most of us only a general hypothesis, a mere leap to God which spurns the intermediate steps, a universal without content, a bare form that lacks reality. ”

“ Man is no idle spectator of the conflict of the forces of right and wrong; Browning never loses the individual in the throng, or sinks him into his age or race. And although the poet ever bears within him the certainty of victory for the good, he calls his fellows to the fight as if the fate of all hung on the valour of each. The struggle is always personal, individual like the duels of the Homeric heroes.
It is under the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. ”

“ In this way the process of knowing seems always to stop short at the critical moment, when the truth is just about to be reached. And those who dwell on this aspect alone are apt to conclude that man's intellect is touched with a kind of impotence, which makes it useless when it gets near the reality. It is like a weapon that snaps at the hilt just when the battle is hottest. For we seem to be able to know everything but the reality, and yet apart from the real essence all knowledge seems to be merely apparent. ”

“ It is the great corrective of the onesidedness of science with its harsh method of analysis and distinction. It is a witness to the unity of man and the world. Every object which art touches into beauty, becomes in the very act a whole. The thing that is beautiful is always complete, the embodiment of something absolutely valuable, the product and the source of love; and the beloved object is all the world for the lover—beyond all praise, because it is above all comparison. ”

“ Religion, when thoroughly consistent, is the triumphant reconciliation of all contradictions. It is optimism, the justification of things as the process of evolving the good; and its peace and joy are just the outcome of the conviction, won by faith, that the ideal is actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined with divine goodness. But morality is the condemnation of things as they are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be. The absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality, either in something lower or something higher. ”

“ Of no English poet, except Shakespeare, can we say with approximate truth that he is the poet of all times. The subjective breath of their own epoch dims the mirror which they hold up to nature. Missing by their limitation the highest universality, they can only be understood in their setting. It adds but little to our knowledge of Shakespeare's work to regard him as the great Elizabethan; there is nothing temporary in his dramas, except petty incidents and external trappings—so truly did he dwell amidst the elements constituting man in every age and clime. ”

“ His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. The vigour of his ethical doctrine is as pre-eminent, as the fulness of his conviction of the absolute sway of the Good. Side by side with his doctrine that there is no failure, no wretchedness of corruption that does not conceal within it a germ of goodness, is his sense of the evil of sin, of the infinite earnestness of man's moral warfare, and of the surpassing magnitude of the issues at stake for each individual soul. So powerful is his interest in man as a moral agent, that he sees nought else in the world of any deep concern. ”

“ The moral law was imposed upon man by a higher power, in the presence of whom man was awed and crushed; for that power had stinted man's endowment, and set him to fight a hopeless battle against endless evil. God was everywhere around man, and the universe was just the expression of His will—a will inexorably bent on the good, so that evil could not prevail; but God was not within man, except as a voice of conscience issuing imperatives and threats. An infinite duty was laid upon a finite being, and its weight made him break out into a cry of despair. ”

“ Emerson was Sir Galahad, blind to all but the Holy Grail, his armour spotless-white, his virtue cloistered and unbreathed, his race won without the dust and heat. But his optimism was too easy to be satisfactory. His victory was not won in the enemy's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos, but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. And, in consequence, Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along which burthened humanity meanly toils. ”

“ In other words, is the attempt to construct a philosophy absurd? To say that it is, to deny the possibility of catching any glimpse of those regulative ideas, which determine the main tendencies of human thought, is to place the supreme directorate of the human intelligence in the hands of a necessity which, for us, is blind. For, an order that is hidden is equivalent to chance, so far as knowledge is concerned; and if we believe it to exist, we do so in the face of the fact that all we see, and all we can see, is the opposite of order, namely lawlessness. ”

“ Can it be that nature is an "open secret," but that man, and he alone, must remain an enigma? Or does he not rather bear within himself the key to every problem which he solves, and is it not his thought which penetrates the secrets of nature? The success of science, in reducing to law the most varied and apparently unconnected facts, should dispel any suspicion which attaches to the attempt to gather these laws under still wider ones, and to interpret the world in the light of the highest principles. And this is precisely what poetry and religion and philosophy do, each in its own way. ”

“ The process by means of which natural science makes progress, or by which the consciousness of the child expands and deepens into the consciousness of the man, is best made intelligible from the point of view of evolution. It is like an organic process, in which each new acquirement finds its place in an old order, each new fact is brought under the permanent principles of experience, and absorbed into an intellectual life, which itself, in turn, grows richer and fuller with every new acquisition. No knowledge worthy of the name is an aggregation of facts. Wisdom comes by growth. ”

“ Love, which in its earliest form, seems to be the natural yearning of brute for brute, appearing and disappearing at the suggestion of physical needs, passes into an idealized sentiment, into an emotion of the soul, into a principle of moral activity which manifests itself in a permanent outflow of helpful deeds for man. It represents, when thus sublimated, one side at least of the expansion of the self, which culminates when the world beats in the pulse of the individual, and the joys and sorrows, the defeats and victories of mankind are felt by him as his own. ”

“ But his consciousness of brotherhood with all men brought only despair for him. He saw clearly the responsibility of man, but not the dignity which that implies; he felt the weight of the burden of humanity upon his own soul, and it crushed him, for he forgot that all the good of the world was there to help him bear it, and that "One with God is a majority." He taught only the half-truth, that all men are united on the side of duty, and that the spiritual life of each is conditional on striving to save all. ”

“ The authority of the law is absolute, but the law is self-imposed. The whole man is convinced of its goodness. He has acquired something even fuller than a mere intellectual demonstration of it; for his knowledge has ripened into wisdom, possessed his sympathies, and become a disposition of his heart. And the fulness and certainty of his knowledge, so far from rendering morality impossible, is its very perfection. To bring about such a knowledge of the good of goodness and the evil of evil, as will engender love of the former and hatred of the latter, is the aim of all moral education. ”

“ He goes forth in the might of his faith in the power of good, as if he wished once for all to try the resources of evil at their uttermost, and pass upon it a complete and final condemnation. With this view, he seeks evil in its own haunts. He creates Guido, the subtlest and most powerful compound of vice in our literature—except Iago, perhaps—merely in order that we may see evil at its worst; and he places him in an environment suited to his nature, as if he was carrying out an experimentum crucis. ”

“ There is nowhere a break in the continuity. God is at the beginning, His rapturous presence is seen in all the processes of nature, His power and knowledge and love work in the mind of man, and all history is His revelation of Himself.
The gap which yawns for ordinary thought between animate and inanimate, between nature and spirit, between man and God, does not baffle the poet. ”

“ He who presumes to decide what passes the power of man's thought, or to prescribe absolute limits to human knowledge, is rash, to say the least; and he has neither caught the most important of the lessons of modern science, nor been lifted to the level of its inspiration. For science has done one thing greater than to unlock the secrets of nature. It has revealed something of the might of reason, and given new grounds for the faith, which in all ages has inspired the effort to know,—the faith that the world is an intelligible structure, meant to be penetrated by the thought of man. ”

“ Poetry, we think, has its own proper place and function. It is an invaluable anodyne to the cark and care of reflective thought; an opiate which, by steeping the critical intellect in slumber, sets the soul free to rise on the wings of religious faith. But reason breaks the spell; and the world of poetry, and religion—a world which to them is always beautiful and good with God's presence—becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead, mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly changing forms of energy. ”

“ Individualism is now detected as scepticism and moral chaos in disguise. We know that the old methods are no longer of use. We cannot now cut ourselves free of the fate of others. The confused cries for help that are heard on every hand are recognized as the voices of our brethren; and we now know that our fate is involved in theirs, and that the problem of their welfare is also ours. We grapple with social questions at last, and recognize that the issues of life and death lie in the solution of these enigmas. ”