T. W. Rolleston

“ Nothing exists by itself—nor even, permanently, as itself. The living universe of our experience is not a Being but an Acting and a Becoming. It is precisely this fact which, on the one hand, imposes a mysterious limit on the intellect, and, on the other, opens a boundless horizon before the will.
The human brain, the most highly organized form of protoplasm known to us, may be called in one sense a machine through which the personal will, the moral emotions, the æsthetic sense, the faculties of reasoning, have to assert themselves in action. ”

“ But all nature does not equally express life, and much of it, as we have seen, does not express it at all to our perceptions. Beauty arises, then, when we find a certain heightening, a saliency, an intensity in the expression or vitality, whether by external nature or, in art, by man. Thus Life, not Beauty, is the mark of art, but beauty is the signal that the mark has been hit. ”

“ Art is man’s expression of life; and he delights in art precisely because and in so far as he delights in life. But if this be all, it may be objected, why, with life in full glow and activity all around him, should man turn to this reflection or rendering of it which he calls art? What place does the reality leave for the enjoyment of the shadow? This was substantially Plato’s indictment of art in the last book of The Republic. All things exist, according to his well-known doctrine of ideas, in an ideal or archetypal form, a “pattern laid up in heaven.” ”

“ What art thou? A man. Look at thyself as a solitary creature, and it is according to Nature for thee to live to old age, to grow rich, and to keep good health. But if thou look upon thyself as a man, and as a part of a certain whole, for the sake of that whole it may become thee now to have sickness, now to sail the seas, and run into peril, now to suffer need, and perchance to die before thy time. ”

“ For ‘worth,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘blessedness,’ ‘pleasure,’ and so forth, are simply terms of life and have no significance whatever apart from it. So the question, Is it better to live than not to live? is merely the same thing as to ask, Is there more life in living than in not living? Instead, therefore, of the unverifiable assumption on which Spencer bases his system of ethics, that life yields on the whole a surplus of pleasure over pain, we merely affirm the indubitable proposition that it yields a surplus of life. ”

“ In Christ the luminous purity of Greek reason was so blended with the religious fervour of the Eastern mind that he may justly be called the ideal man, the Son of Man and of God, the incarnation of the divine thought. Unlike Socrates, he was distinctly a heretic in his place and time. He appeared among a people deeply religious but one in whom religion had taken the form of an immense fabric of ceremonial and observance, guarded and administered by a special caste who conceived themselves as the appointed vehicle of the will of God for the untaught multitude. ”

“ Of all the arts there is none which seems to evade analysis so much as Music; none whose power is at once so mighty and so mysterious. Saying nothing it seems to mean everything. We can think of nothing in the world so lofty, so sweet, so profound as to be the fit embodiment of what Music conveys to us. Closely analogous in its outward form to what in line and colour is called Pattern, we are yet evidently far short of expressing the whole character of Music when we say, what in itself is quite true, that it is beautiful pattern in sound. ”

“ Now, for my own part, I must confess that if mind with all its nobler manifestations such as Will, Love, Duty, and so forth, be a mere rainbow hovering above the cataract of material force, it does not seem to me worth while to discuss anything, for we, mere particles that glimmer for a moment, can never affect anything, and must soon be where nothing can any longer affect us. ”

“ The master key with which we have tried to open certain doors in biology and in ethics will, I hope, serve us also in discovering the principles of art. I accept fully Tolstoy’s postulate of infectiousness as a primary quality of art. There can be no art which does not communicate to others the feeling of the artist. This implies that the artist must have a distinct and sincere feeling to communicate. But it does not at all imply that the finest art is that which is most widely or powerfully communicable at its first appearance or at any given period in history. ”

“ When we fix our minds on life as the goal and depth and fulness of life as the criterion, we come out at once into the clear light where high inspirations are born and justified. But it is not only the conception of life as existing for pleasure that I [Pg 206] think a true ethics will repudiate. We must clear our minds of the idea that life has any goal outside itself—pleasure, moral discipline, or what not. We must fully realize the conception of life as its own goal, its own complete satisfaction and justification. ”

“ These are Growth and Development. The mark of growth is that an organism, by assimilation from the outside world, becomes larger than it was. But in development it becomes different from what it was. The history of an embryo in the womb presents a succession of phenomena which, when one comes to realize them, almost stagger thought; for, while remaining the same thing all through, it is continually becoming a different class of thing—first two cells, then one cell, then a fish, a quadruped, ultimately a human being. ”

“ But he refused all compliance and compromise, and declared with absolute truth that Athens would do better to reward him for stinging it into a perception of realities than to punish him for the wholesome pain of the process. So he went with clear-sighted deliberation to his death, and that death, so wonderfully recorded for us by the greatest prose writer of all time, has ennobled all criticism, all sceptical thought, thenceforward. None can think lightly of what Socrates thought it worth his while to die for. ”

“ If Righteousness—to use that term for all kinds of action ethically right—is to be followed in the interests of life, how can it ever be required that much suffering, and even death itself may have to be faced for its sake? Man is a part of a Whole—in the effective realization of that conception all ethics is summed up—but he is also an individual. Why should the individual give way to the Whole if their interests seem to clash? In other words, though we have the contents, the static significance of the word ‘ought,’ we have still to find its dynamic significance, its cogency. ”

“ A great school of artists and art critics has in recent times maintained that Painting is concerned with nothing except harmonies of light and colour, and that subject is therefore completely indifferent to it save in so far as it affords opportunity for the rendering of surfaces variously illuminated and composed. The sun falling on a heap of refuse is on this theory as much to the artist as when it lights up the features of Cordelia under her tragic fate. ”

“ Ethical philosophy centres on two main points—the ethical criterion and the ethical sanction. We have to ask ourselves, What kind of life ought I to live, and secondly, Why ought I to live it? The first of these questions we have answered simply thus: Life is self-justified; in merely living we fulfil the whole purpose of nature; and as life is a thing admitting of degrees it follows that that life is best in which there is most of life. But this does not mean apparent life for the individual at the present moment. It means most life for the Whole, so far as the individual acts upon the Whole. ”

“ It is clear that there could be no advance in evolution if nature consisted solely of a multitude of independent units of life, fiercely competing against or warring with each other. It is equally clear that no advance could take place if every organism found an environment so perfectly adapted to it as to call for the very minimum of effort and strain in the maintenance of life. ”

“ A postulate of thinking this is indeed, and more than that—it is a postulate of living. If under all the variety and apparent discontinuity of the universe there does not lie One all-pervading and unifying Power, then meditation and action are alike vain, for none can tell the hour when some incursion of the unknown may not shatter our cosmos into chaos, or leave us in a new universe with the edifice of our past experience, the familiar home of the spirit, lying in ruins around us. ”

“ It must be confessed that the existence in nature of any directive power transcending and utilizing the mechanical forces and relations of matter, call it ‘vital force,’ the ‘hand of Providence,’ the ‘X’ of evolution, or what one will, has never readily been admitted by scientific naturalists. They feel that, if once admitted, it offers a prompt and facile explanation of every difficulty, and is available as the cheap resource of all those who study nature with a view to the grinding of their moral or religious axes, rather than to the discovery of truth. ”

“ As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially among various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species, or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. ”

“ But we must never forget that even this word will not take us to our end and sum up a system of ethical thought unless we rightly conceive the ultimate object to which it is directed. This is not the visible community of men, nor even that of all nature, now existing or to exist in the future. It is the ideal, eternal community, of which every man remains equally an organic part, whether he has any means of physical communication with his fellows or not. It is that without which the visible community, with all its laws and inter-relations, would never have come into being. ”

“ Let us revert to our formula—Art is the expression of Life. In the Representative Arts it is the expression of visible life. If one wishes to paint the death of Agamemnon it will not do to rely for one’s effect upon the spectator’s knowledge of that bit of Greek history and to make one’s art impressive simply because its allusions are freely recognizable. ”

“ The Power, some of whose workings it has been attempted to trace in the foregoing pages, is a controlling and directive force, making, through countless varieties of being, for one clear and definable end—the realization of life. It may be asked, Are we to regard this divine Power as wholly immanent in matter or as partly transcending it and governing it from without?
The nature of the divine principle, so far as we are able to discern it, cannot be fully discussed until we come to consider it in the highest sphere of manifestation yet known to us, that of the human soul. ”

“ Whether time and space, or even personality, will exist for us after death we dare not say; we are totally unable to imagine the conditions of such an existence. But we can perfectly grasp the broad fact that whatever we do and are, whatever we think, whatever transacts itself even in the unconscious sphere of our existence, must have eternal endurance and significance because it is knit with the eternal Whole. ”