Various

“ The custom of his age permitted the use of images and phrases which we now justly condemn as incongruous and unseemly, and the fervent fancy of Crashaw carried this licence to excess. At the same time his verse is studded with fiery beauties and sudden felicities of language, unsurpassed by any lyrist between his own time and Shelley’s. There is no religious poetry in English so full at once of gross and awkward images and imaginative touches of the most ethereal beauty. The temper of his intellect seems to have been delicate and weak, fiery and uncertain ”

“ I believe in one God the Father almighty, maker of things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, born of God, God of God, Light of Light, almighty of almighty, true God of true God, born before the ages, not made, by whom all things were made in heaven and in earth. Who for our salvation descended from heaven, was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered by suffering under Pontius Pilate, under Herod the King, crucified, buried, descended into hell, trod down the sting of death, rose again the third day, appeared to the apostles. ”

“ All light comes from the reason, and it is the reason which apprehends both itself and the sensibility which envelops it, and the will which it obliges but does not constrain. Consciousness, then, is composed of these three integrant and inseparable elements. But Reason is the immediate ground of knowledge and of consciousness itself.
But there is a peculiarity in Cousin’s doctrine of activity or freedom, and in his doctrine of reason, which enters deeply into his system. This is the element of spontaneity in volition and in reason. This is the heart of what is Spontaneity in will. ”

“ It is necessary at the threshold of an examination of the history of criticism to expose this laxity of speech, since nothing is more confusing to a clear conception of this art than to suppose that it consists in an effort to detect what is blameworthy. Candid criticism should be neither benevolent nor adverse; its function is to give a just judgment, without partiality or bias. A critic (κριτικός) is one who exercises the art of criticism, who sets himself up, or is set up, as a judge of literary and artistic merit. ”

“ Sensation might arise, for aught we know, so far as causality leads us, not from a world of forces at all, but from a will like our own, though infinitely more powerful, acting upon us, partly furthering and partly thwarting us. And indeed such a supposition is, with the principle of causality at work, within the limits of probability, as we are already supposed to know such a reality—a will—in our own consciousness. ”

“ The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into a neglect as unjust as the earlier popularity had been. As a prose writer, especially as an essayist, he holds, and will not lose, a high position in literature; as a poet it is hardly possible that he can enjoy more than a very partial revival. The want of nature, the obvious and awkward art, the defective melody of his poems, destroy the interest that their ingenuity and occasional majesty would otherwise excite. ”

“ In England the single-judge system is universal, save in appeal; on the continent of Europe plurality of judges is insisted upon, save in the most trivial cases, where the punishment is insignificant. In most countries of the continent of Europe the whole machinery for the prevention, investigation and punishment of crime, is conducted by what is called the parquet, which represents society as a collective unit and not the individual injured. The head of the whole parquet in France is the procureur-général, who holds equal rank with the members of the supreme court. ”

“ How comes it that great names recur continually in the annals of Surrey and Yorkshire, for example, while those of Berkshire and Lincolnshire are entirely barren? No doubt proximity to great centres of population favours the cultivation of the game, but in this respect Kent and Sussex are no better situated than Hertfordshire, nor does it account for Nottinghamshire having so illustrious a record while Staffordshire has none at all, nor for Somersetshire having outclassed Devon. ”

“ As I refer to myself the act of attention and volition, so I cannot but refer the sensation to some cause, necessarily other than myself, that is, to an external cause, whose existence is as certain for me as my own existence, since the phenomenon which suggests it to me is as certain as the phenomenon which had suggested my reality, and both are given in each other. ”

“ Voluntary facts alone are marked in the eyes of consciousness with the characters of imputability and personality. The will alone is the person or Me. The me is the centre of the intellectual sphere without which consciousness is impossible. We find ourselves in a strange world, between two orders of phenomena which do not belong to us, which we apprehend only on the condition of our distinguishing ourselves from them. ”

“ All that it could do would be to warrant a cause of some sort, but not this or that reality as the cause. And further, the principle of causality, if fairly carried out, as universal and necessary, would not allow us to stop at personality or will as the ultimate cause of its effect—volition. Once applied to the facts at all, it would drive us beyond the first antecedent or term of antecedents of volition to a still further cause or ground—in fact, land us in an infinite regress of causes. ”

“ Causality might tell us that a cause there is of sensation somewhere and of some sort; but that this cause is a force or sum of forces, existing in space, independently of us, and corresponding to our sensations, it could never tell us, for the simple reason that such a notion is not supposed to exist in our consciousness. Causality cannot add to the number of our notions,—cannot add to the number of realities we know. ”

“ The examination of what has been produced by other ages of human thought is much less liable to this dangerous error than the attempt to estimate contemporary works of art and literature. There are few indeed whom personal passion can blind to the merits of a picture of the 15th or a poem of the 17th century. In the higher branches of historical criticism, prejudice of this ignoble sort is hardly possible, and therefore, in considering criticism in its ideal forms, it is best to leave out of consideration that invidious and fugitive species which bears the general name of “reviewing.” ”

“ On the contrary, a work of perfect beauty and fitness, in which no fault could possibly be found with justice, is as proper a subject for criticism to deal with as a work of the greatest imperfection. ”

“ The study of criminology has, however, gone far to satisfy us that the true genesis of crime is not to be sought in the anatomical anomalies of individuals, or in the fact that there are people who under “any social conditions whatever and of any nationality at no matter what epoch, would have undoubtedly become murderers and thieves.” On the contrary it may be safely assumed that many such would have done no wrong if they had, e.g., been born rich, had been free from the pressing needs that drove them into crime, and had escaped the evil influences of their surroundings. ”

“ In this respect the contrast between a criminal trial in England and a criminal trial in France is very striking. The interrogation and browbeating of the prisoner by the judge, consistent as it may be with the inquisitorial theory of their procedure, is strange to English lawyers, accustomed to see in every criminal trial a fair fight between the prisoner and the prosecution, and not a contest between the judge and the prisoner. The accused may, if he choose, be defended by counsel, and if poor may get legal aid at the public expense if the court certify for it. ”

“ The intellectual intuition either falls under the eye of consciousness, or it does not. If not, how do you know it and its object which are identical? If it does, it comes within the sphere of psychology; and the objections to it as thus a relative, made by Schelling himself, are to be dealt with. Schelling’s intellectual intuition is the mere negation of knowledge.
Again the pure being of Hegel is a mere abstraction,—a hypothesis illegitimately assumed, which he has nowhere sought to vindicate. The very point to be established is the possibility of reaching being per se or pure being ”

“ Even when the reviewer is, or desires to be, strictly just, it is almost impossible for him to stand far enough back from the object under review to see it in its proper perspective. He is dazzled, or scandalized, by its novelty; he has formed a preconceived notion of the degree to which its author should be encouraged or depressed; he is himself, in all cases, an element in the mental condition which he attempts to judge, and if not positively a defendant is at least a juryman in the court over which he ought to preside with remote impartiality. ”

“ How can you deny the reality of that which you do not know? The answer to this is that in the case of contradictory statements—A and not A—the latter is a mere negation of the former, and posits nothing; and the negation of a notion with positive attributes, as the finite, does not extend beyond abolishing the given attributes as an object of thought. The infinite or non-finite is not necessarily known, ere the finite is negated, or in order to negate it; all that needs be known is the finite itself ”