Various

“ Science reveals no such law. Science is simply silent on the subject; it admits its utter ignorance, and declares the question beyond its scope. Undoubtedly it does not pronounce that God does move matter, but it equally abstains from asserting that God does not. For when it traces back material effects from cause to cause, it comes at last to something for which it has no explanation. When we say that an acid and an alkali combine by the law of affinity, that a stone falls by the law of gravity, we merely generalize facts under a name, we do not account for them. ”

“ No, Lord Beaconsfield's fair and reasonable ascendency has been more honestly won. But his marvellous friendships have not been the only softening touches in his career. All England felt a strange thrilling about the heart on the morning when it heard that Mr. Disraeli's wife was henceforth to be the Viscountess Beaconsfield. It was a domestic idyll suddenly disclosed in the centre of British politics. A man who can make his own hearth the scene of romance, convert all who know him well into true friends, and win all the young people of a nation, must be something more than a self-seeker. ”

“ But, without creation, man has enormous power over Nature. He can, and daily does, overpower her laws, or seemingly make them work as he pleases. Despite the law of gravity, he ascends to the sky in a balloon; he makes water spring up in fountains; he makes vessels, weighing thousands of tons, float on the seas. Despite cohesion, he grinds rocks to powder; despite chemical affinity, he transmutes into myriads of different forms the few elements of which all matter consists; despite the resistless power of the thunderbolt, he tames electricity to be his servant or his harmless toy. ”

“ The artist is by necessity of his nature a thin-skinned, impressionable being, with sensitive nerves and perceptions, without which the power of creation does not exist. He writes and paints and acts and sculpts—in short, composes, invents, creates—to make the world feel as he is feeling. Fame is a vulgar word for the sentiment which inspires him; the longing after sympathy is a much truer expression of what the true artist desires. ”

“ Whether this be so or not, it appears to me, for the reasons I have already given, that we may still entertain the same notions about the beauty of the world as before. Our souls may still rejoice in beauty as of old. To some of us this glorious frame has not appeared a dead mechanic mass, but a living whole, instinct with spiritual life; and in the beauty which we see around us in Nature's face, we have felt the smile of a spiritual Being, as we feel the smile of our friend adding light and lustre to his countenance. ”

“ There is something also of the manner in which Nature works, in the feeling with which the curves interlace, seeming almost to grow into each other, in a Gothic cathedral. In the perspectives of heavy round arches of Winchester and Durham, in the upward soaring of the Salisbury spire, there is the same impression—they seem to have "come" so. It is like a living organism, the parts of which are as natural and necessary to the whole as is the growth of a tree: like the recipe of old for a poet, they seem to have been "born, not made." ”

“ The Suspension Bridge hung high in the air above the ships in the Menai Straits, and that over the narrow hollow of the Avon, have a beauty of lightness and grace all their own—Waterloo Bridge, which Canova declared to be worth coming to England to see—are all specimens of a kind of work which we may hope to see multiplied, and even improved upon, as the adaptation of art to the common necessities of our civilization becomes more common, and is taken in hand by a higher and more educated class of men. ”

“ The love and desire of these is universal in the mind of man. It is seen not more distinctly in the highest forms of civilized art than in the habits of the rudest savage, who covers with elaborate carving the handle of his war-club or the prow of his canoe. Is it likely that this universal aim and purpose of the mind of man should be wholly without relation to the aims and purposes of his Creator? He that formed the eye to see beauty, shall He not see it? He that gave the human hand its cunning to work for beauty, shall His hand never work for it? ”

“ The tendency of recent belief in those who have studied the Book of Nature, and perhaps most decidedly in those who have only turned some of its pages, is that the two revelations are irreconcilable. The immutability of Nature's laws is to them a gospel taught by every stone, by every plant, by every animated being. All that they have learnt to know of matter rests on the assurance that its properties are absolutely fixed. ”

“ But an Empire cannot be so governed, and the result of the experiment has been an amount of human suffering appalling to contemplate. The Indian air is "full of farewells for the dying and mournings for the dead," and the path of the Government can be traced in broken pledges and dead men's bones. These bones are as dragon's teeth, which Lord Lytton is sowing broadcast all over India and Afghanistan, and they will assuredly be changed into armed men if the hand of the sower be not promptly stayed. ”

“ The poet and the painter require intelligent cordial belief and sympathy, which is just what we have not to give, and therefore the reign of the highest art is probably at an end: no Phidias or Michelangelo, no Homer or Shakspeare, are likely again to arise. This is pre-eminently a scientific age—a time for the collection and co-ordination of facts; and what imagination we possess we use in the discovery of the laws by which Nature works, and in the application of our knowledge to the ordinary wants and comforts and pleasures of the human race. ”

“ If the returns on improvements made by landowners on their estates were limited to the interest which they could have obtained from consols, would not the motive for making such improvements be sadly wanting? It would sound strange in great manufacturing towns to be told that flowing profits are no increase of the public wealth, that they are taxes resembling the public funds, and must be swept away down to the lowest sum compatible with the existence of the industry.
And what must be said of the ugly word, monopoly, which is so freely flung against the owners of rent? ”

“ It is impossible to speak of the grasses and not to have the mind recalled to the beauty that resides in form as contrasted with colour. Elegance, grace of form, characterizes most (but not all) plants, whether fertilized by the wind or by insects; and yet this grace, in many cases, perhaps in most, adds nothing to their conspicuousness. It is, on the theory in question, a piece of idle beauty ”

“ The British people find this Government guilty of having won for it and for themselves much honour. When Lord Beaconsfield saw that in any event he was committed to a contest with Russia for the defence of English interests, he had the courage and the wit to determine that the issue of it should be the better for the world. It is for this noble superfluity of skilful statesmanship, this Imperial scope given to England's ruling, that Europe has thanked him, and the bulk of this nation applauded him. ”

“ Supposing that, having entered the House of Commons, he had not attained office, he would yet have always been remembered as the keenest Parliamentary debater of his time. If his public life had ended in 1852—that is, more than a quarter of a century ago—without his having become a Minister, he would have stood recorded as the most skilful leader of an Opposition which our history has known. Had he never passed a measure through Parliament, he must have been referred to by all political thinkers as a strikingly original critic of our Constitution. ”

“ Rent does not increase the price of agricultural produce; it does not make bread dearer. Rent is the consequence, not the creator, of price. Here the difference between agriculture and manufacturing trades is vital. The hire or purchase of machinery forms necessarily a part of the cost of manufacturing the goods: it must be paid for by the price realized, or the goods will not be made. On the other hand, the consideration to be given for the use of the land does not enter into the tenant's estimate of his cost of production. ”

“ There is, indeed, a kind of monopoly which is susceptible of no defence, a monopoly of manufacture conferred on a favoured few, by the arbitrary decree of the law, founded on no superior claim of merit or capacity, and resulting in inflated prices and inferiority of service rendered. Such were the monopolies whose abolition an indignant public opinion extorted from Queen Elizabeth. But a superior advantage of production or sale attached by nature to particular individuals or societies belongs to a wholly different class. Life is full of such monopolies. ”

“ Scarcely any branch of natural science exists which has not furnished materials for at least a skirmish; so that it requires an experienced and impartial eye to be able rightly to understand the true fortunes of the contest over the whole field of battle. True it is, that for every man the question between the two theories has to be decided by somewhat simpler considerations than any such survey. Something in every man seems inevitably to determine him towards either the intellectual or the material theory of things.
The existence of beauty in the world is a very remarkable fact. ”

“ The forces which determine that one farm can pay rent and another none are the same for both, either by their presence or their absence; but the two farms have no connection with each other, except as suffering effects from common causes. When this great truth is seen and acknowledged, and when Political Economy has ceased to talk of the non rent-paying land regulating the amount of all rent, the world which it addresses, and for whom it exists, will be won over to listen to its teaching on rent and to think it real. ”

“ Very different is the doctrine of Buddhists and Jains. With them there is no Supreme Being, no Supreme Divine Eternal Soul, no separate human eternal soul. Nor can there be any true soul-transmigration. A Buddhist and a Jaina believe that the only eternal thing is matter. The universe consists of eternal atoms which by their own inherent creative force are perpetually developing countless forms of being in ever-recurring cycles of creation and dissolution, re-creation and re-dissolution. ”

“ A reduction of rents may very possibly be called for by necessity and by reason; but to place the position itself of landlord in an invidious light, as that of a man who exacts from the labour of others that for which he has neither toiled nor spun, is a most unwarrantable process of argumentation, and can lead to no trustworthy result in a matter of such transcendant importance to the nation. ”

“ They have never pretended to be knights-errant for the righting of wrongs throughout the world. What contents them is the humbler rôle of old-fashioned English statesmanship, which seeks first to make sure of the safety of our own empire and the promotion of our proper interests, doing what further good it can to other peoples incidentally in discharging the fair reasonable obligations which may in that way arise, nor disdaining any glory that so falls to it. But an enormous obligation of this sort was already on our shoulders—the preservation of India. ”

“ Furthermore, the fact that we recognize ugliness seems to make our recognition of beauty more important; for it shows that the perception of beauty is not mere habit, and that we have an inward and independent judgment on the matter—we are able to approve the one thing on the score of beauty, and to reject the other as ugly.
Even allowing fully for the existence of ugliness, it must be conceded that the world around us presents a vast mass of beauty—complex, diverse, commingled, and not easily admitting of analysis. ”

“ He was in particular the soul of the Société des Artistes Dramatiques, and amongst the immense crowd that attended his funeral were, no doubt, hundreds indebted to him for an easy career and a sure means of existence.
We are a long way removed from the time when the life of an artist was one long struggle with misery, when men of the first class continued obscure or barely maintained themselves by their works. Many difficulties still remain no doubt, but how much smoother the road has become! ”

“ With water and fire he moulds into shape mighty masses of metal; he shoots, at a sustained speed beyond that of birds, across valleys and through mountain ranges; he unites seas which continents had separated; there is nothing in the whole earth which he has not subdued, or does not hope to subdue, to his use. There is hardly a physical miracle which he does not feel he can, or may yet, perform. ”