Various

“ The dawn has never failed to appear at her appointed place in the morning, never forgotten where she is to appear again, nor the moment at which she is to reanimate the world. Darkness and light know their appointed hour, and always at the desired moment “the black One has given way to the white.” Linked together by the same chain in the endless path open before them, they follow their way onwards, the two immortals, directed by a God, absorbing each other’s tints. The two fertile sisters do not clash with one another; they never stop, dissimilar in form, but alike in spirit. ”

“ It is he who makes the sun come out again; it is he who makes the world, annihilated during the night, reappear; it is he who recreates it, he who creates it. In a whole series of hymns he ascends to the side of Varuna, and shares the empire with him; at last he mounts above him, and becomes the Universal King:—
“He, who, as soon as he was born, a god of thought, has surpassed the gods by the power of his intellect, he whose trembling made the two worlds quake by the power of his strength—O man, it is Indra! ”

“ Thou most glorious of immortals, whose names are many, for ever Almighty, Zeus, Thou who rulest nature, directing all things according to a law, hail! To Thee all this universe moving round the earth yields obedience, following whither thou leadest, and submits itself to Thy rule.... So great in Thy nature, King Supreme above all things, no work is achieved without Thee, neither on the earth, nor in the celestial regions of ether, nor on the sea, but those which the wicked accomplish in their folly. ”

“ I marvel that a being should be met with in whom at one time or other what we call knowledge has appeared; but this fact cannot exist without being known by the knower. All knowledge supposes, then, a subject that knows itself—that is to say, who is internally present to himself. Here knowledge comes from within, not from without. Whatever is objective can only appear to me, and is consequently a phenomenon. I only see its outside, and it is only in relation to myself that I can grasp even that outside. But the conscious ego sees itself from within. ”

“ He sees man, and judges and chastises him, if he has not followed his law, for from him comes the law of man, as well as the law of the world; from him comes the science supreme among all other sciences, that of duty, the knowledge of those things we ought to think, say, and do, and of those things we ought neither to think, nor say, nor do. To the man who has prayed well, thought, spoken, and acted well, he opens his resplendent paradise; he opens hell to him who has not prayed and who has thought, spoken, and done evil. ”

“ We must not narrow the influence of the sea in mythology within the compass of man’s mere experience of it. Few among the Aryans lived by the Caspian shore; but the Sea of Death appears in one form or another in the religious belief of all the Aryan people. The tradition of the sea, its real wonders, and greater fancied terrors, must have passed from one to another, from the few who lived within sight and sound of the waters to others quite beyond its horizon, to whom it was not visible even as a faint silvery line. ”

“ The mind must turn away from the external world and re-enter itself. It is there that, without need of forms or categories of which criticism has demonstrated the fallacy, the subject grasps itself not only in its phenomena but in its being, and determines itself in conformity to an end. This end is goodness: and this is the only notion we can form to ourselves of the Absolute. Thus, metaphysic is not the science of the object, but that of the subject; or if the name of science be still withheld, it is at least the study of the subject, and it is founded on and completed by morality. ”

“ Into the mass of sedentary lives—the vast majority—it enters but seldom as an experience, provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of all countries which possess a sea-board, how full is the literature of reference to this one phenomenon of physical nature! The sun and the moon, and all the heavenly bodies, the familiar sights and sounds of land, are the property of all; and yet allusions to these are not more common in literature than allusions to the sea: one might fancy that man was amphibious, with a power of actually living upon, and not only by, the water. ”

“ To dread moral considerations in the debates of an English Parliament, lest the morality prevailing in its laws become one-sided and arbitrary, pedantic and ascetic, is so baseless, so wanting in good sense, as scarcely to seem sincere. When people tell us, “We shall be liable to have laws against dancing and cardplaying, or laws compelling us to go to church, if we insist that legislation ought to study for the public virtue,” they not only make themselves ridiculous, they even force us to suspect that they fear lest vice be repressed in ways inconvenient to the vicious. ”

“ How, indeed, could we possibly admit that so powerful, so lofty an intellectual effort as that initiated by Kant, which under the name of criticism, of subjective or objective idealism, or even of positivism, has but been the development of his primary thought; that so prodigious a mental movement as this should be absolutely void of meaning, and destined to leave no trace in science? How believe that since the days of Descartes the human intellect has gone mad? ”

“ Besides which, let positive science, or rather the positive philosophy, in the name of positive facts, proscribe metaphysic as it will, is it not evident that the fundamental conceptions of all science—number, atom, force, matter, cause, law—are metaphysical conceptions? Is it not evident that all science whatever is impossible without a certain number of principles or notions,—in a word, of intellectual laws, which even govern experience itself? ”

“ May Aurâmazda and the gods of the nation bring me their help! May Aurâmazda protect this country from hostile armies, from barrenness and evil! May this country never be invaded by the stranger, nor by hostile armies, nor by barrenness, nor by evil! This is the favour which I implore from Aurâmazda and the gods of the nation!”
This world which he has organized is a work of intelligence; by his wisdom it began, and by his wisdom it will end. He is the mind which knows all things, and it is to him that the sage appeals in order to penetrate the mysteries of the world. ”

“ Let us pass to the notion of substance and to that of cause. These two notions are necessary to render possible the connection of phenomena in the human mind. Our perceptions are, in fact, diverse; if they were only diverse, and had no unity, there would be no passage from one phenomenon to another; consciousness would arise and disappear with each phenomenon, to arise and die anew with the next, and so on. But then there would be no thought, for in order that thought should exist there must be at least two different things presented to the unity of consciousness. ”

“ The North-West Provinces were still unrecovered from a dearth, during which the Government of India had exhibited a rapacity and indifference to human suffering which would, with difficulty, be credited in England. Terrible as is the mortality resulting from a famine in India, the death-roll represents but a tenth part of the suffering which such visitations inflict. For every human being that dies, ten are left, without money and without physical strength, to struggle feebly for existence on the margin of the grave. They cannot give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage. ”

“ It is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, and is, besides, guarded with thorns and briars along all its length. Nevertheless, when, at the last day, the good Muslim comes to cross it, a light will shine upon him from heaven, and he will be snatched across like lightning or like the wind; but when the wicked man or the unbeliever approaches, the light will be hidden, and, from the extreme narrowness of the bridge and likewise becoming entangled in the thorns, he will fall headlong into the abyss of fire that is beneath. ”

“ Granting so much, must not absolute perfection be the reason of the existence of the absolute, as relative perfection is the reason of the existence of the relative? If, however, any choose to call that supreme perfection the Idea, with Hegel—as Plato calls it the Good, Aristotle the pure Act, Descartes the Infinitely Perfect Being—we have nothing to object, so long as it be clearly understood that the idea shall signify the identity of the thought and the being, and not merely a subjective conception of the human mind. ”

“ There we have a complete history of the dead man’s journey across the Nile and through the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new country where everything is better and happier than upon earth. ”

“ He who should leap over the sky and beyond it, would not escape the king Varuna: he has his spies, the spies of the heavens, who go through the world; he has his thousand eyes which look on the earth.
“The king Varuna sees everything, all that which is between the two worlds and beyond them: he reckons the winking of the eye of all creatures:
“The world is in his hand like the dice in the hand of the gamester. ”

“ We are wont to think of the Greeks as of just such a light-hearted, and in a fashion sceptical, temperament, and to contrast the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of mediæval Europe. Scarcely any thought of death, or of judgment after death, disturbs the serenity of Greek art, such as it has come down to us. ”

“ Has there, for example, been since the days of Plato a single metaphysician who has denied the knowledge of the senses to be relative, and has the full scope and bearing of this principle been accurately measured? Can that be denied which has been scientifically demonstrated, which Descartes already affirmed, i.e., that light and sound—Nature’s two great languages—are only the products of our physical organization, and that outside of the eye that sees, and the ear that hears, there is nothing external to us but a series of vibrations and undulations, which are neither luminous nor sonorous? ”

“ Let us divest it if you will of colour, heat, sound; must we not at least conceive it as extended, as existing in time, conceive it, that is, according to the necessary forms that are supposed to be suppressed? For to say that it has been capable of existing without having anything in common with these forms, and that out of this unknown and nameless condition have arisen, by way of transformation, the notions of which we treat, were to admit that something can come out of nothing. We must therefore acknowledge that universal notions do at least exist as germs at the origin of evolution. ”

“ Metaphysic, then, independently of morality, has its own proper foundation, which, far from being affected by criticism, is the very foundation of criticism itself. This foundation once admitted, are we entitled to declare metaphysic no science? We hold that we are not. Doubtless, if by science be meant an absolutely adequate knowledge of the object, such as mathematics affords, metaphysic cannot pretend to such knowledge; but we have here only a question of degree. The perfection of a science is not the same thing as its existence. ”

“ India, on the contrary, very soon forgot that god for whose origin and formation, however, she accounts much better than any other Aryan religion does; and it was not a foreign god who dethroned him—a god from without—but a native god, a god of his own family, Indra, the hero of the tempest.
In fact, the supreme god of the Aryans was not a god of unity; the Asura, the Lord, was not the Lord in the same sense as Adonai. There were by the side of him, within himself, a number of gods, acting of their own accord, and often of independent origin. The wind, the rain, the thunder ”

“ Kant’s evolution, which makes dogmatism to result from scepticism, was an entirely moral evolution, substituting for speculative the authority of practical reason. The evolution we have now to deal with is of a quite different character; it consists in passing from objective to subjective knowledge, from the object to the subject. Even if all that has been just said on the side of criticism were true, there is at least invariably one existence that remains untouched by it: this existence is that of the thinking subject, and this existence is incontestable. ”

“ But it is easy to see how many images and notions which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. ”

“ We go with the expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from true voyages, and what we cherish as credulously from romances and poetry, come crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. Thus we are imbued with thoughts of the sea before we have had any sight of it ourselves, merely by the sea’s great influence acting through the total experience of humanity. ”

“ I am compelled to blush for my order when I find them seizing the opportunity of their employers being under a heavy time-contract for the execution of important public or other works to organize a strike: this is clearly an infraction of all the ethics of morality. Neither can I appreciate their sense of the fitness of things when I hear them laying it down as a sound axiom that wages should be equalized, so that the stupid, idle, or inferior workman should be on a par with the skilled and industrious one. ”