Various

“ The hunger for an immortality of the body, of the senses, the lust of immortality, is, in empty fatuousness, only comparable to the mania of a crazy photographer interested only in his negatives, and who never "develops" one, or to the foolishness that values photographs more than the friends themselves. If we once get our spiritual eye fixed upon the deep reality and unity hidden by the Maia-veilings of individuality and flesh, the cravings of our weak hearts for eternal continuance of our little bundle of littlenesses, would fall away from us as softly as the wayward longings of childhood. ”

“ There is no personality and individualism there, and yet there is something that includes personality and is much more. There is will, consciousness, intelligence, life,—but not identity or individuality. So the life that is the heart of us invites us to leave our little self and find a larger self. Religion is our yes to that invitation. Materialism and pessimism is the saying no to it. The immortality that is alone possible or desirable is the losing our life, the individual identity-loving life, again to find it as the impersonal but richer, deeper life of nature and God. ”

“ Our much eulogised constitution, by its compromise with slavery, cost America a million lives, and a billion of money. And all of those evils, involving a steady degradation of our politics, are due to the fact that America got its independence not by evolution,—which would have surely secured it, leaving England its friend,—but by revolution, which made England its enemy; necessitating a premature, crude, military union; preventing the mature discussion and development which could have made the constitution an advance in political civilisation instead of a retrogression. ”

“ The mourning, shudder, gloom, and horror of death,—God-sent if anything is—is practical pessimism and reckless atheism. Death's one lesson is that we must love and cultivate what he cannot touch. One who has lived a life of kindness and spirituality has no horror of death, and to him it has little mystery. But to him whose divinity has been self and whose religion the worship of his physiological senses, death must be the ugliest of enemies who is to rob him of his all. Did you ever notice how life is plastic and free when first fashioning for itself a body? ”

“ If, as Professor Höffding declares, welfare is to be interpreted as activity, work, development; if this kind of active welfare is the greatest good, whatever admixture of pain and whatever absence of pleasurable feeling it may have; if the greatest amount of a state of continuous pleasurable feeling is not welfare in an ethical sense, what becomes of the utilitarian definition of welfare as pleasurable feeling? If, however, welfare is "the state of a continuous pleasurable feeling," how can we declare that the life of a pessimistic philosopher is preferable to that of a joyful fool? ”

“ We could then see that it is the quality of all life, the progressive purity, power, and increase of life in the abstract, that become all-important. Religion would become the love and veneration of Life the Father of us; morality the cheerful obedience of the individual to that Father; Heaven the re-entrance of the individual life into the great unity. Much of the old religion was irreligious; its God a far-away dead abstraction, not a living, ever-present love; its immortality was at heart a desire for death, its spiritualism at heart a barbaric materialism. ”

“ By such one-sidedness the individual becomes of value only as a wheel in a great machine: he serves merely as a means, not as an end. And such a one-sided individual development is connected with a one-sided social development. The suppression of certain features of the nature of the individual goes hand in hand with the suppression of single estates and classes of society. If we identify civilisation and ethics, without qualification, and regard progress as a safer criterion than welfare, we should overlook the fact that there exists also a social question. ”

“ It is a product of nature, and is preserved and sustained by nature. Everything that philosophy has accomplished—the biological title of every advance, nay of every error, admitted—is, compared with it, but an insignificant and ephemeral product of art. And in reality, we see every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced away from his one-sided intellectual occupation by some practical necessity, immediately fall back upon the universal point of view that all men hold in common. ”

“ To this death of faith and irreligious religion, comes the sympathetic study and love of nature—that is, science—and reveals to us the opulence of life, the infinity of intellect in nature, the inexhaustibleness of her resources and of her diversity, her beauty, and her splendor. The old materialistic degradation of religion forefelt its doom would come from this spiritualistic revivification, and the devotees cried out against science as atheistic. And science found some foolish enemies in her own camp who, misreading their divine book, joined in the cry—"Nothing but mechanics." ”

“ Have you studied logic, history, and science with a sincere desire to do your political and social duty, and to free yourself from prejudice, error, superstition, and conceit? If not why should God suddenly endow you with a perfect intellect ready-made? Is it God's way in this world, to give excellencies unasked and unearned? Rest assured he will not do it at your dying hour. It is no particular merit in you to die ”

“ We now see that not only are science and her workers religious, but without scientific knowledge there can be no adequate idea or practice of religion. You can't love God unless you love and know what he is doing in this universe. The man who in a walk goes neglectfully and obliviously by a million mysteries and wonders that God has been toiling to eliminate for ages,—such a man cannot lay much claim to God's friendship. If we love our friend, we have some interest in the deepest concern of his life. ”

“ So long as ethics starts from assumptions or principles, it will be no science; for truly, as Professor Höffding says in excuse of the inability to prove principles, "The difficulty always occurs in the enunciation of a principle that a direct demonstration of its validity cannot be given."
The requirement of ethics is to arrive at statements of fact. Let us build upon facts and we shall stand upon solid ground.
Ethics in order to be scientific must be based upon the objective and unalterable order of things, upon the ascertainable data of experience, upon the laws of nature. ”

“ They dread death whose life is of the physical type. God never gave to man a greater blessing, after life itself, than death, and nothing more strikingly proves the divine government of the world than the certainty of its coming to us all. If death is your enemy, life is not your friend. The brutal attempt to ignore the fact, the belief that the body with its pack of heathenish appetites and needs could push through death and come out fresh and renewed on the other side is the very insanity of individualism and the intoxication of materialism. ”

“ Even when we very accurately remember a dream which we have just had,—which happens very seldom,—we feel the difference of the two states of consciousness with unmistakable distinctness. We have no power over the tricks that phantasy plays with us in our sleep, and in spite of the often present belief that it is all but a dream, yet every power fails us of penetrating into its independent activity. Moreover the images are generally of a very definite signification, since they are merely reproduced from the store-house of impressions that have sunk into the unfathomable depths of our soul. ”

“ You cannot clutch your cake of happiness and like a spoiled child run into the attic of heaven to eat it alone. Life will see to it that you do not slip off. And if you have been born again of the spirit you will have no such desire, but will beg for kindred work upon the old earth-home. ”

“ The dear stupid physiologist has now reached his limit, and you can confidently answer for him that it was Life created these things, Life that existed before muscles, nerves, and cells, and that slowly fashioned them; Life, an order of existence in no imaginable way analogous to, or to be confounded with matter or mechanics. There is in the history of thought no more ludicrous and dismal failure than the attempt to explain life in terms of mechanics. The hope of the materialist that science would prove his prejudice is torn to tatters. ”

“ Like one of the famed lianas of the primeval tropical forests, it entwines the giant Science, to sap his best powers and slowly but surely to stifle his life. Whatever the modern mind with the help of freedom won by bitter struggles has gained in the knowledge of nature and of history, is twisted and turned, falsified and misinterpreted by hundreds and hundreds of busy hands until it has been fashioned to fit that ready-made scheme of things composed on the one hand of Catholic dogmatical teachings, and on the other of the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. ”

“ But they often supply us with a deep view into the secrets of character, and inculcate with terrible emphasis the truth that nothing is lost in the realms of the soul, any more than in the external world which is ruled by the law of the conservation of energy. Every thought that ever traversed our brain, every emotion that has ever thrilled our heart, every wish that has ever animated for a fleeting moment our breast—has all been entered in ineffaceable characters in the day-book of our earthly existence. ”

“ The employment of a magnifying glass, which by reason of external difficulties is seldom possible, is a convincing proof of the degree of independence of the two personalities within us. Anything more marvellous than the fact before us can hardly be imagined. We create something which is immediately wrested from our control and which leads a totally independent life; we produce something which becomes for our own selves a mute enigma, and which can only be aroused by artificial means out of its ghost-like silence. ”

“ This may to some seem a hard doctrine. It is not perhaps an easy task for the butterfly to break its way out through the million-fold bonds of its cocoon, but when risen into the large air and sunshine does it regret the birth-struggle? They who think they are being cheated of reality for a metaphysic illusion will find in breaking through the bonds of flesh that they also have brought with them splendid wings for rising in the no less real but rarer air of spiritual trust in life. ”

“ I have admitted the possibility of a conflict between civilisation and welfare. Wherever such a conflict arises, there, according to my conception, appears an ethical problem, which must be determined by the principle of welfare, since any order of things or any development that brought with it permanent and everlasting pain would be in effect a dissolution of life itself. Such pain, however, (as even pessimistic philosophers are optimistic enough to hope,) would destroy the will to live. If we live in spite of pain it is because there is always a surplus of satisfaction. ”

“ Does the mathematician, in propounding a new method, or a physicist in explaining an unsolved problem, proceed from the mathematical and physical notions all men hold in common? And if the soul is made an object of scientific research, why should an exception be made of it? It is not so much what we begin with as what we end with, and it is perhaps superfluous to say that Dr. Wolff has ended where he began—with the simplicity, the substantiality, the unity, and the permanency of the ego. ”

“ Society in the sense of a mere number of individuals will by and by create but does not constitute morality; nor can the majority of a society propose a criterion. The nature of moral goodness is not a matter of number nor of size nor of quantity. It must be sought in the quality of our ideas and motives. Moral are those ideas which tend to build up the life-totality of our souls so as to engender more and more of mankind in man, or still broader expressed, so as to keep man in harmony with the whole cosmos—with God. ”

“ Art is a game, but a serious and profound game, like love, and it is born of leisure and pleasure. The unity of the work of art consists simply in the coupling of a question and an answer, a problem and a solution, a combat and a victory. ”

“ As you become freed from the cramping littleness of self-love and the bonds of self-gratification, as you rise into the life of the spirit, you find yourself less individual. One fitted for a true heaven would not care for the old immortality. What is good to carry over into the future life is not so much personal identity as personal non-identity, not so much the imperfections that make us individuals as the perfections that free us from individualism. ”

“ It seems then, in effect, to be before all expressive or inventive, and the second of these traits appears the most essential. The property of art and also of morality is to seek and to believe to find a divine end in life, a great end worthy of individual sacrifice. When art presents itself separated from morality, when it is an agent not of harmony but of social dissolution, it is a sign that it is imported from abroad. Art is then immoral and dissolvent. In all ages truly logical art has been only the translator and the illuminator of morality. ”