Various

“ I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do; they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with promise of going better, they make little complaint. ”

“ Much literature of this sort is, of course, temporarily valuable; but Time promptly and wisely puts it into the wallet at his back. Without endurance, fame is as the fire of thorns under the pot; without vitality, naught can endure.
As a matter of fact a work need not be brutally vital to have a fair chance at long life. It must interest somebody very much indeed. Of course, the great immortals start out in life popular in the best sense; but there are lesser immortals too. One does not have to be Dante or Shakespeare to win out. ”

“ And what is worse, our high school students and whole communities have been imbued with a false sense of proportion. To run half as fast as a greyhound, to jump one-fifth as far as a kangaroo, to kick one-tenth as hard as a Missouri mule, these are the principal things, these are the weightier matters of the law. These contests with the brute world, in which we are always defeated, have taken the place of the higher intellectual contests of humanism. The school superintendent or principal who can turn out a winning team, he is the man, the new patriot in our democracy. ”

“ Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute evolution.
The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal that we do not know about biology. ”

“ Evil is not a positive thing, but merely lack of the good, or lack of proportion in the good—inadequacy or excess, the excess being when a force or a passion good in itself exceeds the forces that usually keep it within bounds—when one force of those that hold the earth’s crust in equilibrium becomes excessive, and there is earthquake; when love of country seeks to expand it, at the expense of other countries, and there is war; when the appetite that creates and conserves property exceeds the respect for the rights of others, and there is theft or robbery or even murder ”

“ What has been the attitude of Great Britain since 1815, and how far does it foreshadow her future policy? It must not be forgotten that in the long struggle to safeguard human life as well as property upon the seas, the chief burden has been borne by her. In the old days of her proud claim to a salute in the narrow seas, she felt her responsibility to police those seas, and this sense of responsibility has widened with the extension of her commerce, so that she has put the whole world in her debt by rendering the seven seas a safe highway in time of peace. ”

“ Possibly you have found a grim consolation in realizing that most of the time since the beginning of human records, our present lot has been the lot of the greater portion of mankind. Perhaps you have found a consolation less grim in realizing that this state of affairs has been diminishing—very notably diminishing during the century preceding this war; and it is to be hoped that you have found a consolation almost triumphant in the realization that a large portion of the world at last realizes that such conditions can be put an end to, and are grimly determined to do it. ”

“ To-day we do not hope that any form of government can assure us an immediate millennium, and we look with suspicion upon any prophet who promises an immediate utopia. Condemned as we are to look with straining eyes towards a distant land of promise, some remote perfection of our race, we are all the more jealous of our chance to do our bit in achieving that goal. The inalienable right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, has yielded place to the inalienable right to grow. ”

“ Our conviction has, as it were, a string to it. I read once in a novel a phrase like this: “He was as amazed as a Christian, who, waking after death, should look round the universe and find that there was no God.” Imagination gives us tolerance by marring every faith with the suggestion that we may wake up and find ourselves mistaken. And this is just the faith that cannot remove mountains. The idea that the other fellow may be right, paralyzes activity. Only bigots and fanatics set fire to the world without scruple. ”

“ It is the tendency of long enduring fame to become sluggish and to sink into dogmatism.
It is one of the duties lying nearest to the present—wherever that present may be—to right the wrongs of the weak, and to humble the pride of usurpers. Distrust of one’s own taste and power, whatever may be the case among individuals, is impossible to a whole generation. To judge and to accept as final one’s own conclusion is the prerequisite for true results and positive progress. The saints have always been vigorous in their unshaken conviction of the truth that is in them ”

“ The most conspicuous and significant part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.
The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can be, looked on in a light free from control by dogma. When this is done the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day. ”

“ No wonder that this explanation of Darwin, offered at the same time with a clear elucidation of the evolution theory itself to a world just ready for both, came to be the one all-sufficient explanation, came to be a scientific dogma of the most dogmatic type.
Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt them or measured them. ”

“ When, in the fifties and sixties, Science abolished the anthropomorphic limitations of the Creator, it did not stop there, but abolished, for the time being, all the anthropomorphic qualities, including those that have not necessarily any limitations at all. While the universe, despite frequent inadequacy, disproportion and catastrophe, still abounds in obvious beauty and happiness, Science for a time shut its eyes to beneficence, and denied benevolence and even purpose. Fiske did more than anybody else has yet done to restore them—to show that they are corollaries of Evolution. ”

“ It is equally unreasonable and equally immoral to say that the war proves that Christianity is a failure, and to say that it proves Christianity has never been tried. Because if either of these hypotheses be correct, one set of belligerents is as deep in the mud as the other is in the mire, and there is no personal culpability for this war, and no national culpability either. We are all guilty of not being Christians, or all unfortunate in having grown up in ignorance of revelation, and beyond that there is no blame for the war. ”

“ The Law of Evolution contains nothing counter to the Moral Law: it only changes the old sanctions of it. In the control of the universe, it substitutes for an anthropomorphic, tinkering, and even “jealous” God, a Law that varies not, and, despite terrible apparent exceptions, on the whole makes for righteousness and for happiness. Even now, while most of the world is steeped more than ever before in anxiety and grief, and while scores of miles are covered with slaughter, the vast preponderance of the earth’s surface is covered with beauty, and the vast majority of human beings are smiling. ”

“ In consequence we no longer share the faith of Plato that knowledge, as distinct from opinion, can be secured. We cannot believe anything quite as firmly as the mediæval Catholic believed in an eternal church independent of argument, or indeed of humanity. If we could, we should be as intolerant as Billy Sunday, whom “the pale cast of thought” has never tinged, and, if we were metaphysicians, should go up and down the world preaching the dangers of neo-realism, as the evangelist fulminates against the blasphemy of biological evolution. ”

“ The one thing of which the vastness of this war gives us a fairly good assurance, is that no nation will again be trained from infancy to old age to regard war as a high, holy and beautiful process of attaining its manifest destiny to rule the rest of mankind. For generations no statesman will purpose a war, and no monarch will again have the power of hurling his people at neighboring nations. If Germany fails in its present effort, neither Germany nor any other nation will repeat the experiment of 1914. ”

“ Forms of government seem worthy to endure, in proportion as they minister to growth. We still cling to democracy, because it still seems to promise the largest chance for growth. It is a significant fact that along with the phrase “make the world safe for democracy,” there has sprung into existence the phrase “make democracy safe for the world,” as if to warn us that democracy like all forms of government, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and that end is humanism. ”

“ But Socrates did not cure the world of using catchwords. In war, in politics, in religion, even in science, they still pass for the coin of the realm. They are always dangerous: for they always delude one into thinking to be easy that which is in truth most difficult. There is hardly a virtue which we can have without crowding out another virtue. We of the twentieth century have taken tolerance for granted, as if it were as much to be expected as good manners. ”

“ The human mind, however ‘scientific’ its training, must often recoil from the conclusion that this is all; and there are moments when one passionately feels that this cannot be all. On warm June mornings, in green country lanes, with sweet pine odours wafted in the breeze which sighs through the branches, and cloud-shadows flitting over far-off blue mountains, while little birds sing their love-songs and golden-haired children weave garlands of wild roses ”

“ But the only ideas which we can admit to have an equal claim to partial truth, are those which are not mutually exclusive, so that the different facets of the universal truth shall not interfere with one another. Unless we mean simply that a variety of opinion makes the world less dull, in which case conviction does not come in at all, we are unable to admit that a belief diametrically opposed to our own is “just as good,” not as a foil, or a spur, to our own thinking, but in its own right. ”

“ It gives substance to the seemingly paradoxical belief that for the rank and file of men, nine-tenths of the future lies in the past,—that certain giant men long dead, still have power to lead the race to heights that the majority of us but dimly see. To put it negatively, humanism represents the belief that a majority of each generation go to their graves without having entered upon their inheritance, without even having suspected that they had an inheritance, having lived not so much in their sins, as in ignorance of the glory that humanity has already attained. ”

“ Even human parents, faced by an ordeal at all comparable to this in sudden poignancy, would scarcely act in a manner calmly rational. What mother, leaving her infant slumbering in the cradle, and suddenly returning to find a brutal visaged mannikin bent over it in a posture of menace, would expend the millionth of a second in the psychologist’s reflective delay? Like the jay, she would act in such a situation from instinct alone, nor would we consider her deficient in intelligence. ”