Various

“ In dreams we experience unlimited histories, and pass over unlimited spaces, in an instant; see, hear, feel, touch, taste, smell, enjoy unlimited things; walk, swim, fly, change things, with unlimited ease; do things with unlimited power; make what we will—music, poetry, objects of art, situations, dramas, with unlimited faculty, and enjoy unlimited society. Unless we have eaten too much, or otherwise got ourselves out of order in the waking life, in the dream life we seldom if ever know what it is to be too late for anything, or too far from anything ”

“ Age may bring what youth withholds, a sense of humor, a mellow sympathy. But only youth can begin that habitual discipline of mind and will which is the root, if not of all success, at least of that which blooms in the comfort of other people. Carry the logic of the vocation-mongers to its extreme. Grant that every girl in college ought someday to marry, and that we must train her, while we have her, for this profession. Then let the college insist on honest work, clear thinking and bright imagination in those great fields in which successive generations reap their intellectual harvest. ”

“ The doubt of immortality is not over the innate reasonableness of it: the universe is immeasurably more reasonable with it than without it; but over its practicability after the body is gone. We, in our immeasurable wisdom, don’t see how it can work—we don’t see how a universe that we don’t begin to know, which already has given us genius and beauty and love, and which seems to like to give us all it can—birds, flowers, sunsets, stars, Vermont, the Himalayas, and the Grand Canyon; which, most of all, has given us the insatiable soul, can manage to give us immortality. ”

“ All that the theory of our government requires, is that our rulers shall be such men as are designated by the majority of the voters. That they should be wise and good men may accord with the theory of aristocracy; it is no part of the theory of democracy, and is certainly a very small part of the practice.
When I say that half of the property of this country is disfranchised, I mean that the nature of this property is such that it is peculiarly subject to the power of rulers, and that the owners of it have hardly any legitimate way of defending it against the arbitrary exercise of this power. ”

“ Yet while the cosmic soul idea seems very illuminating, and even stimulating, as far as it goes, it soon lands us in the swamp of paradox surrounding all our knowledge. How reconcile it with our individuality—the individuality as dear as life itself—virtually identical with life itself? Well, we can’t reconcile them, at least just yet. But we can pull our feet up from the swamp, and make a step that may be towards a reconciliation. Each of our brains is a network of channels through which the cosmic soul flows; and there are no two brains alike—hence our individuality. ”

“ How many of the ten millions of depositors in the savings banks have considered that their rulers at Washington give away every year in military pensions a sum equal to all, and more than all, the income earned by the four billions of dollars in the banks? When after many years, it seemed that this burden might at last begin to be lightened, it was suddenly increased by the last Congress perhaps thirty millions a year. Why should so many people scrimp, year in and year out, when the equivalent of all the toil and all the self-denial is thus swept away? ”

“ To learn as we go—discere ambulando—need not turn the home into an experiment station.
But “every woman knows” that housekeeping, when it is a labor of love and not a paid profession, goes far deeper than ordering meals or keeping refrigerators clean, or making an invalid’s bed with hospital precision. We are more than cooks. We furnish power for the day’s work of men, and for the growth of children’s souls. We are more than parlor maids. We are artists, informing material objects with a living spirit. We are more even than trained nurses. ”

“ Yet, such is the nature of dogs and men, the watchdog was never more numerous nor more alert than today. He was never in better voice, and having nothing whatever to do, he does it to the highest artistic perfection. At least one justification remains. Civilization has not done away with the moon. In the stillness of night, its great white face peeps over the hills at intervals no dog has yet determined. Under this weird light, strange shadowy forms trip across the fields. The watchdogs of each farm have given warning, and the whole countryside is eager with vociferation. ”

“ But every added milestone along the road from youth to age shows us the truth of Cicero’s claim, made after he had borne public care and known private grief, for the faithful, homely companionship of intellectual studies: “For other things belong neither to all times and ages nor all places; but these pursuits feed our growing years, bring charm to ripened age, adorn prosperity, offer a refuge and solace to adversity, delight us at home, do not handicap us abroad, abide with us through the watches of the night, go with us on our travels, make holiday with us in the country.” ”

“ A dream is a work of genius, and in many respects, perhaps most, especially in vividness of imagination, the best example we have. It is the most spontaneous, constructed with the least effort from fewest materials, the least restrained, and often immeasurably surpassing all works of waking genius in the same department. A genius gets a trifling hint, and being inspired by the gods (anthropomorphic for: flowed in upon by the cosmic soul?) builds out of the hint a poem or a drama or a symphony. ”

“ To assert today that the rich are for the most part entirely harmless is to dare much, for the contrary opinion is greatly in favor. Such wholesale condemnation of the rich assumes a more general and a more specific form. They are said to be harmful to the body politic simply because they have more money than the average: their property has been wrongly taken from persons who have a better right to it, or is withheld from people who need it more. ”

“ A convention is to be held in a western city in this very year, to announce to the world that the delegates and their constituencies—all honest lovers of mankind—will refuse in future to recognize any private title to land or other natural resources. Holders of such property, by continuing to be such, will place themselves beyond the pale of human society, and will forfeit all claim to sympathy when the day dawns for the universal confiscation of land. ”

“ Because men have been permitted, through gross defect in the laws, to build up interests in dealing out poisons to the public, are they to be compensated, like the purveyors of wholesome products, when the public decrees that their destructive activities shall cease? Because a corrupt legislature once gave away valuable franchises, are we and our children, [pg 14] and our children’s children, forever to pay tribute, in the shape of interest on compensation funds, to the heirs of the shameless grantees? ”

“ The scornful retort of the Socialist is at hand: “Of course the middle classes are shrewd enough to practice the virtues that pay.” Into this familiar moral bog that there are as many kinds of morality as there are economic conditions of mankind, I do not consent to plunge. I need only say that the so-called middle class virtues would pay a workman or a lord quite as well as they do a bourgeois. Moreover, while workmen and lords are prone to scorn the calculating virtues of the middle classes, there is no indication that the bourgeoisie has selfishly tried to keep its virtues to itself. ”

“ When all the promptings of liberality or selfishness or ostentation are well regulated, we will be in the ideal world. Until then, in the actual world, it is the part of wisdom to regulate ideal ethics by practical ethics—and tip, but tip temperately.
And now to apply our principles to a wider field.
The ideal is that all men should have what they produce. The ideal is also that all men should have full shares of the good things of life. These two ideals inevitably combine into a third—that all men should produce full shares of the good things of life. ”

“ In many cases too, I know that such gigantic wealth is in fact the product of unfair craft and favoritism, is to that extent unassimilated and illegitimate. Yet admitting the worst of great fortunes, I think a prudent and fair minded man would hesitate before a general programme of expropriation. He would consider that in many cases the common weal needs such services as very wealthy people render, he would reflect on the practical benefits to the world, of the benevolent enterprises for education, research, invention, hygiene, medicine, which are founded and supported by great wealth. ”

“ When the majority of those who have really studied the phenomena of the sensitives, starting with absolute skepticism, have come to a new form of the old belief; and when, of the remaining minority, the weight of respectable opinion goes so far as suspense of judgment, how does the argument look? Isn’t it at least one of those cases of new phenomena where it is well to be on guard against old mental habits, not to say prejudices? ”

“ The corporation income tax law was really an act of popular dislike of corporations exercising great monopolies. Grouping all the little corporations with them was an absurdity and a cruelty.
Corporations have no feelings. They are not wounded by the hostility of legislatures. The managers of corporations of large capital have feelings, and some of them are wounded in their pride by this hostility. But they need not suffer in their pockets. They are abundantly able to protect their own property; they know how to make money on the short side of the market as well as the long side. ”

“ But the larger truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her value as a human being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the heaven’s brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously women fulfil the “function of their sex” the more they are in danger of losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage. ”

“ If from almost any given point in the United States you start out towards the Southwest, you will reach in time the Land of the Sleepless Watchdog. On each of the scattered farms, defending it against all intruders, you will find a band of eager and vociferous dogs—dogs who magnify their calling because they have no other, and who, by the same token lose all sense of proportion in life. ”

“ For it will be pretty generally agreed that efficiency of the individual scholar and unity of the scholarly class are, properly, only the means to obtain the real end of education, which is social efficiency. The only way, in fact, to make the discipline demanded by a severe curriculum and the sacrifice of particular tastes required for unity seem worth the cost, is to persuade men that the resulting form of education both meets a present and serious need of society and promises to serve those individuals who desire to obtain society’s fairer honors. ”

“ It seems to show itself not only in the visions of the sensitives, but in the dream life of all of us. If Mrs. Piper’s dream state (I name her only as a type) is really one of communication with souls who have passed into a new life, dream states generally may not extravagantly be supposed to be foretastes of that life. And so far as concerns their desirability, why should they not be? Our ordinary dreams are, like the dreams of the sensitives, superior to time, space, matter and force—to all the trammels of our waking environment and powers. ”

“ The risk of life for life at a child’s birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household cares the nervous system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers rather than a feeder of the imagination. The unhappiness of homes, the failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men. ”

“ For the moment, caught between the headiness of working folk, the din of doctrinaires, and the wiles of corporate activity, the lot of the middling rich is not the most happy imaginable. But they seem better able to weather these flurries than the windy, cloud-compelling divinities of the hour. From the survival of the middling rich, the future common weal will be none the worse, and it may even be better. ”

“ The Emperor lost, and the King of Prussia took the stakes: for in those days it was a divine right of Kings to deal in flesh and blood.
The play is finished, the board is cleared, Alsace and Lorraine were added to Germany, and the mistake is irretrievable. A fact accomplished cannot be blotted out. But hopeless as it all is, there are watchdogs who, on moonlight nights, call across the Vosges for revenge—for honor, for War, War, War. And the German watchdogs cry War, War, War. The word sounds the same in all languages. The watchdogs bark, but the battle will never begin. ”

“ Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a tour de force, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence. Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. ”

“ But for generations the landed interest would survive, if not by title of common law, at least by title of common corruption. And in the course of the conflict, we can not doubt that political disorder would flourish as never before, and that under its shelter private vice and crime would develop almost unchecked.
We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that the will of a mere majority is absolute in the state. The law is a reality only when the outlawed interests represent an insignificant minority. ”

“ It is not the rich who suffer most: it is “the unemployed,” and the millions of dumb, helpless, struggling thrifty men and women whose hard earned savings constitute a large part of the capital of the corporations; and who are already alarmed at the shrinking value of these savings. It is, perhaps most of all, the mass of ignorant unthrifty poor, whose chief wealth is the wages paid them by the corporations which they are taught to look on as their oppressors. ”

“ The distinctions of social class, of wealth, of public honor, leave untouched the equality of men in the fundamentals of human dignity. They do not go to the vitals of self-respect; they do not interfere with a man’s sense of what is due to him, and what is due from him, in the primary relations of life. ”