Manes

“ Another, and different race of men, splendid alike in strength and gentleness, will walk the earth and climb its sky, bearing down the soul’s constrictions and frontiers, even unto the ramparts around the throne of life. ”

“ They are thinking of, planning for and executing plans which subordinate the race—the human entity—to a subdivision, the mark and sign of which is the lowest and most universal possession of male nature—the mere procreative instinct and possibility. And this has grown to be the habit of thought until in science, in philosophy, in religion, in law, in politics—one and all—we must translate all language into other terms than those used. For the word "universal" we must read "male;" for the "people," the "nation," we must read "men." ”

“ I had descended, then, not only into an inhabited world—not only into a world of men, who, however they might differ in outward form, must resemble in their wants, ideas, and habits, in short, in mind if not in body, the lords of my own planet—but into a civilised world and among a race living under a settled order, cultivating the soil, and taming the brutes to their service. ”

“ And, indeed, without something of this instinct—this sense of an intrinsic traditional humanity persisting through particular progressive variations, this belief in a co-equality of at least some minds through all the succession of human ages in what we call the historic period—what were the past of mankind to us much more than a history of dogs or ruminants? ”

“ Here hast thou that noble human race, that delightful creation, which has been granted sense and immortality. How it bears on it the image of the infinite God, and the likeness to Him, that wilt thou recognise by the variety of His creations. As in a looking-glass wilt thou see the worth of this thy human race. ”

“ Aiding or thwarting it, coloring and changing it, were a thousand influences,—side-currents from other religions and philosophies, social changes, Roman law and tradition, the new life of the barbarians; old ingrained habits of blood and brain; the constant push of primal instincts—hunger and sex; tides of war and trade and industry; slavery and serfdom; strong human personalities, swaying a little the tide that bore them; all the myriad forces that are always at work in history. ”

“ Therefore, when we speak of ourselves as divided into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, we must be understood always to imply that within each of these classes there are a certain number of aliens, if we may so call them,—persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection ”

“ There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race. ”

“ How far these young men were familiar with the personages, the thoughts, and the forms of the ancient world, whether they had any sense of our dependence on the ancients, and of our being their intellectual descendants—for that is the sum and substance of humanism—I of course have had no opportunity for determining. ”

“ And no matter how humble and obscure, how poor or how rich in the material things of the earth, the spiritually-bound and spiritually-directed of men, though they may not be counted among the great of history, are the true heroes of the race, the agents of the World-Spirit. ”

“ But it is here proposed to annul this beneficent law of nature; to repel this proffered bounty of Heaven. It is proposed to create a race of men, to whom all the lights of experience shall be extinguished; whose hundredth generation shall be as ignorant and as barbarous as its first. ”

“ It was at first a wondrous Being, called the 'Initiator," and after him a group of semi-divine and semi-human beings." Without at all attempting to explain the real nature of this mysterious Being or Race, we may assume that one of the things hinted at is the consciousness of united being possessed by these ancient Adepts. Walking abroad over the earth as instructors of a less progressed humanity, their wisdom and power had a common root. They taught truth from a heart-perception of life, ever fresh and eternal, everywhere pervading nature and welling up in themselves. ”

“ Is there one universal type of human character embracing and reconciling all the conflicting differences of human types in the living world and in its historic or prehistoric past? Can really scientific reasons be advanced in support of the sentimental belief in that colossal personage called "man," whose abstract unity is allowed to put on new phases of external form, but whose "essence" is declared to remain unaltered? ”

“ These were the men—idealists, dreamers, soldiers and avengers, varying from the silent and thoughtful to the quick and impulsive; from the cold and bitter to the ignorant and faithful. They believed in God, in spirits, in fate, in liberty. To them the world was a wild, young unregulated thing, and they were born to set it right. ”

“ From the two billions of men, only a few survived—the mad. They were now the Organisms, lords of the era, their discords so exactly equivalent to the vagaries of the land as to constitute a peculiar wild wisdom. ”

“ On the farm and in the shop, behind the counter and at the bar, in congress and in senate, on the platform and in the pulpit, we find some, who, by inheritance, environment, personal effort and the grace of God, have become examples of ideal manhood. But look at men in the mass. How few examples of perfect manhood do you find in a crowd of ten thousand men? ”

“ Here another problem arose in the divine mind—how to raise human personality to such a union with the Theanthropos as, without infringing upon its nature, to raise its being and its acts to the value, excellence, and dignity of theanthropic being and acts, and thus to exhibit in it the most perfect image of the infinite. ”

“ I believe that everything which we Europeans of to-day are in the habit of admiring as the values of all these respected things called "humanity," "mankind," "sympathy," "pity," may be of some value as the debilitation and moderating of certain powerful and dangerous primitive impulses. ”

“ Though, perhaps, not strictly human, this earlier race was capable of every kind of human intercourse, dwelt with man, instructed him in the arts, punished and tormented him, and beheld his daughters that they were fair. ”

“ Then came the age when the mind towered above the body, when a nation’s power no longer consisted in the millions of its men, but in the treasuries of its knowledge; when the intellect took up the vastest concentrations of animal strength, which seemed omnipotent before, lifted them off their fulcrum, and they became like a feather, in the breath of its power. ”

“ The transference of human faith and worship from vague nature-powers, dimly recognized as personal agencies, to veritable personalities, endowed with consciousness and will, and distinguished by diversity of attribute, moral and intellectual, constitutes, as we have seen, the second great stage in the history of human progress. ”

“ The man whose gift of insight into the inner life of the modern individual human being was so slight, and who in an age of peculiarly independent individual development, was hampered and biassed by the prejudices of patriotism, loyalty, and orthodox piety—this man, thanks to his vigorous Naturalism, had, when he observed these same individuals as a clan, as a nation, or as a race, a perfect understanding of their character as such. ”

“ The ancient and customary methods of the society developed a common spirit, under the influence of which each citizen unfolded his own personal peculiarities. When he went forth elsewhere he felt himself, and was felt to be, a stranger. ”

“ These figures, because of their local character and for other reasons, entered into peculiarly close relations with human societies, of which they thus tended to become constituent parts, and the same feeling that gave the gods human shapes converted the heroes into mere men, who are generally reconstructers of society. ”

“ The transformation of psychology.—Condillac.—The theory of sensation and of signs.
We now reach the core of moral science; the human being in general. The natural history of the mind must be dealt with, and this must be done as we have done the others, by discarding all prejudice and adhering to facts, taking analogy for our guide, beginning with origins and following, step by step, the development by which the infant, the savage, the uncultivated primitive man, is converted into the rational and cultivated man. ”

“ This susceptibility of human nature, which the Fathers touch upon, when they speak of disputation freezing except in a concourse, is not without an exact counterpart, when, in another connection, they are speaking of the humanists, or Professors of the literary classes. ”

“ The truth is that the facts of the world as they stare us in the face show that, in our common attitude, [Pg 201] we not only overlook the modifications in human nature, which have occurred historically since yesterday—occurred even in our generation—but we also ignore the modification of human nature which mere differences of social habit and custom and outlook effect. Take the case of the duel. ”

“ For Los said: When the Individual appropriates Universality
He divides into Male & Female: & when the Male & Female,
Appropriate Individuality, they become an Eternal Death.
55 Hermaphroditic worshippers of a God of cruelty & law!
Your Slaves & Captives; you compell to worship a God of Mercy.
These are the Demonstrations of Los, & the blows of my mighty Hammer
So Los spoke. ”

“ Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with, civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. ”

“ He goes up and down the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. The warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason’s procession. ”

“ They had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics and schoolmen. ”

“ Those men were true philosophers who invented coursing and the other varieties of the chase, tempering the labour they involve with pleasure, exultation and rivalry, and they had an accurate knowledge of human nature. ”

“ Yet, notwithstanding many melancholy facts that seem to be repugnant to such a conclusion, there exist satisfactory grounds for inferring that civilization has a direct tendency to [pg lvii] promote the moral improvement of the Human Race, and that our species is probably destined even in this state of existence, to a course not only of social, but also of a moral progression! ”

“ Out of a few germs of thought, conceived in the early ages, have been evolved all the principal institutions of mankind. Beginning their growth in the period of savagery, fermenting through the period of barbarism, they have continued their advancement through the period of civilization. ”

“ These people were two hundred years further on in the march of civilisation than the Victorian generation. It was not likely they would be less—humane. Yet they had cleared their minds of formulae! Was humanity a formula as well as chastity? ”

“ These superficial specimens of humanity, who know which side their bread is buttered, owe their rise, their stars and ribbons, their K.C.B.'s and pensions, not to the sterling merits of courage and ability, of talents and manliness, but to the oily tongue that knows so well how to work the oracle, and to a readiness of changing tactics as the chameleon changes colour.' In short, these gentlemen have mastered the 'gospel of getting on;' the species, 'neglected Englishmen,' has not. ”

“ However this may be, it is evident that the multiplicity, the variety of alphabets, and even their filiation furnish the anthropologist with characters of great importance, and specially fitted to establish ancient relations between human groups in some cases widely separated.
X. Social condition. Man is essentially a social being. [446] “Were any one to ascend to heaven alone, and listen alone to the harmony of the spheres, he would not enjoy these marvels,” a Greek philosopher has said. Thus we find the human species everywhere collected into more or less numerous societies. ”

“ There were men to whom not only kopjes and stones were calling out imperatively, “What are we, and how came we here? Understand us, and know us;” but to whom even the old, old relations between man and man, and the customs of the ages called, and could not be made still and forgotten. ”

“ Voluntary agents, visible and invisible, impel and govern everything. Moreover this point of view is universal throughout the community,—adopted with equal fervor, and carried out with equal consistency, by the loftiest minds and by the lowest. ”

“ I would therefore at present ask more deliberately than I could at our last meeting,—first, in what direction it is desirable that the development of humanity should take place? Should it, for instance, as in Greece, be of physical beauty,—emulation, (Hesiod's second Eris) ,—pugnacity, and patriotism? or, as in modern England, of physical ugliness,—envy, (Hesiod's first Eris) ,—cowardice, and selfishness? ”

“ The nobler races of men—the historical races, as they have been called—constantly show this aptitude for contending with these downward tendencies of our nature, and for advancing, through the conquest of them, to new and higher life. ”