New Age

“ The New Age is the most valuable because it is the most thorough. Not only is its analysis of present conditions the most acute and the most sound that we have to-day, but the solutions it propounds to the problems it analyses are the most fearless, the most thorough and the most idealistic. ”

“ But it seems to me that in walking the streets of London and Paris I shall revert to my student days, and appear to myself like a relic of a former generation. Those who have been born into the inheritance of the new civilization feel very differently about it from those who have lived their way into it. To the young and those approaching middle age all these innovations in life and thought are as natural, as much a matter of course, as the air they breathe; they form a part of the inner framework of their intelligence, about which their mental life is organized. ”

“ Such were some of the lights and some of the enterprises of that great age, when the profoundest questions pertaining to philosophy, religion, law, and government were discussed with the enthusiasm and freshness of a revolutionary age; when men felt the inspiration of a new life, and looked back on the Middle Ages with disgust and hatred, as a period which enslaved the human soul. But what peculiarly marked that period was the commencement of those marvellous discoveries in science which have enriched our times and added to the material blessings of the new civilization. ”

“ If there is any period one would desire to be born in,—is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? ”

“ The names of these others are the foremost names of our time, and we instinctively recognise the fact that all of them, those who went before and those who followed after, form but one company. They do. They form the company of the Age of Transition. They close the epoch. They pass the lamp of life to the New Race. They pause on the threshold of the New World. ”

“ In tracing analogies through the history of the past, the conditions, premonitory, present, and subsequent to great world-movements have often been referred to.
Nothing is more common or more patent than the oft-repeated saying, “This is the age of science.” 211 Any great movement that undertakes at the present day to deal with the deeper problems of individual and social life, must fit in and conform to the “spirit of the present age.” ”

“ Fashions and modes in literature and art, as in society, come and go; new institutions arise, demanding new methods and modifying cherished customs; and men’s thoughts enlarge and widen with improved conditions, as with the inevitable progress of the age. ”

“ But these declining years are preceding those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. ”

“ Truly the prophecy of a new life in such forms will probably seem strange to our age, which would scarcely have the courage to take this promise to itself, if it were to look solely at the tremendous difference between its own prevailing opinions on these matters and those which have been expressed as principles of the new era. ”

“ The Age of Material Progress, or the Industrial Age.—History has been well likened to a grand dissolving view. While one age is passing away another is coming into prominence.
During the last fifty years the distinctive features of society have wholly changed. ”

“ After a certain age is reached, how trivial and flitting seem the new generations! The people whom we found upon the stage when we came into the world,—the middle-aged and the elderly people who were bearing the brunt of the battle,—they seem [Pg 235] important and like a part of the natural system of things. When they pass away what a void they leave! ”

“ While in all these departments changes have been going on, which upon a superficial view appear to indicate a kind of spontaneous development, when they are analyzed they are seen to have been wholly caused, or more or less influenced, by the genius, the thought, the discoveries, the exertions, and the acts of particular individuals who have had the force to impress themselves upon the age, and thus to make new systems, new beliefs, new products, new rules of social or political life, new tastes, and new habits of thinking and acting. ”

“ Religion, industry, state, education, and literature have been consciously transformed by the heroic efforts of such great men of the world, and these conscious and artificial transformations of the several aspects of social life have been the constituents of a new environment and thus the seeds of Renaissance. ”

“ From such examples of the progress in civilization that has come in a single country and a single lifetime, it is clear that the world has not been standing still with us, but new arts, new thoughts, new institutions, new rules of life, have arisen or been developed out of the older state of things. ”

“ Routine shortens and variety lengthens time, and it is therefore in the power of men to do something to regulate its pace. A life with many landmarks, a life which is much subdivided when those subdivisions are not of the same kind, and when new and diverse interests, impressions, and labours follow each other in swift and distinct succession, seems the most long, and youth, with its keen susceptibility to impressions, appears to move much more slowly than apathetic old age. ”

“ We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development,—those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new. ”

“ Our age, as we shall learn, contains merely what was implicit in the very waywardness of that revolutionary period. Their youthful enthusiasms, at first vague, wandering, conflicting, took form at length through growth, and produced, in their maturity, our modern doctrine of evolution, our modern efforts to bring into close relation the natural and the spiritual, our whole modern many-sidedness of interest and experience. ”

“ And when people ask me what the people of the New World possess preferably to the Old, I reply, with the impression of that which I have seen and passed through in America fresh in my soul;—a warmer heart's pulse; a more energetic, a more vigorous youthful life. ”

“ There is, there must be, another conception, more lofty than this conception of progress; a conception of progress as the accumulated effort of generations. Is it not true that each generation creates forms of beauty, and discovers new truths and virtues? Can we not say that generations really do show progress, if they succeed in preserving the creations of preceding epochs, and in erecting on them as a basis more complex and elevated creations of their own? ”

“ Nature, which by one law of development evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, and represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined by the antagonism of the new. ”

“ From More we turn to a writer of a later generation, remarkable for the freedom and independence of his mental attitude towards contemporary ideas and institutions, and who avows in more than one place that the New World profoundly modified his habits of thought. ”

“ Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of that future. ”

“ The old culture went down in rivers of blood—not too figuratively meant—and a new arose, or, better, was created. Now, what is true of this most important revolution of our antecedent cultural life is true also, in corresponding measure, of every new “becoming” in the history of peoples. No state, no church, no social form, has ever arisen but that the path of the new life has passed over ruins and graves. ”

“ In various other ways, apart from the mutual influence of divergent group-customs, the progress of civilization tends to produce variations in ideals. The increase of knowledge, the development of science and philosophy, bring floods of new ideas to burst the old dams; deepening insight reveals the irrationality of old ideas to the leaders of thought. The progress of the arts gives new interests and valuations. ”

“ Those who know their besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened to them, or those who will read the instructive account recently given of them by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the idea which culture sets before us of perfection,—an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,—is an idea which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances. ”

“ Betwixt the people of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, we should not therefore suppose there could be a very marked difference. Yet change, and the seeds of immense change, were actively at work. The revival of Greek literature, the invention of printing, and the progress of new ideas in church government and religious doctrines, were preparing the most complete revolution of mind, of state maxims, and of manners, which the world had never seen. ”

“ In that part of the world, upon that new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in its history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization; here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment. ”

“ It was the beginning of a gradual transformation which with every century, with every generation, takes some new form, and is sometimes called progress, sometimes revolution, but which moves on with the same relentless persistence as the laws that govern the earth. ”

“ Humanity hath taken on new life. The autumn hath gone by, and the reviving spring is here. All things are now made new. Arts and industries have been reborn, there are new discoveries in science, and there are new inventions; even the details of human affairs, such as dress and personal effects—even weapons—all these have likewise been renewed. The laws and procedures of every government have been revised. Renewal is the order of the day.
And all this newness hath its source in the fresh outpourings of wondrous grace and favour from the Lord of the Kingdom, which have renewed the world. ”

“ But none of the changes of outlook in the past have approached in their extent and significance those which have been in progress during the last fifty years, the new history of man and his surroundings, stretching back through hitherto unthought-of ages, the substitution of an illimitable vista of ever changing worlds for the imagined perfection of the ordered heavens, and above all the intrusion of science into the most intimate regions of ourselves. ”

“ In the following great period a fresh life blossomed in rich and manifold expansion out of that revelation of love which, properly speaking, now first of all put forth its full vital energies, giving a new shape to all the institutions of human society, and impressing on art, as well as on moral and political science, a new character, totally different from that which they possessed among the most enlightened nations of antiquity. ”

“ The energies, activities, and impulses he constantly put forth, as well as the high principles that ever guided him in his earnest endeavor to improve the intellectual and moral condition of his kind, mark his era as a great artistic epoch in the onward and upward progress of the race. By stimulus, suggestion, and inspiration he has powerfully influenced his time, though manifestly not a little of the seed he abundantly and hopefully scattered has fallen upon barren ground. ”

“ People, you remember, played with the fantasy of beginning a brand-new century as if it were a new toy. Nobody who was living could remember the birth of the last century. It was a new emotion for everyone. ”

“ We shall need a new Renaissance, ushered in by a new “humanistic” movement, in which we shall add our present minute, introspective study of ourselves, our jails, our slums, our nerve centers, our shifts to live, almost as morbid as medieval religion, a rediscovery of the round world, and of man’s place in it, now that its face has changed. We study the world, but not yet with intent to school our hearts and tastes, broaden our natures, and know our fellow-men as comrades rather than as phenomena ”

“ The explanation of the change is, that the analytical and reasoning tendency which distinguishes both the imaginative and reflective works of the classical period, had in the new century slowly made way for interest in the actually existing, in what is perceivable by the senses. And the deeper-lying reason of this new preference was that men now placed nature, original, unconscious, rustic, uncultivated nature, above all the culture of civilisation. ”

“ The new generation, even that portion of it that represents the educated classes, has broken away from the study of a world which, though resembling the modern world in so many of its ideas and institutions, differed from the present era in the fundamental conception of life, and professed an entirely different idea of perfection. ”

“ One of the germs of the poetry of the new century lies in this little poem; for here, in place of the cultivated human being as developed and extolled by the eighteenth century, we have the human being as seen by the new era in the circle of his kin—birds and wild beasts, plants and stones. ”

“ And it is often chance that places in our hands those books which mark the beginning of a new era in the evolution of our ideas. The most casual circumstances, a few lines that happen somehow to come before our eyes, decide our future and plant us in the appointed groove. ”