Radicals

“ Radicals themselves, and eager to set the world right, they paid reverence to a Radical who, sixty years ago, was inspired by the same passion, and in all that long stretch of time has never failed the cause. ”

“ Let the Radicals well consider whether in attempting to achieve their avowed object they are not, in fact, only assisting the secret views of a party whose scheme is infinitely more adverse to their own than the existing system, whose genius I believe they entirely misapprehend. ”

“ What I would like to say to young radicals—if there is any way to say it without seeming a prig—is that in choosing their own path through life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom and judgment and hard study. ”

“ There are, lastly, the Radicals of position, who are Radicals, as somebody said, because they are not lords. Those whom, in contradistinction to all these, we call Philosophical Radicals, are those who in politics observe the common manner of philosophers ”

“ If radicals spend their time holding conventions to attest their loyalty and stamp out the “enemies within,” they do not spend it in breaking intellectual paths, or giving us shining ideas to which we can attach our faith and conscience. The spiritual apathy from which the more naïve of us suffer, and which the others are so busy fighting, arises largely from sheer default of a clear vision that would melt it away. ”

“ Ignorant of the conception of human nature to which Spencer has accustomed us, the old Radicals treated it as a constant quantity which only needed liberty for its proper development. In their eagerness to discard theology, they discarded the truth of man's depravity which finds expression in the creed of the Churches. ”

“ These persons became Radicals because they saw immense practical evils existing in the government and social condition of this country, and because the same examination which showed them the evils showed also that the cause of those evils was the aristocratic principle in our government,—the subjection of the many to the control of a comparatively few, who had an interest, or fancied they had an interest, in perpetuating those evils. ”

“ Radicals and Liberals, then, are agreed as to principle though they differ in methods, for the Liberal is a very good lantern, but a lantern which requires lighting; and it is the Radical who strikes the match. ”

“ They are in society from their babyhood. Our poor, battered aristocracy—the Radicals have kicked away all its natural supports, and left it dans l’air; but it can still teach manners and the art to please. ”

“ There was really only one problem to consider. Given a society with a known history, composed of human beings of a known character, and distributed among known conditions, what form of government was best suited to their case? Origin, character, social and economic distribution, and past history, are all different in different peoples, and political institutions will inevitably differ also. The Radicals were far enough away from real life. But with all their incapacity for politics, they performed the great service of preaching the political importance of individuality. ”

“ The Radicals of the nineteenth century were engaged, and most righteously engaged, in dealing with one particular problem of human civilisation; they were shifting and apportioning more equally a load of custom that had really become unmeaning, often accidental, and nearly always unfair. ”

“ Radicalism presents to men an ideal state where everybody is bright and free and happy; and thus helps to detach the affections from beliefs and institutions which are no longer helpful. The emotions may not adhere to the radicals’ scheme, [Pg 10] but they are at least freed from their old bondage and can embrace the reforms of the less conservative. The influence that radicalism exerts in this way is a very powerful one. ”

“ They are, one and all, radicals in thought, and, with differing strength of intention, reformers of society, inasmuch as their speculations and aspirations are relevant to practical problems of living. ”

“ He was a radical of radicals in politics, and his outspoken, sympathies and hatred of conventionalities won for him the esteem of such men as Lord Rosebery, Marcus Clarke, and the Victorian liberal phalanx with, whom the latter was closely identified in Victoria, and which carried the powerful Berry regime into power on the memorable 11th May 1887. Poor Clarke in his 'Future of the Australian race," considers that all vegeterians are Conservatives, and 'Red Radicals' for the most part meat-eaters, while fish-eaters are invariably moderate Whigs. ”

“ In order to make out a case strong enough to induce us to turn aside from our more urgent tasks and spend weary years in agitating for the disestablishment of the Upper House, Radicals must show that the Lords are in the habit of rejecting measures of great intrinsic importance to the people at large and really demanded by them. ”

“ But the National Liberals triumphed at the general election; fear of reactionary tendencies finally induced the Radicals to accede to the wishes of the majority; and on the 5th of June 1849 the new constitution received the royal sanction.
At this stage Denmark’s foreign relations prejudicially affected her domestic politics. The Liberal Eiderdansk party was for dividing Schleswig into three distinct administrative Germany and the Danish duchies. ”

“ When subtler views of our history, some more false and some more true than his, have become popular, or at least well known, when in the near future Carlylean or Catholic or Marxian views of history have spread themselves among the reading public, this book will always remain as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure, healthy-minded, essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which characterised the Radicals of that particular Radical era. ”

“ From one, which appeared in 1837, reviewing Albany Fonblanque's "England under Seven Administrations," and speaking generally in high terms of the politics of "The Examiner," we may extract a few sentences which define very clearly the political ground taken by Mr. Mill, Mr. Fonblanque, and those who had then come to be called Philosophical Radicals. "There are divers schools of Radicals," said Mr. ”

“ The North British Review, which never attained the celebrity of either of these, and which has at length, in 1871, been discontinued, occupied strong Scottish and Presbyterian ground, and had its respectable supporters.
But besides the parties mentioned, there is a floating one, growing by slow but sure accretion, know as the Radical. It includes men of many stamps, mainly utilitarian,—radical in politics, innovators, radical in religion, destructive as to systems of science and arts, a learned and inquisitive class,—rational, transcendental, and intensely dogmatic. ”

“ With the instinct of the true radical, the poet has gone to the root of the social attitude. Our duty as members of society is to be radical, he tells us. And not only that, but an excess of radicalism is essential to the equilibrium of life. Society so habitually thinks on a plane lower than is reasonable that it behooves us to think and to hope on an even higher plane than seems to be reasonable. This is the overpoweringly urgent philosophy of radicalism. It is the beautiful courage of such words that makes them so vital an inspiration. ”

“ I thoroughly sympathize in his belief that all true philosophical reasoning has its end in unity––that there are abundant proofs of this unity in matter and spirit, in things visible and things invisible—that the truths of science and religion find reconciliation in this unity. I reject, as he does, a purely spiritualistic view of things no less than a purely materialistic view. But I cannot agree with him in believing in indefinite evolution. ”

“ The rude manners, the boisterous passions, the daring ambition, and the gross indulgences which formerly characterized the priest, the nobleman, and the sovereign, had now begun to yield to learning—the charms of refined conversation—political intrigue and private artifices. Thus do the scenes of life vary with the predominant passions of mankind, and with the progress of civilization. The dark clouds of prejudice break away before the sun of science, and gradually dissolving, leave the brightening hemisphere to the influence of his beams. ”

“ Nor can I agree with him in believing that life and mind are to be interpreted in terms of matter, motion, and force, even though this interpretation be taken as only symbolizing provisionally arbitrary aspects of an Unknown Reality; and least of all can I agree with him in believing that the principle of unity, underlying matter and spirit alike, is merely an Unknown Cause, the Unknowable, a Power without limits of either time or space, of which the nature ever remains inconceivable. ”

“ The active mind which witnesses perpetual variety must be perpetually critical. To be aware that the conditions of to-day [90] are different from the conditions of yesterday and of to-morrow is, according to the temperament of the beholder, to lament the past or to hasten the future. In this respect the Radical and the Conservative are alike, that it is the perception of change which determines them, though it determines them in different ways, the one being affected by hope, the other by fear. ”

“ A medium plasticity is the healthful condition. On the one hand, a force of established structures and habits and beliefs, such as offers considerable resistance to change; on the other hand, an originality, an independence, and an opposition to authority, energetic enough to overcome the resistance little by little. And, while the political non-conformity we call Radicalism has the function of thus gradually modifying one set of institutions, the religious nonconformity we call Dissent has the function of thus gradually modifying another set. ”

“ Though I may tell you, sir, that I have not unfrequently been called a radical, and a radical is a personage. What I am endeavoring to express is that I have feelings, and that I should prefer rather to be happy than miserable. ”

“ Radicalism, indeed, is its child. Political and religious radicalism brought the Pilgrims to New England, the Quakers to Pennsylvania; political and economic radicalism made the Revolution against the will of American conservatives; political and social radicalism made the Civil War inevitable and gave it moral earnestness. Radicalism, whether you like it or not, is much more American than what some people mean by "Americanism" to-day. ”

“ Out of ten thousand conflicting spurs of action comes, in the snapping of a finger, a sinister unity of purpose, which knows not the individual brain that conceived it, nor the logic of its action. Ten thousand clods, jumbled in confusion, are instantly turned into a single straight furrow. ”

“ Here was no anonymous reviewer, no mere brilliant satellite of the radical movement losing himself in his immediate reactions: one finds everywhere, interwoven in the fabric of his work, the silver thread of a personal philosophy, the singing line of an intense and beautiful desire. ”

“ Radicalism, not long since, had come to its consummation, and vanished from him in a tragic manner. "Not by Radicalism is the path to Human Nobleness for me!" And here now had English Priesthood risen like a sun, over the waste ruins and extinct volcanoes of his dead Radical world, with promise of new blessedness and healing under its Wings ”

“ The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.” When thus generalized, ‘radical empiricism’ is not only a theory of knowledge comprising pragmatism as a special chapter, but a metaphysic as well. It excludes “the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality” (Cf. below, p. 195) . It is the author’s most rigorous statement of his theory that reality is an “experience-continuum.” ”

“ But all of them were utopian in the sense that they believed in the triumph of the opinions they held. They never admitted the possibility of new people coming to the front, new ideas developing so quickly that they would have to be reckoned with by every government no matter to what shade it belonged. More especially did they fail to foresee the triumph of the Radical and revolutionary elements. They considered them as of no serious importance, perhaps because they had never troubled to study them carefully, and so appreciate their strength. ”

“ CHAPTER FOURTH. DANGERS OF THE REFORMATION AND ZWINGLI'S BATTLE AGAINST THEM. In our times we hear such frequent use of the word radicalism. What is its true meaning, according to its derivation? Action, that penetrates to the roots. We can imagine a good radicalism, which would tear out by the roots all the evil growth of life, and also a bad, which would uproot all that is good. The first strives to unite, the second to divide. Experience teaches that neither the one, nor the other, is continually prosperous. ”

“ Stephen ascribes their failure in part to their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.' There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far behind the fighting line, although he may be useful in forging explosives in some quiet laboratory. ”

“ Poetry and radicalism then go hand in hand. When radicalism is in the ascendant, poetry will throb with the feverish energy of the people. It will not only be more abundant, but it will show more of real life—the stuff of which literature is made. In conservative times questions concerning life do not agitate men’s minds to any great extent. People take things as they find them. ”