Acquiescence

“ And, in this concatenation of circumstances, action for breach of promise is out of the question.—Besides, often enough, the girl, through pride or through sheer chagrin at the indifference of the man, pretends acquiescence.—What happens to the man? ”

“ Some of these are frequently followed by painful, others by pleasurable feelings, and the penalty of idle acquiescence in the flux of phenomena is rapid death. So a dire necessity is laid upon the subject to distinguish himself from the world, and to set about thinking how phenomena may be controlled. ”

“ That there should be many who are not satisfied with the evidence of the Christian religion is not to be wondered at, since it is not of that nature to produce universal acquiescence. Where then can be the propriety of inveighing so bitterly against some for rejecting what, according to the nature of things, all cannot be expected to receive? Assuredly, the sin of doubting must be proportional to the evidence; then why should we attach the same punishment for disbelieving things that are not self-evident as we do for things that are? ”

“ A still deeper difficulty results from such an effort to evade the double sense in which the facts of succession are known in your experience. If you can have present to you only one event at a time in a series of successive events, how long, or rather how short, must an event be to contain within itself no succession at all, or no difference between former and latter contents? In vain do you suppose that, at any time, you have directly present to your consciousness only one of the successive words that you hear me speak. ”

“ Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness. ”

“ Clearly only the contact, or immediate proximity of the two occurrences. If any sequence could in fact be more wonderful than another, it should rather seem to be for the consequent to impart grandeur to the precedent—the effect to the cause,—than for the cause to impart grandeur to the effect. ”

“ We can trace, for example, the effect of a casual word, not only upon the person to whom it was addressed, but through him on many others as it is passed on in widening circles, until it seems to have affected the whole country; and one glimpse of such a vision is more efficient than any number of moral precepts in impressing upon us the necessity of extreme circumspection in thought, word, and deed. ”

“ This, then, is the startling and mysterious phenomenon of the human understanding—that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to the coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the establishing any nexus between the different parts and successions of our whole train of notices, we include an accessary notion of necessity, which yet has no justification or warrant, no assignable derivation from any known or possible case of human experience. ”

“ Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the world—never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot—appears; when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of, has indeed intervened. ”

“ When the nerves once break, how breaks the character with them! How many ascetics, withered and soured, do we meet in the world, who but for one shock to the heart and form might have erred on the side of meekness! ”

“ Surely it knows by this time that a good life is of more importance than creeds or beliefs. Surely in this year of our Lord, 1867, the days of the Inquisition are past both for editors and writers, and the watchword of to-day—and, thank God, for to-morrow, and the day after—is progress, not paralysis. ”

“ Unless you have loved the singing of the doxology, as I did, and have, like me, in your sixth or seventh year, been without the knowledge of the latter half of that third line, how would it be possible to make you understand what its lack meant to me! How make you know the vanishings and fallings from me; the shame and longing, troubled pride, doubt, and uncertainty! ”

“ For their ' incoherence ' is not, as a rule, intrinsic, but is an ex post facto judgment passed on them in our waking life. And as for the intelligible sequence of successive dreams, we should require an intelligible sequence in successive lives to make the parallel complete. ”

“ Let the danger of my situation touch thee, O my God! The character of my heart discourages and alarms me; I know that inconstancy in thy ways is a presage of perdition, and that the versatile and changeable soul is cursed in thy holy books. ”

“ This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. ”

“ Occasionalism, the doctrine that the action of the spiritual organisation on the material, and of the material on the spiritual, or of the inner on the outer, and the outer on the inner, is due to the divine interposition taking occasion of the effort of mind, or of the inner, on the one hand, and the effort of matter, or the outer, on the other, to work the effect or result ”

“ The very expansion of the faculties of the soul, and the probable disclosure in it of many new faculties which have no object of exercise in this land of exile, are in themselves pleasures which we can hardly picture to ourselves. ”

“ A sceptic into whose hands the volume fell a few weeks before his decease, requests that, after he is gone, I may be informed that to that volume, and especially to its chapter on the ‘Change at Death,’ he owed the revolution of a life’s opinions, and the first consolatory conviction which had ever reached him that there was a fairer and a better world toward which he was fast hastening. ”

“ The growth of the soul must be understood as being brought about not suddenly, but slowly and gradually, seeing that the process of amendment and correction will take place imperceptibly in the individual instances, during the lapse of countless and unmeasured ages, some outstripping others, and tending by a swifter course towards perfection, while others, again, follow close at hand, and some, again, a long way behind. ”

“ To the purely critical essays in this volume I have added a certain number of others dealing with what, in popular parlance, are called 'general topics,' but what in reality are always—in the most extreme sense of that word—personal to the mind reacting from them. I have called the book 'Suspended Judgments' because while one lives, one grows, and while one grows, one waits and expects. ”

“ In the development of time into causation, persistence becomes state and change becomes event. In the development of judgment into conception, consciousness becomes recollection and choice becomes inference. ”

“ But in so treating it, I bore in mind that excision is the best safeguard against decay, that time throws away as rag and bobtail the political specifications thought to be precious, and that we must at once, and in the nobler sense, romanticize such dry facts as we mean shall live. ”

“ Whether the cause be referred to mental, physical, or spiritual conditions, everyone knows the effect; every one has felt that the looks, the actions or gestures of the beloved awaken some vestige of tenderness in those most deeply sinned against and grievously wronged. ”

“ What happens so rapidly or so slowly that we fail to accommodate to the events our ability to take note of the succession as a present and given fact, all such too rapid or too slow series of occurrences, we fail directly to note as matters of clear consciousness. ”

“ That time of judgment which is to dispel all disguises, and to drag sin from its coverts into the full light of heaven, will assuredly find no leisure for the discursive eye; one perception, one emotion, will doubtless rule exclusive in the soul. ”

“ Hence, — and here, indeed, is the conclusion of the whole matter, — the very effort hypothetically to assert that the whole world of experience is a world of fragmentary and finite experience is an effort involving a contradiction. ”

“ The perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness, which we labour under in abstruse inquiries, philosophical, moral, and religious, ought, perhaps, to be referred to this head. Also the secondary perplexity which arises from our being subject to this perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness. ”

“ The consequences are already marked within the structure of the soul. So to speak, they are physiological. The thing effected by our in difference or by our indulgence is not the book of final judgment, but the present fabric of the soul. ”

“ It is not the mystery of iniquity, brought all out in its character, but it is the historic course of events—a picture of that scene, by itself, in which the mystery of iniquity, and all its important principles, and God’s acting on them are developed, in order to the filling up of that which is finished at the sounding of the seventh trumpet. ”

“ A realization of the shifting scenes of human happiness, and of the frailty of mortal anticipations, — such as first led me to the feet of Christian Science, — seems to be requisite at every stage of advancement. ”

“ When removed from this world of care, their highest hope is to become a part of the great Quiescent. It will naturally appear to them the best preparation for the repose of a future life to cultivate repose in this. ”

“ The sad side of impecuniosity is, unfortunately, so vast a subject that it would require an entire volume, instead of part of a chapter, to properly record the miseries of mind and body endured by those in past ages, who, not unknown to fame, have been permitted to pine and die in despair. ”

“ When we read that 'the succession of events is an endless chain of effects which are in their turn causes of new effects,' what is meant is sequence, and for 'cause' and 'effect' the terms 'antecedent' and 'consequent' should have been employed. ”

“ Here and there, moreover, a soul bowed under the weight of recent affliction, or shaken with the terrors of a newly-awakened conscience, was both awed and glad to be able to give itself audible expression in words so fit and forcible as those of the Confession and the Litany, and thankful if it might pick up so much as a crumb of pardon and peace from the Master's bountiful table. ”

“ The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active life. ”

“ I interrupted, eager to be done with this inquisition, and for the first time I saw an actual break of something human in that stern face of hers, for she started as if curious to learn what other motives might bring men from that thousands-of-miles-distant civilization to such an unknown land as this. ”

“ And under this and every other instance of human instability and calamity, one common principle remains as a hope which cannot be shaken. We can look from earth to heaven, and say, ‘Thou, O Lord, remaineth for ever, thy throne from generation to generation.’”—Dr. ”

“ Now it is evident, first of all, that habits of mind may grow, as being a something permanent and continuous; and by assent growing, it is often only meant that the habit grows and has greater hold upon the mind. ”

“ At the present day this state seldom exists without temptation, misfortune, or sorrow, by which the things of the body and the world, that is, such as are proper to man, are brought into quiescence, and as it were die. ”

“ And how many griefs are calmed, anxieties forgotten, thanks to this wholly physical act of attention, to this repetition of an even movement, in which one finds—of necessity and very quickly—the equilibrium of one’s whole being. ”

“ It would indeed be strange and lamentable if the divorce between feeling and conviction—to adopt a popular classification—was not simply incidental to change, but was also an inexpugnable part of fundamental aspects of human life. ”

“ You can surely realize that hurry, impatience, anxiety, intense expectancy, fear and suspicion must of necessity disturb the conditions and prove inimical to the efforts of the spirit operators to present clear and convincing demonstrations of their power and identity. ”

“ It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. ”

“ The question runs up into wider ones--What is the general effect of asceticism on human nature? and, Must there not be a certain proportion between the aspirations of man and his powers?--questions which have been often discussed both by ancient and modern philosophers. ”

“ Let the wind blow how it may, there is but one thing to attend to, one thing to ask about, namely, whether he steer according to the compass, which, in this case, is the conscience or conscientious conviction. ”

“ The immediate parties may find some excuse or palliation in the thoughtlessness of youth, the strength of affection, the pangs of disappointment and blighted hopes, in versatility of feeling to which all are subject, and in constitutional temperament. ”

“ Then he wondered at the condition that bred this surmise. How was it possible to reflect so indolently upon the condition of another when his own was perilous. Still, such speculations obtained with men, it is said, in great crises, and at the grave's edge. ”