Archaisms

“ Every material agency, potential on the earth and under, has been developed, harnessed, and applied; every hampering stumbling-block of an old righteousness, an old religion, an old philosophy is removed ”

“ Is it, then, the fate of the human spirit, like human institutions, to fall away immediately on attaining a degree of perfection? or rather, is not this evidence of powers which shall hereafter expand, grow, and unfold their activities,—here on earth chilled, and cramped, and broken? ”

“ Could blind chance constitute order and decorum, and consequently a providence? That wisdom, order, and design should be the production of nonentity, or of chaos, confusion, and old night, is too absurd to deserve a serious confutation, for it supposeth that there may be effects without a cause, viz.: produced by nonentity, or that chaos and confusion could produce the effects of power, wisdom, and goodness. Such absurdities as these we must assent to, or subscribe to the doctrine of a self-existent and providential being. ”

“ You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?
Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body. ”

“ Aristocracies, hierarchies, established orders, hereditary castes, and strong religious beliefs that have become conservative, they are like the trees and the fences that check the violence of the blast that over a dead level rushes in headlong fury—like the ballast in a ship that resists the sudden lurch. ”

“ You see, therefore, that the imagination, feelings, virtues, and failings of human nature, are circumscribed within a very narrow compass; and that the same things, with few exceptions and differences, are to be found everywhere. ”

“ Out of the attempts that are made to realise both these conceptions and to keep them on friendly terms with one another, there is emerging a state of chaos—political, social, moral, spiritual,—a weltering chaos of new and old ideals, new and old theories of life, new and old standards of values, new and old centres of authority, new and old ambitions and dreams. ”

“ Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondnesses for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be effected; there is no escape. ”

“ If, in opposition to these arguments, and in defiance, at once, of right reason and general authority, the elliptical arch should at last be chosen, what will the world believe, than that some other motive than reason influenced the determination? ”

“ The infallible conscience, the universal and unwritten law, the principles of eternal justice, are precisely those eighteenth-century phantoms against which the romantic and historical school rose in defiance. ”

“ For we do not endeavour to assume or acquire any majestic state for these our discoveries, by the triumphs of confutation, the citing of antiquity, the usurpation of authority, or even the veil of obscurity, which would easily suggest themselves to one endeavouring to throw light upon his own name, rather than the minds of others. ”

“ Of austere and commanding virtue, irreproachable in his self-denying life, trained in all the learning of the schools, and gifted with rare persuasive eloquence, he became the terror of the hierarchy, and found the laity ready enough to listen and to act upon doctrines which satisfied their worldly aspirations as well as their spiritual longings. ”

“ Confronted by the existing order and the ordinary prose of life they appear before us as individuals with personal aims of love, honour, ambition, and ideals of world reform, ideals in the path of which that order presents obstacles on every side. ”

“ Art and Religion both signify effort to comply with an ideal standard—indeed, the height of the standard is the test of each—and what makes for innocence or for faultiness in the one, makes for innocence or faultiness in the other. ”

“ Little things that pass as mere ordinary common-places,—things in significant, and wholly beneath notice in the every day world, become fraught with such in finite meaning, and may hold such sublime, such undreamed of possibilities—here in Arcadia. ”

“ If the problems be vast, indeterminate, confused, and derived rather from the hopes, fears, love, hatred, astonishment, etc., of men, than from any genuine desire of knowledge,—so also does the received belief supply invisible agents in unlimited number, and with every variety of power and inclination. ”

“ Yet the difference between the earlier and the later works is more a difference of tone than of substance. In the one he attacks those who make reason the standard of faith, in the other he attacks those who rely exclusively upon authority. ”

“ Some centuries ago, the system of ideas known to history as Alchemy held universal sway over the minds of men; now there are none, among the cultivated at least, who dare to defend its assertions. And yet we may inquire what there was in these ideas that so commended them to men's minds, that at a time their authority was almost beyond dispute. ”

“ When the aristocratic morality goes astray and commits sacrilege on reality, this is limited to that particular sphere with which it is not sufficiently acquainted—a sphere, in fact, from the real knowledge of which it disdainfully defends itself. ”

“ Hast thou distinguished that which proceeds from his heart, from that which is merely p. 278the affect of an imagination corrupted by artifice? Hast thou compared the wants and the desires resulting from his nature, with those which he owes to civilisation? Hast thou considered man in his proper shape, where each of his movements bears the stamp of his inward disposition? Thou hast taken the mask of society for his natural figure; and thou hast only known that man whom his titles, his rank, his riches, his power, and his acquirements have corrupted. ”

“ To the human agencies, arising from the mind's power of abstraction, we apply the term "moral;" to such as are the direct and immediate effect of matter, independent of abstraction, the terms "natural or physical." ”

“ Authority, tradition, and custom are wholly or partially destroyed. And since authority, tradition, and custom are the cement of the social structure, there results a general dissolution of that structure into its component individuals. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But whenever conduct becomes enigmatical, and principles are avowed contradictory to human reason, passion and interests, an ordinary knowledge of the craft of ambition is apt to suggest a suspicion, that these singular abnegations have not sprung from a sanctity that has elevated the avowers above human nature, but from the injustice of their designs and the profundity of their dissimulation. ”

“ The dead abstract notions of the intellect, the dialectical disputes of the reason, the purely subjective and one-sided apprehension of objects by a deluded fancy, and the absolute will, are the four sources of human error. ”

“ In the æsthetic and ethical realms they conflict with its order—the early Christian with his kingdom of heaven, and the contemporary anarchist with his abstract dream of justice, will tell you that the existing order must perish, root and branch, ere the true order can come. ”

“ We must inquire into the principles on which the objection to temples and images is founded, in order that we may approve of those who object on sound principles, and condemn those whose principles are false. ”

“ Nor can the philosophic moralist encompass our venerable walls without having his mind, comparing the splendid and gigantic works of antiquity with their present condition, strongly impressed with the mutations produced by the lapse of ages, and the perishing nature of all mundane greatness. ”

“ If in the holy men thus actuated all imperfection of knowledge, all participation in the mistakes and limits of their several ages had been excluded, how could these writings be or become the history and example, the echo and more lustrous image of the work and warfare of the sanctifying principle in us? ”

“ Or finally, shall the doctrine retreat behind an ancient maxim, and state itself thus: “Evolution shows us what are the ultimate tendencies of acts; but no act ought to be committed which belongs to a class of acts whose general tendency is bad”? ”

“ These themes are all-comprehensive: every truth and every error which any intellect can harbour, must find a place under one or other of these heads; and these, accordingly, are the departments into which philosophy is divided, inasmuch as these are the provinces where error has to be uprooted, and truth planted. ”

“ For instance, I read among other things this golden rule on such an ordinary printed paper stuck against a room door, "Make no comparisons;" and if you consider how many quarrels, and how much mischief arise in the world from odious comparisons of the merits of one with the merits of another, the most delightful lessons of morality are contained in the few words of the above-mentioned rule. ”

“ Behind the loftiest estimates of value by which the history of thought has hitherto been governed, misunderstandings of the bodily constitution, either of individuals, classes, or entire races are concealed. ”

“ When the Comparative Method is applied in a wider and more catholic spirit than hitherto it will then—but not till then—be seen whether the fair humanities are exploded superstitions or are sufficiently alive to blossom in the dust. ”

“ The framework must be there, or the character will not stand up; the gentler graces must be built around the framework, or the person is harsh and unattractive.
Every time we judge a doctrine or another person, we judge ourselves. ”

“ They thought it possible to write, with so much scruple, and simplicity, and insight, as to carry along with them every man of good will, and, whatever his feelings, to compel his assent. Ideas which, in religion and in politics, are truths, in history are forces. ”

“ We must have an aristocracy—not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose—or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910. ”

“ The new ideas, fermenting among the people, break up old prejudices and established ideas, and thus thought, at first constructive, becomes, among the masses, destructive in character. Hence the popular thought, in a period of enlightenment, issues in denial, scepticism, and disbelief. ”

“ For we form a history and tables of invention for anger, fear, shame, and the like, and also for examples in civil life, and the mental operations of memory, composition, division, judgment, and the rest, as well as for heat and cold, light, vegetation, and the like. But since our method of interpretation, after preparing and arranging a history, does not content itself with examining the operations and disquisitions of the mind, like common logic ”

“ In other words, it is a doctrine for a purpose, a kind of tool in a class-war—the end being to bring all men into one class. Second, the doctrine is the reflection of a certain matter-of-fact resemblance or process causing resemblance—which is accomplishing itself in the modern world. ”

“ In all directions our habitual causes of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. ”

“ The ever more and more common form of the ideal: first men, then institutions, finally tendencies, purposes, or the want of them. The highest form: the conquest of the ideal by a backward movement from tendencies to institutions, and from institutions to men. ”

“ Yet the revelations yielded by these ancient remains show us that societies could hold together notwithstanding: what we should think a chaos of conduct and of opinion. Nay, more, they show us that it was possible for men to profess one thing and do another, without betraying a consciousness of inconsistency. ”