Dialectics

“ When will mankind be aware of the uniformity, of the importance, of truth? When will they cease to confound, by sexual, by political, by theological, distinctions, those immutable principles, which form the true basis of virtue and happiness? The paltry expedients of combating error with error, and prejudice with prejudice, in one invariable and melancholy circle, have already been sufficiently tried, have already been demonstrated futile:—they have armed man against man, and filled the world with crimes, and with blood.—How has the benign and gentle nature of Reform been mistated! ”

“ It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men thought their eternal no less than their temporal interests were at stake, could have done. ”

“ It was rather a culmination than a contradiction of the current faiths and convictions, just as the dogma that all men are equal and that one ought to have as much political power in the state as another was the culmination of the political dogmatism and social philosophy of the nineteenth century. Hence our judgments of the good or evil consequences of folkways are to be kept separate from our study of the historical phenomena of them, and of their strength and the reasons for it. ”

“ Out of new sentiments and ideas, not seen as yet, new forms of society will come, free from the antagonism of races, classes, men—representing the American idea in its length, breadth, depth, and height, its beauty and its truth, and then the old civilization of our time shall seem barbarous and even savage. ”

“ I ask you to consider whether so long as the moral constitution of men's minds shall continue to be the same, after this generation and assemblage shall sink into the grave, and another race shall arise with the same moral and intellectual development we have—whether, if that institution is standing in the same irritating position in which it now is, it will not continue an element of division? ”

“ Nay, this Kingdom begins to be seen not only in religious ecstasy, in moral vision, but in the light of common sense, and the human understanding. Social science begins to verify the prophecy of poetry. ”

“ Gentlemen, whatever be your judgment of to-day or to-morrow upon the modalities of the social order which I have attempted summarily to portray from this tribune, you can not deny that you are here face to face with a doctrine which you may judge rash, which you may judge utopian, vain; but many another doctrine has been judged vain and has been denounced as utopian by the privileged classes on the very eve of their advent in history. ”

“ But I am sure that the dialectic power is something of the nature which I have described. It is the only force which can make plain the full truth to students who have gone through the preliminary studies that we have described. It is the only study which investigates rationally real forms and essences243 — what each thing is, truly in itself. ”

“ If we, who were once prone to believe our knowledge, our manners, and our customs to be all-sufficient, have been borrowing from others, so we in our turn have been imitated by the older nations of Europe, and the result is an approximation in sympathies and a blurring of distinctions. Political differences and race superficialities of expression seem a larger barrier than they really are, for in its broader faiths and vision the civilized world is becoming homogeneous. ”

“ The point at issue is not that there is talking or doing here or there by certain gentry who imagine that they are making history. The real issue is in the clash of two classes, two interests, two cultures, two conceptions of the world, two moral systems. ”

“ We read history with more or less of prejudice and intolerance, viewing with the bright light of the nineteenth century those blots upon its page, which lay unseen in the early dawn of Christianity. And yet there is no name (but One) in all the records of the past, which we should dare to bring to the test of abstract virtue. ”

“ Our contentions, our sanguinary wars, consecrated to history by the baptism of blood, have in every, or in nearly every, instance sprung from the force of prejudice, or the mistakes of politicians, whose minds were narrowed to the limits of a convention formed for perpetuating the reign of ignorance. ”

“ And thus experience taught me a manifest conclusion that, whereas dialectic furthers other studies, so if it remain by itself it lies bloodless and barren, nor does it quicken the soul to yield fruit of philosophy, except the same conceive from elsewhere. ”

“ How successful have civilized peoples been in achieving their objectives?
At the outset we must realize that in any complex society there are wide ranges of ideology, from the body of ideas held by small uninfluential sects to the purposes, ideas, policy declarations and actions of governing oligarchies. We do not wish to defend or attack the ideas, but to summarize them and understand them in a way that will give a group picture of the purposes, ideas, policies and day-to-day activities of the civilizations in question. ”

“ Through such social processes as these—through unconscious suggestion, through communication and discussion that mould public opinion, through changes in environment and the influence of new leaders of thought and action—the evolution of folk life has carried whole races, sometimes to oblivion, but generally out of savagery and barbarism into a material and cultural civilization. ”

“ Against this bitter shrewdness and bleak realism in the suffering classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisured classes stand for certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life; such as history, reverence, the love of the land. ”

“ It would be necessary to take one by one the laws and institutions of each people to show to what extent they are the expression of the needs of each race and are incapable, for that reason, of being violently transformed. ”

“ Our discussion is in excess of our deliberation, and our deliberation is in excess of our information. Our journals, platforms, pulpits, and parliaments are full of talking and writing about topics of sociology. The only result, however, of all this discussion is to show that there are half a dozen arbitrary codes of morals, a heterogeneous tangle of economic doctrines, a score of religious creeds and ecclesiastical traditions, and a confused jumble of humanitarian and sentimental notions which jostle each other in the brains of the men of this generation. ”

“ You glory in your refinement, and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful, as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. ”

“ WITH the advance of civilization one subject class after another has risen in revolt, more or less violent, more or less peaceful, and asserted its right to inquire, to think in its own way—that is to say, it has asserted its humanity. ”

“ The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind. ”

“ 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 old, rigid institutions of feudal Society and the last dead residue of dogmatism must first be dissected by the sharp knife of criticism and analysis, into its elements, before new social and spiritual creations can come into being. In the course of the development of new elements there came to the front a new antagonism which did not exist before, and the reconciliation of which is at present under discussion. ”

“ If we thoughtfully review the course of argument pursued, we shall rest in the following as our sum and ultimatum. The dialectic intellect, by exertion of its own powers exclusively, may enable us to affirm the reality of an absolute Being, generally. ”

“ That category of errors which goes under the name of national prejudices, for instance, is transparent in its origins to every man belonging to a nation other than the one in which a particular set of such prejudices is commonly accepted. And other categories of errors, social, professional, religious, and so on, are of the same kind, affecting only certain classes of men, because of the passions or interests or traditions which belong to them by reason of their peculiar practical associations. ”

“ The active presence of conflicting tendencies not only in politics but in religion and philosophy, during the reign of absolute rulers of the past, showed that they could not box culture within the confines of their dogmas and edicts. ”

“ The one unvarying factor of the human mind,” he went on, “is the firm, unbiased conviction that I am right, and all opposition necessarily, consciously and wilfully wrong. This belief is the base and foundation of all human institutions, of sectionalism, caste, creeds, parties, states, of patriotism itself. ”

“ But I fear—In short, I have been told that political strife was a necessary result of human nature."
"Human nature!" cried the old boy, impetuously; "what human nature? The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of slave-holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen? ”

“ Its spirit has been agitation!—and its language, fruits and measures have partaken throughout of a character that is thoroughly warlike.
[Pg 6] “In language no element ever flung out more defiance of authority, contempt of religion, or authority to man. As to agency, no element on earth has broken up more friendships and families, societies and parties, churches and denominations, or ruptured more organizations, political, social or domestic. ”

“ To the enthusiastic dialectician everything would seem to depend upon the turn of a debate; a challenge to a disputation was as serious as a challenge to the combat: logic became the centre round which all speculation revolved, and the question about its metaphysical basis became the absorbing one for all who pretended to share in the commonwealth of scholars. ”

“ Indeed, all peoples, when at a certain stage of race-culture, and the multitudes in all civilizations, are just that bundles of confused and conflicting ideas, impulses, and practices, which have never been unified into a consistent "character." ”

“ We shall at almost every turn hear modern laws and constitutions—liberty of worship, liberty of the press, liberty of meeting, with representative legislatures and responsible governments—denounced as the curse of mankind in all the varying accents of a strange dialect, or a dialect happily strange to us. ”

“ I have shown in another work how institutions, arts, and languages are modified in passing from one people to another, and how the laws of these transformations differ from the truth as stated in books. I allude to this matter now merely to show why, in examining the subject of democratic ideas, we occupy ourselves so little with the text of doctrines, and seek only for the psychological elements of which they constitute the vestment, and the reactions which they provoke in the various categories of men who have accepted them. ”

“ Society's laws and customs make them what they are. They must be so, or must be content to be of the oppressed classes. There are but two great classes in civilization,—the oppressed and the oppressors, the trampled upon and the tramplers. ”

“ The modern improvements in society, and the cultivation of reason, which has spread its benign influence over both the European and the American world, have nearly eradicated this persecuting spirit; and we look back, in both countries, mortified and ashamed of the illiberality of our ancestors. ”

“ But a few ages ago, to be able to read conferred the privileges of the clerical character, and exempted men from capital punishments—how improved, therefore, is the present state of society, and how different may it yet become, as prejudices are dispelled, and as liberal feelings acquire their just ascendancy among the rulers of nations! ”

“ The very style of dialectical theory is a scandal and abomination to the prevailing standards of language and to the sensibilities molded by those standards, because while it makes concrete use of existing concepts it simultaneously recognizes their fluidity and their inevitable destruction. ”

“ In thus dividing the nation, he is careful to point out that in each class we may from time to time find "aliens"—men free from the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the class in which they were born ”

“ They may accept standards of character and action from the classes, or from foreigners, or from literature, or from a new religion, but whatever they take up they assimilate and make it a part of their own mores, which they then transmit by tradition, defend in its integrity, and refuse to discard again. ”

“ Each separate system bears undoubted traces of racial or local influences; each reflects the civilization in which it flourished, the habits of thought and habits of life of the people, and the religious, ethical, and political ideals of their rulers and teachers. ”

“ The perpetual train of varying ideas, customs, and prejudices set before them may perhaps show them that their own ideas, customs, and prejudices are not the center round which the world revolves, and that justice and reason cannot be founded upon a few pharisaical rules ”

“ One or two teachers of the highest popular repute ask us to believe, instead, that language had its beginning in a condition of indefinite dialectic division, and has been always tending toward unity—that there are, as an exception, two or three real families, and no more, these being the result of peculiar and unexplained processes of arbitrary concentration in the remote past ”

“ When examining, for instance, the political institutions of France we showed that parties to all appearance utterly distinct—royalists, radicals, imperialists, socialists, &c.—have an ideal absolutely identical, and that this ideal is solely dependent on the mental structure of the French race, since a quite contrary ideal is found under analogous names among other races. ”