Ensemble

“ With our bodies, with our minds, with our souls, with all our powers and faculties, with all our intuitions and endeavours, with the science of the sages, with the history of the ages, with the minstrels' chants and the artists' "witcheries," with all these we glorify Thee as the Eternal Reality. In Thee as the all-embracing Unity, we feel unified. ”

“ Now, as the members of a body, each in its proper place and functions, live in perfect harmony, mutually comfort, defend, and love each other, without being jealous or vengeful, and have only in view the well-being of that body of which they are parts, so in the community of which you are members and in the employment assigned to you. Remember you are parts of a whole, and that it is necessary to refer to this whole your time, labour, and strength; to have the same thoughts, sentiments, designs, and language, without which there would no longer exist either body, members, parts, or whole. ”

“ These groups are the main-drainage-system of modern life; they are the ordinary channels through which the business of the world has to pass, and its organised thought be directed. Take any one of these groups, and consider its differential character, its mode of apperception, its êthos, and you find it something deformed, twisted, strained in one direction, like a tree by the sea-shore. But take a few score of them, and imagine their qualities fused together, and the result would accord with the ideals of common humanity—ideals vaguely conceived, perhaps, but generous. ”

“ For it is precisely the wholeness, and not the mere fragmentariness, the presence, and not the mere absence of unity in our consciousness, the relative attainment, and not the mere postponement of our meanings, which, from this point of view, guides us towards a positive view of how the unity of Being is, in the midst of all the varieties, attained. ”

“ It is, to illustrate, physical, mental, and spiritual, or more elaborately, it is athletic, industrial, political, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, and religious, and in its social life has developed institutions answering to these different phases of itself. It is, again, lawful and lawless, old and young, conservative and radical, sympathetic and selfish. But whatever the mode of analysis or division or dichotomy, the unity of experience embraces all the elements, aspects, or relations that are discovered. ”

“ The groups and single figures on their own bases, abstracted from the general composition, and considered without attention to the plan, frequently exhibit those genuine and unaffected attitudes, those simple graces which Nature and the heart alone can dictate, and only an eye inspired by both, discover. ”

“ Perhaps the principles of unity and variety—two essentials of any art work—enter into the matter. The variety in the uniforms of the different sections satisfies the eye, and the unity of the marching pleases the mind. ”

“ Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? ”

“ It was exactly what I saw—what I often see: such is the place, the scenery, the people. Every group is a picture, the commonest object has some interest attached to it, the commonest action is dignified by sentiment, the language around us is music, and the air we breathe is poetry. ”

“ For, numerous and diverse as are the objects in nature, they are so constituted and connected—so dependent on and related to one another—as to compose a whole which exhibits a marvellous unity in variety. ”

“ To combine and carry on together various distinct lines of thought, and various individual members of character, so that each shall constantly remember and respect the others, and this through a manifold, diversified, and intricate course of action; to keep all the parts true to the terms and relations of organic unity, each coming in and stopping just where it ought, each doing its share, and no more than its share, in the common plan, so as not to hinder the life or interfere with the rights of the others ”

“ I here assume, what is agreed on by most writers, that beauty of form—so far as it is independent of sensuous pleasure on the one hand, and pleasures of association and suggestion on the other, is resolvable into the presence of a certain order among manifold details, which order is commonly spoken of as unity in variety. With respect, first of all, to the way in which the element of variety and contrast presents itself in visible form, a word or two will suffice. ”

“ In enquiring about any one individual we must ask how other individuals enter ‘objectively’ into the unity of its own experience. This unity of its own experience is that individual existing formally. ”

“ It is true that the resemblances between the modes of life and the bent of thought in the two Worlds are as striking and numerous as their divergences; but this fact is in itself of the highest significance in that it emphasizes that fundamental unity, spiritual as well as physical, which is of the whole human brotherhood. ”

“ So men have said in effect throughout the ages, and where they have conceded reality or substantial character to manifoldness, the concession has simply concealed a reassertion, but with fuller and deeper meaning, of the intimacy of unity with reality. What makes for real unity or wholeness, then, must impart realistic character, giving actual contact and intimacy with just that of which, so to speak, the world is made. ”

“ Then we turn to the friends of ideas: to them we say, 'You distinguish becoming from being?' 'Yes,' they will reply. 'And in becoming you participate through the bodily senses, and in being, by thought and the mind?' 'Yes.' And you mean by the word 'participation' a power of doing or suffering? ”

“ We have still to ask how in particular we can most truly conceive the systematic unity which is formed by the whole multiplicity of apparently more or less independent subjects of experience, what degree of permanence and individuality, so far as we can judge, belongs to ourselves as members of that system, and what light is thrown by our ethical, religious, and æsthetic aspirations and ideals on the concrete character of the whole system and on our own place in it. ”

“ It was character living itself out, an utterance of its entire unity, something drawn from the solemn depths of those life-convictions which all the personal and impersonal powers of a man, aglow and welded, unite in producing. ”

“ Tones of the human mind may be different, but they should be Chord and discord concordant in order to blend properly. Unselfish ambition, noble life-motives, and purity, — these constituents of thought, mingling, constitute individually and collectively true happiness, strength, and permanence. ”

“ The ideas and employments, which their seclusion from the world rendered habitual,—the familiar contemplation of the most sublime objects of nature,—the habit of concentrating their affections within the narrow precincts of their own glens, or the limited circle of their own kinsmen,—and the necessity of union and self-dependence in all difficulties and dangers, combined to form a peculiar and original character. ”

“ It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. ”

“ The great truth revealed in the doctrine of the Grand Man, as already explained, is, that the order, connection, mutual dependence, unity, harmony, and diversity existing among the heavenly societies, are similar to what we find among the various members and organs of the human body ”

“ All culture, in whatever line, must pass through these two stages of estrangement and of reunion; the reunion being not of two different things, but the recognition of itself by thought, and its acceptance of itself as itself. ”

“ I thought also that the idea which was expressed in some of the groups, of the human beings clinging together, and their sense of mutual relationship, was true and beautiful. There are very few single figures; they ascend or are hurled down in groups of two or more persons; they lift up each other, or they mutually drag each other down. ”

“ If I try to discover or to invent some new experience which I may call the true nature of the group, I am simply adding to it in thought another experience which takes its place among those the group already contains. ”

“ One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all. The Whole mattered—but the unit, the person, had no importance, except as he represented the Whole. ”

“ It is their concentrated individuality which presents to us the most general and at the same time most complete idea of their intrinsic character, in so far, that is, as this individuality is brought together out of the variety of accidental traits, isolated actions, and events into the one focus of their simple and self-exclusive unity. ”

“ But by how much the higher we ascend, and elevate ourselves to the sameness both in form and essence, of first natures, and proceed from parts to wholes, by so much the more shall we discover the union which has an eternal existence, and survey the essence, which has a precedaneous and more principal subsistence, and possesses about, and in itself, difference and multitude. ”

“ In the first place, then, we have this abstract case: the power of representation and will are present, a sphere of action is present, and a free way opened from the soul to the world, from the world to the soul. ”

“ And just so far as I fall short of systematic individuality, whether from the poverty of my interests or their mutual incompatibility, the appearance of unity in my life is illusory, and I must be pronounced an unreal appearance. ”

“ And every unity, every identity, every classification is rightly called fanciful unless it serves some other end than the mere satisfaction, emotion, or inspiration caught by momentarily believing in it. ”

“ Association or grouping is, then, an intrinsic power of mind; but as all life seems to be built on opposites—light and darkness, heat and cold, love and hate—so mind, which is capable of association, is capable also of displacement or the splitting apart of elements which belong together. ”

“ And my practical experience of the way in which my own most clearly defined and conscious purposes depend for their fulfilment upon connection with the interests and purposes of a wider social whole possessed of an organic unity, should help me to understand how the totality of interests and purposes determining the selective attention of different percipients can form, as we have held that it must, the harmonious and systematic unity of the absolute experience. ”

“ The ultimate, and what we may in a general sense term the classical, form in which this sense of the community of the Life principle found expression was that which endowed the vivifying force of Nature with a distinct personality, divine, or semi-divine, whose experiences, in virtue of his close kinship with humanity, might be expressed in terms of ordinary life. ”

“ As some have liked to describe the change, the "universal individual," the individual as an authoritative and heaven-made type, that dictated a life and a belief to others generally, passed away, and in its stead, instead of unity as itself an individual, instead of an incarnate type, came unity as in the relation, or the activity maintaining the relation, of all individuals. ”

“ And he shows how the prodigious strength of the great common emotions that occasionally arise results from the fact that they have grown up out of the most commonplace ordinary acts of daily life, speaking, walking, talking, by which the life of each man in a group mingles with the common life of all. ”

“ Conceive of this printed page as a plane world in which every letter is a person; every word a family; phrases and sentences, larger communities and groups. These "innumerable individualities, distinguished by their variations" must needs seem to themselves as "distant from one another," their very differences of form and arrangement a barrier to any superior unity. ”

“ The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in the psychic life are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with no need of reference to any more simple or substantial agent than the present Thought or 'section' of the stream. ”

“ This more pluralistic style of feeling seems to me both to allow of a warmer sort of loyalty to our past helpers, and to tally more exactly with the mixed condition in which we find the world as to its ideals. What if we did come where we are by chance, or by mere fact, with no one general design? What is gained, is gained, all the same. ”

“ Not only does he achieve a large unity of action, building into a shapely structure round his central figure a complex of persons, motives and social conditions, but he deals in detail with the inner life of his characters, and he gives to passion and sentiment the pervading importance that has now become traditional in this form of literature. ”

“ Admitting these observations to be true, there is, nevertheless, a distinction to be drawn between the materials for a history of action and those for one of feeling; between the labors of men aiming at distinction among their fellow-beings, and the private, familiar sentiments that run into the texture of the social system, without remark or the hope of observation. ”

“ Individualist doctrines celebrate the ‘I’, collective movements the ‘we’. Devoid of the fullness of self-assertion or the positive connotations of friendship, community and political solidarity, ‘you’ can tend to get overlooked. ”

“ If I am strong and you also, are we both collectively strong, and if I am just and you also, are we both collectively just, and if both collectively, then each individually so, too, if I am beautiful and you also, are we both collectively beautiful, and if both collectively, then each individually? ”