Intellectual revolution

“ These myriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead upon the soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of an individual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. To the individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives the hour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its own life. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions of history.
The new science must not only clear the stagnant ground for the growth of new ideas, it must go deeper. ”

“ These scientific revolutions in the domain of ideas are purely intellectual. Our sentiments and beliefs do not affect them. Men submit to them without discussing them. Their results being controllable by experience, they escape all criticism. ”

“ We therefore observe this striking phenomenon: as laws and institutions seek to level individuals the progress of civilisation tends still further to differentiate them. From the peasant to the feudal baron the intellectual difference was not great, but from the working-man to the engineer it is immense and is increasing daily. ”

“ From the sixteenth century to the French Revolution nearly all important historical events bore in some way on the struggle for freedom of thought. It would require a lifetime to calculate, and many books to describe, all the directions and interactions of the intellectual and social forces which, since the fall of ancient civilization, have hindered and helped the emancipation of reason. ”

“ The forms of democracy which select the better elements of the popular classes finally result in the creation of an intellectual aristocracy, a result the contrary of the dream of the pure theorists, to beat down the superior elements of society to the level of the inferior elements.
On the side of natural law, which is hostile to theories of equality, are the conditions of modern progress. Science and industry demand more and more considerable intellectual efforts, so that mental inequalities and the differences of social condition which spring from them cannot but become accentuated. ”

“ But those great intellectual revolutions upon which all other [325] revolutions are based, cannot be measured by so simple a standard. To trace the movements of the human mind, it is necessary to contemplate it under several aspects, and then coördinate the results of what we have separately studied. ”

“ The book, with its deep reading of human nature, its insistence on the continuity of national growth, and its contempt for those who thought to alter a political society by reasoning in the abstract, was the wisest book which the Revolution produced on either side. ”

“ Between the stage of embryonic life, through which Society had passed, and the stage of maturity and independence, upon which it will enter, there lies the gap which we can hardly bridge, namely, the revolutionary critical epoch, which gave birth to modern Society, the period which made possible the independence of future social life from the past and laid the foundation of a creative Society. What revolution does for life, criticism accomplishes for ideas and views. ”

“ It will be sufficient for us to give our attention to some few striking facts in the progress of science and art, especially in those cases which being more recent, are at once better known to us, and have a nearer relation to our interests. Let us turn to any department of human knowledge or inquiry, and we see the clearest manifestations of the growing philosophical spirit of which I speak.
If we look at the character of civil government, we find that every revolution—every important change—is the result of the progress of philosophy—of the extension of the empire of reason. ”

“ It is the people who, in the long run, without theories, by their spontaneous creations, modify, reform, absorb the policy projects and philosophical doctrines, and who, incessantly creating a new reality, incessantly change the basis of politics and philosophy. ”

“ Thus the Rights of the Individual, established by the French Revolution in the field of political action, have led to the declaration of the privileges of the proletariat and the lower classes of society, have made literature and art spiritual and romantic, have established religion on the solid ground of social service and philanthropy, and by giving an impetus to bold, independent thinking have succeeded in revolutionising the Sciences. ”

“ Knowledge and science, which begin to be generally diffused, are already advancing these results; they are giving an impulse to the march of the human mind, and in time, governments and people, without tumult or revolution, will be freed from the yoke which has oppressed them so long. ”

“ In this field a central direction of production is not only unnecessary, but absolutely foolish. Here free production can rule without the necessity of production of commodities of value or of capitalist production.
Communism in material production, anarchism in the intellectual. This is the type of the socialist productive system which will arise from the dominion of the proletariat or, in other words, out of the social revolution by the logic of economic facts whatever may be the wishes, ideas and theories of the proletariat. ”

“ This great concentration of knowledge and research must lead to a vigorous action which will give to the future revolution the character of practical manifestation of applied sociology, without passion or demand of revenge, with no terrible tragedies or heroic sacrifices, no sterile movements, no disillusion of zealots, no treacherous returns to reaction. ”

“ The particular expectations of literacy confirm values associated with its characteristics. Politics and the ideals embodied in the Enlightenment-it carried into action political aspirations originating in religion-and the Industrial Revolution cannot be separated. Expectations of permanency, universality, reason, democracy, and stability were all embodied in the political experience. ”

“ This is equally true in science, philanthropy, and religion. When the advance of knowledge and enlightenment of conscience render reform or revolution necessary, the ruling powers of college, church, government, capital, and the press, present a solid combined resistance which the teachers of novel truth cannot overcome without an appeal to the people. ”

“ One must understand the sense of events, one must tear off the masquerade clothing, one must wash off the paint and judge not by words, but by deeds, not by intentions, but by results. One must understand the objective meaning of the revolution. ”

“ To analyze the secret springs that have effected the progressive changes in society; to trace the origin of the various modes of government, the consequent improvements in science, in morality, or the national tincture that marks the manners of the people under despotic or more liberal forms, is a bold and adventurous work.
The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. ”

“ It is obvious, however, that the influence of this invention over the political, commercial, and social relations of the people of this widely extended country, looking to nothing beyond, will, in the event of success, of itself amount to a revolution unsurpassed in moral grandeur by any discovery that has been made in the arts and sciences, from the most distant period to which authentic history extends to the present day. ”

“ We may, respecting the claims of working men, perceive that they demand too little, and that the things they demand are not those which matter. Even the shock of a revolution is not too high a price for an experience which should convince us that knowledge is the basis of a nation’s strength. ”

“ Psychology and sociology teach us that in the spiritual or psychical sphere individual development, and therefore also the development of society, is characterised by crises, by crude contrasts, by revolutions. Struve is utterly wrong in deducing from the theory of evolution, the view that revolution is epistemologically inconceivable. ”

“ These are what are called revolution principles. They are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sydney, Harrington and Locke. The principles of nature and eternal reason. The principles on which the whole government over us, now stands. It is therefore astonishing, if any thing can be so, that writers, who call themselves friends of government, should in this age and country, be so inconsistent with themselves, so indiscreet, so immodest, as to insinuate a doubt concerning them. ”

“ They established the supremacy of the idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, defeat, nor decay. ”

“ Ideas which are firmly established, incrusted, as it were, in men's minds, continue to act for several generations. Those which resulted from the French Revolution were, like others, subject to this law. ”

“ Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic, and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing. ”

“ The majority [i.e., his opponents] has substituted the dogmatic spirit for the critical, the idealistic interpretation of events for the materialistic. Simple will-power, instead of the true relations of things, has become the motive force of revolution. ”

“ Feeding his spirit of revolution were numerous anarchistic theories, called the new philosophy, which had this curious quality: that they hotly denied the old faith, law, morality, as other men formulated such matters, and fervently believed any quack who appeared with a new nostrum warranted to cure all social disorders. ”

“ Each revolution comes with a cluster of so-called geniuses, men and women whose skill and imagination force the scientific community to break out of old habits of thought and embrace new and unfamiliar concepts. ”

“ This wise revolution will undoubtedly assist the progress of truth; but it has displeased many men of genius, who maintain that by so doing, the sciences are robbed of their greatest attractions, and that the new mode will tend to weary the mind and disenchant study ”

“ Only in the sense that they employ new and more effective methods to attain the same end—that is to [52] say, the formation of individuals who will accept all the conventions, all the prejudices, and all the untruths on which society is based.
We do not hesitate to say that we want men who will continue unceasingly to develop; men who are capable of constantly destroying and renewing their surroundings and renewing themselves; men whose intellectual independence is their supreme power, which they will yield to none ”

“ If we may summarise that theory in colloquial phraseology, it is that, while economic evolution must pave the way for revolution, the final stages of revolution have been effected in the past, and can only be effected in the future, through the co-operation of "disgruntled intellectuals." ”

“ Whatever goes by the different names of the revolutionary, the radical, the democratic, the liberal, the free-thinking, the sceptical, or the negative and critical school or party in religion, politics, or philosophy, all passes with him under the designation of metaphysical, and whatever he has to say about it forms part of his description of the metaphysical school of social science. ”

“ It is permissible to consider the Revolution as being partly a necessity, but it was above all—which is what the fatalistic writers already cited do not show us—a permanent struggle between theorists who were imbued with a new ideal, and the economic, social, and political laws which ruled mankind, and which they did not understand. ”

“ What shall we say of the democratic trend of the modern world as it affects the finer sort of intellectual achievement? While the conscious sway of the masses seems not uncongenial to the more popular and obvious kinds of eminence, as of statesmen, inventors, soldiers, financiers and the like, there are many who believe it to be hostile to distinction in literature, art or science. ”

“ Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissociated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire. ”

“ The eighteenth century marks, in these directions, a sharp turning-point in human thinking, and the end of mediaevalism and the ushering in of modern forms of intellectual liberty. The eighteenth century, too, witnessed a culmination of a long series of progressive changes which had been under way for centuries, and the flood time of a slowly but steadily rising tide of protest against the enslavement of the intellect and the limitation of natural human liberties by either Church or State. ”

“ 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. ”