Intellectual tradition

“ This, then, it seems, is Culture—knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world—not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment—reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system. ”

“ These ideas we inherit—they form the tradition 262of our civilisation. Such traditional ideas are never static. They are either fading into meaningless formulae, or are gaining power by the new lights thrown by a more delicate apprehension. ”

“ If we are to account mind not matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that gives dignity, and grace, and intellectual value to history, and its action on the ascending life of man, then we shall not be prone to explain the universal by the national, and civilisation by custom. ”

“ It is a mistake to imagine that subtle speculations touching the divine attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. ”

“ But as men began to grow more enlightened,—as, one by one, the secrets of nature were revealed to the students whose desire for knowledge overbore their tacit acceptance of tradition,—doubts began to arise as to the possibility of the truth of this long-cherished idea. ”

“ These theorists, who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion ”

“ The justification of them is that when we wake to consciousness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the bonds of tradition, custom, and habit. The mores contain embodied in them notions, doctrines, and maxims, but they are facts. ”

“ Let me say a word in behalf of the largest culture of the intellect, of all faculties thereof,—understanding, imagination, reason. I admit there have been men of able mind and large intellectual development who have turned off from religion, their science driving them away from the doctrines taught in this name. But such men have been few. ”

“ Here, also, through the copious stores of literature at our disposal, we can arrive at something definite regarding the various forms assumed by these passions, when allowed free scope for development in the midst of refined and intellectual civilisation. ”

“ The world is ruled by ideas, by abstract thought. Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them. We recognize this clearly in studying any past period. ”

“ The better spirit of the present times will maintain a safer and a more honourable principle,—the true objects of Literature, the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, stand entirely unconnected with Politics and Religion, let this be the imprescriptible right of an author. ”

“ By Tradition I mean the entire circle of thought and practice, custom as well as belief, ceremonies, tales, music, songs, dances and other amusements, the philosophy and the superstitions and the institutions, delivered by word of mouth and by example from generation to generation through unremembered ages: in a word, the sum total of the psychological phenomena of uncivilized man. Every people has its own body of Tradition, its own Folk-lore, which comprises a slowly diminishing part, or the whole, of its mental furniture, according as the art of writing is, or is not, known. ”

“ And these can scarcely be separated from one another, or from the further enquiry, What is its content?
The historical genesis we shall not enter on; and as to the genesis in the individual, we will merely remark that we seem first to see in some person or persons the type of what is excellent; then by the teaching, tradition, and imagination of our own and other countries and times, we receive a content which we find existing realized in present or past individuals, and finally detach from all as that which is realized wholly in none, but is an ideal type of human perfection. ”

“ Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last end of everything, in four days or in four million centuries—it matters not which—no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this culture, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest? ”

“ Imagine the success of the attempt to still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I have mentioned, by putting before him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose! Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such men that the education which leads to perfection in such elegances is alone to be called culture ”

“ Concede intellectual power, or the spiritual element, then add this temperament, and there follows a certain subtile, penetrative, radical quality of thought, a characteristic percipience of principles. And principles are not only seen, but felt; they thrill the nerve as well as greet the eye ”

“ Under these two different forms, therefore doth Tradition reveal to us the primitive world, or in other words, these are the two grand conditions of humanity which fill the records of primitive history. ”

“ Approaching the question as we do, not from the point of view of the evolution of a particular literary form, but from that of a persistent ideal and quasi-philosophical tradition, which manifests itself in all manner of forms and fashions, we have a perfect right to adopt whatever classification suits our purpose best, provided always that we have a clear notion what it is we are discussing. ”

“ Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life. ”

“ This Art of Tradition concerns, first, the understanding; and secondly, the affections and the will. As man is constituted, it is not enough to convince his understanding.
First, then, it is 'the organ' and 'method' of tradition; and next, it is what he calls the illustration of it. First, the object is, to bring truth to the understanding in as clear and unobstructed a manner as the previous condition—as the diseases and pre-occupations of the mind addressed will admit of, and next to bring all the other helps and arts by which the sentiments are touched and the will mastered. ”

“ Tradition and the building up of sentiments and ideals, together with the symbols by which they are known and familiarized, are very largely, if not exclusively, the work of the written word. But Literature and the Press are themselves governed by their past history, and by traditions and conventions that have been gradually built up from a few fundamental ideas, however diversified they may eventually have become; and these ideas, in their turn, owe their origin to the passions and sentiments of the race as a whole. Even the work of genius has its roots in the ideas of the past. ”

“ In order to deal effectually with the history of philosophy, in order to derive any benefit from it as students, and in order to confer any benefit on it as historians, we must, first of all, be philosophers ourselves. ”

“ Everywhere the tone of thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature of the eighteenth century. ”

“ In studying the philosophy of a people at any stage of culture, to understand what such a people entertain as the sum of their knowledge it is necessary that we should understand what phenomena they saw, heard, felt, discerned; what discriminations they made, and what resemblances they seized upon as a basis for the classification on which their explanations rested. A philosophy will be higher in the scale, nearer the truth, as the discernment is wider, the discrimination nicer, and the classification better. ”

“ Tradition, oral and written, is accumulated and condensed observation; and by means of this each new generation can avail itself of the experience of preceding generations, can thus find time to explore fresh departments of knowledge, and so transmit its own traditions to the generations that shall follow. ”

“ These, by whatever name we like to call them, are facts and not fancies, and facts which enter largely into all questions, whether of science, philosophy, religion, or practical policy. Every one who wishes to keep at all abreast with modern culture, ought to have some general knowledge of the ideas and principles which underlie them and which are embraced in the comprehensive word “polarity.” ”

“ But in every age and nation, where learning has reared aloft her polished head, where true philosophy is cultivated, where common sense is heard and listened to, there omens, apparitions, predictions, and black arts, are universally exploded, and justly derided ”

“ As the true history of our own race shows that we came from a low and brutal state, common once to all mankind, so the facts of our present condition give us reasonable hope for a better future. Let us, then, stand, on the highest points of knowledge in all its departments, for these are touched with light. We must reach these heights by continual reading, observation, and experiment. The result of these is culture. All thought has an added, beauty as it approaches the truth, but what is needed is to attain to clear conceptions. ”

“ Now, the imperative mood is the characteristic of art, as distinguished from science. Whatever speaks in rules, or precepts, not in assertions respecting matters of fact, is art; and ethics, or morality, is properly a portion of the art corresponding to the sciences of human nature and society. ”

“ Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence of the freedom of life. ”

“ There are, also, interior senses, apprehensive powers of the mind, which equally crave culture, and which depend for their precision and force on careful education and diligent use. Mere observation, experience, or study, cannot give knowledge that will be of any avail. ”

“ To understand, we have analyzed the intellectual world into two classes, good and evil; and to discover the members of each class, we fix their qualities, not by the hypothetick, but the practical mode of reasoning. ”

“ A further factor in these contests is their cultural value, both moral and intellectual. They necessarily cultivate the highest ethical conceptions, historical and political knowledge, and careful and logical thinking. ”

“ Acceptance of these ideas—the ideas upon which rest art, science, the polity of nations and religion—and self-renunciation for them, are the only sources of truly noble action. “Everything great and good upon which our present existence rests, from which it has proceeded, exists only because noble and powerful men have resigned all the enjoyments of life for the sake of ideas.” ”

“ It will be a very tedious and irksome task to copy the various traditions bearing on the above subjects and to discuss their authenticity, and criticise their genuineness, on the principles of the technicalities peculiar to the Science of Traditions, as well as on the basis of scientific and rational criticism. ”

“ But let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country to country throughout the course of centuries. ”

“ And this aim we cannot seek without coming in sight of another aim too, which we have often and often pointed out, and tried to recommend: culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit. ”

“ If truth and reason have, as we believe, any natural irresistible effect on the mind of man, it must. These considerations, when culture has called them forth and given them free course in our minds, will live and work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action. ”

“ First in rank are those ideas that have in them the germs of a great moral unfolding,—as the ideas of a religious teacher, like Socrates or Confucius. Next in merit are those ideas that lay open the secrets of Nature, or add to the combinations of Art,—as the ideas of inventors and discoverers. ”

“ Language, general ideas of right and wrong, convention, invention, national feeling—all this and much more, constituting the more important part of the human individual’s environment—is part of tradition; and tradition is pre-eminently and inevitably social. However individualistic we may wish to be we cannot escape modelling by this social environment.
The general effect of man’s gregarious instinct is that he desires to find himself in harmony with some traditions, with the ideas that modern jargon likes to call the herd to which he belongs. ”