Modernity

“ Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death -- our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Whoe else has found it? -- Modern man perhaps? -- 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn' -- sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill -- from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanliness of modern Yes and No. ”

“ But, as a single drop of water may contain, within itself, all the elements and materials, out of which Omnipotence can create and replenish a world, so a single century may give birth to men and events, that will change the political and moral character of the world; which, giving life and being to a train of principles, whose operations and extension will tell, loudly and deeply, upon each succeeding generation; and whose consummated work of grandeur, wisdom and goodness will be read, only in the last, the brightest and the best pages of time’s recorded history. ”

“ Only a few people seem interested in that spectacle, so full of surprises—the development of all human institutions, from fairy tales to democracy. In beholding it we learn how we owe all things, humanly speaking, to the people and to genius. The natural people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into gorgeous ritual. ”

“ The emotions of the present may incline us to look back regretfully upon that past which reminds us of so much that is great and noble, in spite of its many and inevitable drawbacks, and which, by showing us the origin of modern society, by revealing to us the manner of its birth and its onward progress, may give us the key to its present critical condition when a profound and universal transformation seems about to take place. ”

“ Religion, industry, state, education, and literature have been consciously transformed by the heroic efforts of such great men of the world, and these conscious and artificial transformations of the several aspects of social life have been the constituents of a new environment and thus the seeds of Renaissance. ”

“ All eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective; we see this not merely in poetry, but also in painting and much besides. Every healthy effort, on the contrary, is directed from the inward to the outward world, as you will see in all great eras, which have been really in a state of progression, and all of an objective nature.’”—Ibid. ”

“ Fashions and modes in literature and art, as in society, come and go; new institutions arise, demanding new methods and modifying cherished customs; and men’s thoughts enlarge and widen with improved conditions, as with the inevitable progress of the age. ”

“ We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development,—those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new. ”

“ Those who know their besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened to them, or those who will read the instructive account recently given of them by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the idea which culture sets before us of perfection,—an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,—is an idea which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances. ”

“ In other words, the fate of our modern civilization, with all its marvellous machines on it, its art galleries and its churches, is all hanging to-day on the battle between the spirit of achievement, the spirit of creating things, and the spirit of weariness or the spirit of thinking of ways of getting out of things.
It does not take very long to see which one prefers when one considers the problem of living in one world or the other. ”

“ Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of that future. ”

“ All human institutions are progressive. Each stage of civilization is complete in itself, but preparatory to another and higher stage. Liberty, the art idea, the religious idea develop more and more as men realize in consciousness higher truths and standards. From the art that found expression in the cromlechs of the Druids to the highest embodiment of spiritual ideas, from crude faith to philosophic and religious insight, from rude mechanism to magnificence of structure and invention—such has been history, such, we believe, will be history. ”

“ In various other ways, apart from the mutual influence of divergent group-customs, the progress of civilization tends to produce variations in ideals. The increase of knowledge, the development of science and philosophy, bring floods of new ideas to burst the old dams; deepening insight reveals the irrationality of old ideas to the leaders of thought. The progress of the arts gives new interests and valuations. ”

“ I believe the refinements of modern society, its elegant accomplishments, its intellectual culture, and its conceptions of the beautiful, are glorious evidences of our advancement toward a higher plane of being. ”

“ What we now are, we have become by our own culture and development, and by the inflowing of those great modern ideas which have affected all the world, and helped to build up its civilization into such stately proportions. ”

“ But if the civilization of the present race of men, founded, as it is, in solid science, the true knowledge of nature, and vast discoveries in art, and which is elevated and purified by moral sentiment and by the truths of Christianity, be not destined to destruction before the final termination of human existence on earth, the object and purpose of this edifice will be known till that hour shall come. ”

“ Now this great century, the last of the true Middle Ages, which as it drew to its own end gave birth to Modern Society, has a special character of its own, a character that gives it an abiding and enchanting interest. ”

“ It should be inspired, not by a regretful hankering after the extinct beauties of Greece and the Renaissance, but by a shining vision of the society that is to be, of the triumphs that thought will achieve in the time to come, and of the ever-widening horizon of man's survey over the universe. ”

“ We find two forces constantly at work in humanity—the one static (morals) , the other dynamic (intellect) —bent upon leading us to culture, progress, truth, goodness, and beauty. In the fifth and at the beginning of the fourth century B.C., for once in our development, and then only for a short period, humanity296 undoubtedly succeeded in attaining a perfect balance of its moral, intellectual, and esthetical faculties. We may well call that period the golden age of mankind in art. ”

“ While I agree with them so far as to say that the spirit of the race should harmonise with the spirit of the time, I must warn them that modernising is a mere affectation of modernism, just as affectation of poesy is poetising. ”

“ Will not the future take a wider view, and form a more generous conception? For the true object of education is that each body should have its own hygiene, and each mind its own Renaissance, and each soul its own Reformation. ”

“ Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and Modern Time. The last of these terms is the most dangerous. The word "modern" implies that we, the people of the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement. ”

“ In our day a new ideal is in process of formation, which sees in suffering a condition of life, a condition of happiness, and which in the name of a new culture combats all that we have hitherto called culture. ”

“ In tracing analogies through the history of the past, the conditions, premonitory, present, and subsequent to great world-movements have often been referred to.
Nothing is more common or more patent than the oft-repeated saying, “This is the age of science.” 211 Any great movement that undertakes at the present day to deal with the deeper problems of individual and social life, must fit in and conform to the “spirit of the present age.” ”

“ From such examples of the progress in civilization that has come in a single country and a single lifetime, it is clear that the world has not been standing still with us, but new arts, new thoughts, new institutions, new rules of life, have arisen or been developed out of the older state of things. ”

“ And so in our own Age, when it has somewhat recovered and composed itself from the manifold errors with which it has been perplexed and harassed, will Inspired Men arise and bring to it that of which it stands in need.
We have finished the task which we proposed to ourselves:—we have delineated, briefly and succinctly as was our purpose, the Characteristics of the Present Age contemplated from those essential principles which belong to all Time. There remains nothing further for us to do but to add a conclusion to the whole. ”

“ And as the scientific spirit or the socialistic spirit can give to the permanent instincts of the world a new zest, so the Renaissance passion for self-expansion and for education gave to the old road a new mirage. ”

“ These subordinate peculiarities will depend first on the peculiar genius, idea and work of the nation, and next on the transient circumstances, geographical, climactic, historical and secular, to which the nation has been exposed. The past helped form the circumstances of the present age, and they the character of the men now living. ”

“ We shall speak of the holy traditions of the past, we shall despise certain daring innovations on the part of the inexperienced youth, which were perfectly proper twenty years ago, when you were beginning, but which now are out of place. Do you care for a thrust at modernism? ”

“ 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 ”

“ These exchanges of parts will put people in their true light; the historical optic, renewed, will re-adjust the ensemble of civilization, at present a chaos; for perspective, that justice of geometry, will size the past,—making such a plan to advance, placing another in the background. Every one will assume his real stature ”

“ Our age, as we shall learn, contains merely what was implicit in the very waywardness of that revolutionary period. Their youthful enthusiasms, at first vague, wandering, conflicting, took form at length through growth, and produced, in their maturity, our modern doctrine of evolution, our modern efforts to bring into close relation the natural and the spiritual, our whole modern many-sidedness of interest and experience. ”

“ The explanation of the change is, that the analytical and reasoning tendency which distinguishes both the imaginative and reflective works of the classical period, had in the new century slowly made way for interest in the actually existing, in what is perceivable by the senses. And the deeper-lying reason of this new preference was that men now placed nature, original, unconscious, rustic, uncultivated nature, above all the culture of civilisation. ”

“ Now, then, is the moment for culture to be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are new. ”

“ A summary of science, art, literature, and religion in their influence upon the common life will indicate the changes most manifest, less in material conveniences than in the spirit of man. At the end arises the question of the future of a society, evidently moving in a direction which no one can foresee, towards experience of far-reaching change. ”

“ The various springs from which human action flows, the various types which human crises produce, the virtues and the vices which great historic conflicts heat into activity—all these features of social motion, never jointly reproduced in works of history, are here drawn in vivid colors and present a historic canvas that is prime in the domain of literature. ”

“ And the farther the world proceeds on that 'new road' it is travelling at present, the more the demand will be heard in this quarter, for an adaptation of instrumentalities to the advanced, and advancing ages of modern learning and civilization, and to that more severe and exacting genius of the occidental races, that keener and more subtle, and practical genius, from whose larger requisitions and powers this advancement proceeds. ”

“ Through realizing the slow, and often imperceptible, progress of history, we can take advantage of the respects in which our present cultural location elevates us above the past, and at the same time we can appreciate the limitations of the present as we look forward to the future. ”

“ But our object is, by this edifice, to show our own deep sense of the value and importance of the achievements of our ancestors; and, by presenting this work of gratitude to the eye, to keep alive similar sentiments, and to foster a constant regard for the principles of the Revolution. Human beings are composed, not of reason only, but of imagination also, and sentiment ”