Philistine

“ We should bear in mind that the philistine is an insignificant, though exact part of a huge social machine, of a Frankenstein “kultur” before which the philistine prostrates himself in dust, a social monster of which he is proud to form an irresponsible mite. Whether he be an atom of a political organization, of a nation, or of a military kultur-system, the philistine is trained to be content to play the same ignoble, slavish rôle of submission, obedience, and irresponsibility. ”

“ But in this he is hardly sincere; and the appropriate answer is a tu quoque, the fitting reply to every piece of insincere criticism. Does the philistine feed the poor and save the sinners? Who is commonly more careless of the workers' needs and more cruel to the fallen in his self-righteous probity? For the philistine is often a puritan. ”

“ I told you long ago that I was a Philistine of the Philistines, deliberately and avowedly. The true artistic soul which you delight to call Pagan is only the servant of Philistinism, and I own that I prefer to stand with the ruling party. As, indeed," she added, with a mischievous gleam in her eye, "do many who will not confess it."
Rangely flushed. The thrust too closely resembled reproaches which in his more sensitive moments he received at the hand of his own inner consciousness, so to speak, not to make him wince. He felt himself, besides, becoming involved in a painful position. ”

“ Philistines are uncritical, unconscious of defects and faults, living in the mire of self-contented stupidity and mediocrity. They cease to grow mentally and morally. Their intellectual and moral capacities become paralyzed, atrophied. Man becomes the equal of the brute.
With a philistine education and training, man is fit to become one of those unfortunate and pitiful European pawns and automata who obey blindly the commands of their superior officers. ”

“ In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonisation of the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. ”

“ If Europe is in violent convulsions of war insanity, America suffers from no less serious mental maladies,—speculation frenzies, revival manias, and preparedness plagues. Mental epidemics are ineradicable afflictions of the highly evolved mob spirit characteristic of the philistine. The evolution of the philistine is the involution of genius. Philistinism is social decay. The progress of humanity is from brute to man, from Philistine to Genius. ”

“ The Agamemnon and the Antigone, with their teachings of destiny and duty, the Hermes of Olympia and the Parthenon frieze, with their ever-irresistible charm of youthfulness, the Phaedo with its discussion of immortality, the Metaphysics of Aristotle with their still subtler and more abstruse speculations, source of so much of our Christian doctrine and apologetic—all these require little defence against the Philistine of to-day, if only he can be induced to gaze at his intended victim before he delivers his blow. ”

“ The realism of the Philistines is manifested in the recognition of healthy life that we find in some of the new literature—in the heroic romance of Anthony Hope, in the charming tenderness and sweetness of Maartens’s Hollandais and in the fresh-witted islanders, full of arterial blood, of Hall Caine and the wizard who lies buried on the mountain top of his own beloved island—that second one to the left after you leave San Francisco. ”

“ In common phraseology, he is a Philistine—a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species. ”

“ I am Goliath the Philistine of Gath, who killed the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas the priests; and led into captivity the ark of the covenant of Jehovah, and placed it in the temple of Dagon my god; and it remained in the cities of the Philistines seven months. Also, in all our battles I have gone at the head of the army, and we conquered and cut down men, and laid them as low as the dust of the earth; and to this day the Philistines have not granted me the honor of being chief of a thousand men. ”

“ Philistin, m. (artists’) , a man who belongs to a different set, an outsider, a bourgeois, a “Philistine.” The Slang Dictionary says: “Society is supposed to regard all outside its bounds as belonging to the Philistine world. Bohemians regard all cleanly, orderly people who conform to conventionality as Philistines;” (medical) medical man who, not being on the staff of an hospital, visits the establishment, generally prolonging his stay more than is pleasant or convenient for the members of the staff; (tailors’) journeyman tailor. In the English slang a Philistine is a policeman. ”

“ The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art, and this cry was raised by the Athenian people against every great poet and thinker of their day—Æschylus, Euripides, Socrates. ”

“ Arnold, however, has done most to establish the word in English usage. He applies it especially to members of the middle class who are swayed chiefly by material interests and are blind to the force of ideas and the value of culture. Leslie Stephen, who is always ready to plead the cause of the Philistine, remarks: "As a clergyman always calls every one from whom he differs an atheist, and a bargee has one or two favorite but unmentionable expressions for the same purpose, so a prig always calls his adversary a Philistine." ”

“ He, and no one else, is the prop of existing things, and against him we all fight in vain, however noble our courage may be; for unfortunately all things are in this slavery of leathern custom, and only fright and trouble of all kinds can turn the Philistine into a man by thoroughly upsetting him. ”

“ From the essential nature of the philistine it follows, secondly, in regard to others, that, as he possesses no intellectual, but only physical need, he will seek the society of those who can satisfy the latter, but not the former. ”

“ I would respectfully call the attention of the editors of the Post to the fate which befell the Assyrians. It is written in Isaiah XXXVII—36: Then the angel of the Lord went forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and four score and five thousand; and when they arose in the morning: behold, they were all dead corpses.
The Philistine’s plea is for the widest liberty to individual genius. Perhaps no living man has presented this plea so strongly in his life and work as William Morris. The poem herein printed is a taste of this strong man’s quality. ”

“ And so, too, when a Philistine wants to be sent to Parliament by his brother Philistines, and extols the earnest good sense which characterises Manchester and supplies the mind, the will, and the power, as the Daily News eloquently says, requisite for all the great and good things that have to be done, he intoxicates and deludes himself as well as his brother Philistines who hear him. ”

“ The philistine is good material for mobs, for mental epidemics, for religious crazes, and for all kinds of hysterical movements in which not reason but emotional automatism is in the foreground. Philistinism, stupidity, and implicit obedience of a monstrous, efficient war machine are intimately interrelated. The individual becomes a private, the nation an army, and the country a camp. ”

“ For Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children; and therein it specially suits our middle class, who not only do not pursue sweetness and light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, and addresses from Mr. Murphy, which makes up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched. But the aristocratic class has actually, as we have seen, in its well-known politeness, a kind of image or shadow of sweetness ”

“ Yet, ignorance prevails, for is not “Retired Clergyman” living proof? And so I will say: There lived in the Far East about three thousand years ago a tribe of people known as Philistines. It is a hotly mooted question among the theologians whether they were so-called because they lived in Philistia or whether Philistia took its name on account of being peopled by Philistines. I will not take sides in this issue, but hedge closely and simply stand firm on the fact that a tribe called the Philistines existed. ”

“ The misleading problem in these questions is always How to introduce into this terrible world, with an empty nothing beyond it, a God Who converts the enormous sufferings of existence into something fictitious, so that the hoped-for salvation remains the only real and consciously enjoyable thing. This will do very well for the Philistine, especially the English Philistine. ”

“ He just grovels in pathology and wallows in therapeutics. He is ever administering boluses to his heroes and emetics to his heroines—and readers. In that story of a box-stall, The Stark-Monroe Letters, he displays vials, bottles, droppers, corks, iodoform gauze, trepanning tools, silver treacheas, catgut thread, antiseptic cotton and scalpels. The man who can read two of the Stark-Monroe Letters without being salivated shall have The Philistine gratis for a year. I beg of Dr. Doyle that he will read Science and Health by Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and forever eschew Nasty Stuff in literature. ”

“ I may remark, however, that a man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine—an expression at first peculiar to the German language, a kind of slang term at the Universities, afterwards used, by analogy, in a higher sense, though still in its original meaning, as denoting one who is not a Son of the Muses. ”

“ If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines. Culture says: 'Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice ”

“ And shall not we covet to approve ourselves to our Lord Jesus by a ready compliance with every intimation of his will given us by his word, Spirit and providence? Secondly, How little they feared the Philistines. They were glad of an occasion to defy them. Whether they broke through the host clandestinely, and with such art that the Philistines did not discover them, or openly, and with such terror in their looks that the Philistines durst not oppose them, is not certain; it should seem, they forced their way, sword in hand. ”

“ Hubbard was tossed by a small Irish bull into the Irish Sea and drowned, but as all really good men go to East Aurora when they die, there is no change in his postoffice address.”
The next Annual Philistine Dinner will probably be in honor of Mr. Yone Noguchi.
Here is a true story with a moral for those who can find it: A certain teacher in the primary department of one of the Chicago public schools had a six-year-old boy in her room who seemed rather perverse and very dull. When she would talk to the class he would sit with open mouth and stare at her. ”

“ The people fall again into idolatry and are afflicted by the
Philistines. An angel foretelleth the birth of Samson.
13:1. And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord: and he delivered them into the hands of the Philistines forty years.
13:2. Now there was a certain man of Saraa, and of the race of Dan, whose name was Manue, and his wife was barren.
13:3. And an angel of the Lord appeared to her, and said: Thou art barren and without children: but thou shalt conceive and bear a son. ”

“ One of the frequently recurring signs represents a human head surmounted by a shock of hair (see Fig. 38) , almost exactly like the hair of the Philistines as they are pictured by the artists of Ramses III on the walls of his palace at Medinet Habu (see Fig. 36) . This sign was probably the determinative for man. This likeness would make the proof of the Cretan origin of the Philistines complete, were it not that some scholars think that the disc exhumed at Phæstos had been brought thither from across the sea. ”

“ It is to be found in many manifestations besides these, and may best be called, as we have called it, the love and pursuit of perfection; culture being the true nurse of the pursuing love, and sweetness and light the true character of the pursued perfection. Natures with this bent emerge in all classes,—among the Barbarians, among the Philistines, among the Populace. And this bent always tends to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, but their humanity. They have, in general, a rough time of it in their lives ”

“ In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat. ”