Reversal

“ Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual's life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a 'transformation.'
These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided. ”

“ It struck me, even in the light of my then limited judgment, as an unregenerate wish; and thus early my faith in the possibility of man’s reformation received the first of those many blows that have resulted in shattering it.
Nature, whether human or otherwise, was not made to be reformed. You can develop, you can check, but you cannot alter it. ”

“ In strictness, the reverse of wrong always is right; for, to speak with severe precision, the reverse of steering upon Scylla is simply not steering upon Scylla; the reverse of being extravagant is not being parsimonious—it is simply not being extravagant; the reverse of walking eastward is not walking westward—it is simply not walking eastward. And that may include standing still, or walking to any point of the compass except the east. But I understand the reverse of a thing as meaning the opposite extreme from it. ”

“ Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Thus feelings and then reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangled thoughts, and of a series of what are called impressions, planted by reiteration. ”

“ The other side of “the divide,” evolution had been physical,—body, and body function had been the goal. This side “the divide,” it was spiritual and social, and the goal was the evolution of the man within man. The things which mattered now were love, sacrifice, service, goodwill rather than “tooth and claw.” Before, nature’s goal had been along the line of least resistance. Now, the line of march set straight against instinct and along the line of greatest resistance. There could be advance on [30] this side “the divide,” only as the ideal became clearer and its sway more coercive. ”

“ To which party shall I betake myself when each says of the other that 'tis unclean, unclean? Doth your reverence think I am wrong if I stay awhile till I have got me more understanding and know black from white? Would any man counsel me to plunge in like a fly into hot soup? Nay, nay, your reverence cannot upon his conscience do that! Without question one religion must be right and the other two wrong: and if I should betake myself to one without ripe reflection I might choose the wrong as easily as the right, and so repent of my choice for all eternity. ”

“ An act of volition, whether followed by an effect or not, is accompanied by a consciousness of effort, “of force exerted, of power in action, which is necessarily causal, or causative.” This feeling of energy or force, inherent in an act of will, is knowledge a priori; assurance, prior to [pg 256] experience, that we have the power of causing effects. Volition, therefore, it is asserted, is something more than an unconditional antecedent; it is a cause, in a different sense from that in which physical phenomena are said to cause one another: it is an Efficient Cause. ”

“ I am sure, as I do not doubt some of you know from experience, that such individual demonstrations of reverence cause difficulties in the way of temptation to self-consciousness to those who practise them; while in the common worship of a society they minister to division and distraction, and so tend to mar the unity which is the first condition of reverence. ”

“ It is impudence and imposture to demand singular and vast respect to small and common things. Superior virtue and capacity, publick actions and services done to mankind; a generous and benevolent heart, and greatness of mind, are the true objects and sources of reverence. But to claim reverence to prating, to cuts, and colours, and postures, is stupid, ridiculous and saucy. ”

“ XLIII.
“O Haydn,” begg’d I, “say not this. Here speaks
The same rebellion that was once my own.
We must not judge for self, but reverence
The words of men ordain’d to teach the world;
The words of men so learnèd in the truth;
The words of councils fill’d with just such men.—
No reverence have you for authority?” ”

“ Now, under the Restoration, the reaction set in, and the lower and earthly side of human nature—none the less human because it is at the bottom and not at the top—seemed determined to take its full revenge. ”

“ We have now examined the various classes of thinking which we can readily observe in ourselves and which we have plenty of reasons to believe go on, and always have been going on, in our fellow-men. We can sometimes get quite pure and sparkling examples of all four kinds, but commonly they are so confused and intermingled in our reverie as not to be readily distinguishable. The reverie is a reflection of our longings, exultations, and complacencies, our fears, suspicions, and disappointments. ”

“ He, no more than they, seems to have definitely raised the question, How are we to account for, or formulate, the principle of difference or change? What is it that causes things to come into being out of, or recalls them back from being into, the infinite void? ”

“ But not to digress farther in the midst of a digression, as I have known some authors enclose digressions in one another, like a nest of boxes; I do affirm, that having carefully cut up human nature, I have found a very strange, new, and important discovery; that the publick good of mankind is performed by two ways, instruction, and diversion. ”

“ Not a man would believe that we meant to begin. ‘We’ve been ready for months—is there one can deny it? Is there any one here thinks rebellion a sin? We counted the cost—and we did not decry it, And we asked for no more than the word to begin? ”

“ You are in error, says the necessitarian to his opponents, in denying that motive, and in affirming that mind, is the efficient cause of volition. For if an act of the mind, or a volition, is caused by the mind, it must be produced by a preceding act of the mind, and this act must be produced by another preceding act of the mind, and so on ad infinitum; which reduces the matter to a plain impossibility. ”

“ By this mutual transfusion an equilibrium is preserved, like that which similar processes maintain in the natural world, and while a healthy, popular feeling circulates through the Aristocracy, a sense of their own station in the scale elevates the People. ”

“ The change is everywhere, but inward; we localize it here and there, but outwardly; and thus we constitute bodies which are both stable as to their qualities and mobile as to their positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the universal transformation. ”

“ Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?
The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must be acknowledged and taken account of; and in the seen world both aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It is a question of emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint's type or the strong-man's type the more ideal? ”

“ If conversion be a blessed miracle by which a debased nature is suddenly lifted up, and a harsh, lead-colored, prosaic world transfigured into the vestibule of heaven, he longed to witness it in his own experience. ”

“ Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondnesses for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be effected; there is no escape. ”

“ The problem of change is given up, and we fall back upon our laws, persisting and appearing in successions of fleeting elements. If so, phenomena seem now to have become temporal illustrations of laws. ”

“ This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. In all directions our habitual causes of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. ”

“ There is one habit of the imagination, to which we have not yet adverted, the habit of reverie. In reverie we are so intent upon a particular train of ideas, that we are unconscious of all external objects, and we exert but little voluntary power. ”

“ We cannot speak legitimately of changes in the point of view and the intervening medium until we have already constructed some world more stable than that of momentary sensation. Our discussion of the blue spectacles and the walk round the table has, I hope, made this clear. But what remains far from clear is the nature of the reconstruction required. ”

“ After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness? Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration, of rottenness at the core? And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps it could build as well. ”

“ This new life will betake itself along the line of least resistance—or should we not rather say, the least resistances, as a "compromise with all the necessities," in a just balancing of pleasure and unpleasure? ”

“ Every tragedy falls into two parts,—Complication and Unravelling or Denouement. Incidents extraneous to the action are frequently combined with a portion of the action proper, to form the Complication; the rest is the Unravelling. By the Complication I mean all that extends from the beginning of the action to the part which marks the turning-point to good or bad fortune. The Unravelling is that which extends from the beginning of the change to the end. ”

“ If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. ”

“ Wherever we see a change in matter, we should infer an act by which it is produced; and thus, through all the changes and modifications of the material universe, we shall behold the sublime manifestations of an ever-present and all-pervading agency of spirit. ”

“ The choice that is finally made between the right, the expedient, and the wrong is determined by a variety of considerations—by conflicting emotions, by the balancing of probabilities and inclinations, by the degree or kind of temptation, by the presence or absence of witnesses, especially human, by other specialties of an animal's position, by the nature and extent of its moral training, by the character of the rewards and punishments offered on previous occasions. ”

“ Things in themselves, abstracted from our intuition, are susceptible of change. Where there is change, there is succession, and where there is succession, there is a certain order in the things which succeed,—an order which is really in the things themselves, although it does not subsist by itself, separated from them. ”

“ To cure the habit of reverie when it has once been formed, we must take different methods with different tempers. With those who indulge in the stupid reverie, we should employ strong excitations, and present to the senses a rapid succession of objects, which will completely engage without fatiguing them. ”

“ Conversions, whether they be political, scientific, philosophic, or religious, form another way in which bound energies are let loose. They unify, and put a stop to ancient mental interferences. The result is freedom, and often a great enlargement of power. ”

“ When we look back upon events that have happened, we stand in a different position; we behold with a clearer vision as we embrace within our glance the beginning and the end, the act and the consequences. But the man who is doing the act may contemplate a very different result. ”

“ Every thing which is called arising and departing, every change rests therefore only upon the mingling and withdrawing of these eternal and fundamental materials; the inexhaustible manifoldness of being rests upon the different proportions in which these elements are mingled. Every becoming is conceived as such only as a change of place. In this we have a mechanical in opposition to a dynamic explanation of nature.
3. The Two Powers.—Whence now can arise any becoming, if in matter itself there is found no principle to account for the change? ”

“ And then I looked into a Court of Law—then into a Church—then went upon ’Change,—and in every place tried to divide man from his double or false man—from the artificial twin-self that so often walks about the world with him in profane places, and sometimes in sacred temples. ”

“ Law of Attraction.—Where this affinity—or sameness—exists between the different things, there is what we term the law of attraction, or what may be termed the disposition to unite together. Where there is no affinity existing between the nature of the different particles of matter, there is what may be termed the law of repulsion, which has a tendency to destroy the harmony which would otherwise take place. ”

“ At the best one encounters a sort of revolt. This feeling of revolt, I suffered, in varying degrees of intensity, at the hands of almost every one who came near me; it would seem that nothing inflicts a deeper wound than suddenly to make one's distance felt. ”