Source (scholarship)

“ One must have at disposal all valid results of scholarship, yet one must not be a scholar. For
Scholarship is less than sense;
Therefore seek intelligence.
One must command a wealth of detailed fact, ever alert to the deceptiveness of seeming fact, since oftentimes
The firefly seems a fire, the sky looks flat ”

“ It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. ”

“ The spirit and approach should be far removed from the arrogance, contention, and exclusiveness which have too often sullied the name of scholarship in the wider society, and which have created barriers to the sound development of this worthy pursuit. ”

“ Referring to the second class of opportunities inviting the sociological scholar, I content myself with saying that scholars might exalt both their scholarship and their citizenship by claiming an active share in the work of perfecting and applying plans and devices for social improvement and amelioration. ”

“ It is, accordingly, one of the present duties of scholarship to reconsider all that is assumed and involved in the existing institution of property. We must go back to the immemorial perception that human beings cannot live to the best advantage without mutuality. ”

“ They at least will understand that scholarship knows no nationality. But in the fear that this may fall under the eye of that larger public, whose interests are, properly enough, not scholastic, a word of explanation may prove a safeguard. ”

“ No one, I may remark in passing, ought to intermeddle in the direct guidance and ordering of human affairs, who is not a Scholar in the true sense of the word; that is, who has not by means of Learned Culture become a participator in the Divine Idea. ”

“ He in whom Learned Culture has actually accomplished its end,—the attainment and possession of the Idea,—shows, by the manner in which he regards and practises the calling of the Scholar, that his vocation is to him, before all other things, honourable and holy. ”

“ He is an example of what early and continued zeal, talent, and diligence, united with energy of character and consistent moral habits, may accomplish in the cause of letters and science, by the force of solitary application, without the advantage of hereditary wealth, the impulse of patronage, or the prestige of early academic honors. ”

“ What is the vocation of the Scholar?—what is his relation to Humanity as a whole, as well as to particular classes of men?—by what means can he most surely fulfil his high vocation?
The Scholar is invested with a special character only in so far as he is distinguished from other men; the idea of his calling arises from comparison, from his relation to Society at large, by which we understand not the State merely, but generally that aggregate of reasonable men who exist near each other in space, and are thus placed in mutual relations with each other. ”

“ All philosophical knowledge is, by its nature, not empiric, but genetic,—not merely apprehending existing being, but producing and constructing this being from the very root of its life. Thus, with respect to the Scholar, the determinate form of whose being we have now described, there still remains the question,—How does he become a Scholar?—and since his being and growth is an uninterrupted, living, constantly self-producing being,—How does he maintain the life of a Scholar? ”

“ Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. ”

“ The Scholar may securely reckon upon this trust in his honesty and skill, as soon as he has earned it as he ought. Further, there is in all men a feeling of truth, which indeed is not sufficient in itself, but must be developed, proved, and purified ”

“ It is certainly very strange for a scholar to heap together evidence for a host of matters of secondary importance, and neglect to bring forward a single authority for that on which everything turns, i.e., the existence of the [Pg 40] primitive community. ”

“ Why should we go out of our way, one and all of us, to impute personal motives in explanation of the conversion of every individual convert, as he comes before us, if there were in us, the public, an adhesion to that absolute, and universal, and unalienable principle, as its titles are set forth in heraldic style, high and broad, sacred and awful, the right, and the duty, and the possibility of Private Judgment? ”

“ Ye are bought with a price - As the slave who is purchased by his master for a sum of money is the sole property of that master, so ye, being bought with the price of the blood of Christ, are not your own, you are his property. As the slave is bound to use all his skill and diligence for the emolument of his master, so you should employ body, soul, and spirit in the service of your Lord; promoting, by every means in your power, the honor and glory of your God, whom you must also consider as your Lord and Master. ”

“ Yet, how few of these millions, even among the most deeply versed in scholastic lore, unless they are men of the soundest moral and religious principles, are ever guided in their choice by any thing but fancy, whim, caprice, or some other far less excusable motive? Their scholastic acquirements alone, never avail them in the slightest degree. The eye is usually the sole guide—the appellate court of reason and judgment not being so much as even consulted. ”

“ For instance, if without throwing out any previous hint, however remote, I think of 366twenty different persons in succession, my knowledge of whom is a secret in my own brain, and if I say to a medium, ‘Of what person am I thinking now?’ and if the medium instantly, without hesitation or inquiry, gives me the right reply twenty times in succession, I may reasonably conclude—may I not?—that the power is what it appears to be, and that the medium gets his knowledge through a faculty which, if not preternatural, is very rare, and is denied as possible by science. ”

“ Knowledge now, as a rule, remains always subordinate to the service of the will, as indeed it originated for this service, and grew, so to speak, to the will, as the head to the body. In the case of the brutes this subjection of knowledge to the will can never be abolished. ”

“ In every human effort, whether directed to the interests of the commonwealth, or to the private individual and the gains of trade, to science or to art, this master of helps to spiritual births could find fit points of contact for the awakening of a true self-knowledge, and a moral and religions consciousness. ”

“ In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authority of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and the responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power. ”

“ I am resolved that so far as lies in me, they shall not be; and I may say for those whose genius and learning have made the Messenger what it is, that they, too, are thus resolved. Let the hand of liberal patronage be opened and let the gifted minds pour forth their treasures, and the work shall prosper and shall be worthy of patronage. For myself, I desire only a fair compensation for my labors, on which I depend; and the rest shall gladly be given to the cause of literature and whatever credit there may be in the effort to promote its improvement and extension. ”

“ The common purpose of these different branches of knowledge has already been pointed out; viz. that by their means provision may be made for the uniform but constantly progressive development of all the faculties of man: and hence arises the true vocation of the Scholar; the most widely extended survey of the actual advancement of the human race in general, and the steadfast promotion of that advancement. ”

“ Only when a foreign power takes possession of him, and urges him forward, and lives within him in room of his own energy, does true and real existence first enter into his life. This foreign power is ever the power of God. To look up to it for counsel, implicitly to follow its guidance, is the only true wisdom in every employment of human life, and therefore most of all in the highest occupation of which man can partake, the vocation of the True Scholar. ”

“ This is especially illustrated and corroborated in the case of institutions—whether great or small, wealthy or poor, founded, no matter in what century or in what land, to maintain and advance human knowledge, and generally to afford help to those intellectual efforts which ennoble the race. ”

“ In the same place we have said that this life may manifest itself in two forms;—either in actual external Being and Action, or only in Idea; which two distinct modes of manifestation together constitute the peculiar vocation of the Scholar. The first class comprehends all those who are called to lead on human affairs, through their own strength and according to their own idea, to new and progressive harmony with each succeeding age ”

“ He who, although labouring in a limited province, has become a partaker of Knowledge as a whole, and accepts his own calling as but a part thereof, may perhaps have little even historical acquaintance with other provinces, but he has a general conception of the nature of all others, and will constantly exhibit an equal reverence for all. ”

“ Such, for instance, are the poets, prophets, philosophers, inventors and men of science of all ages, the great political, military and religious organizers, [Pg 265] and even the real captains of industry and commerce. All power involves in its origin mental or spiritual force of some sort; and so far as it attaches to passive attributes, like hereditary social position, offices, bank-accounts, and the like, it does so through the aid of conventions and habits which regard these things as repositories of spiritual force and allow them to exercise its function. ”

“ In Lectures and Biographical Sketches, in the essay on Aristocracy, and also in that on The Man of Letters, the duty of loyalty to his thought and his order is urged as a trait of the gentleman and the scholar, and in the latter essay, the scholar’s duty to stand for what is generous and free. ”

“ In the case of normal men the indirect, and even the possible, relations to the will are added, the sum of which make up the total of useful knowledge; but here also knowledge remains confined to the relations. ”

“ The peculiar self-abasement of a man consists in this,—when he makes himself an instrument of a temporary and perishable purpose, and deigns to spend care and labour on something else than the Imperishable and Eternal. In this view, every man should be honourable and holy to himself,—and so, too, should the Scholar. ”

“ It is the scholar's duty to search out the fraction of truth in such wholesale error, to show that some property has been robbery, and to assist in refining principles by which we may guard against permitting any man to call his own what should be partly the franchise of others. ”

“ Ask yourselves, my friends, how much you know about those familiar things which are part of your lives as are the sunshine, the grass, and the flowers—your Bible, your money, your playing-cards. Each is an institution so consecrated by custom that you accept it exactly for what it meant to your father just as he took it from his own father a generation before. ”

“ When the system as a whole has presented its credentials to the reason and the conscience, and these have decided that the bearer of such credentials must be the representative of a Divine Being, then the attempt to pick and choose among the details of the system becomes perilous work. ”

“ On the contrary, the higher, over-individual ends, as they are sometimes called, — politics, industry, science, literature, art — imply a differentiation among men that in spite of its significance would defy classification. ”

“ And if, where the divine government is concerned, practice is the expression of principle, and principle the standard and interpreter of practice, such harmony cannot but be maintained and must be asserted. In studying, therefore, fragments of history and sketches of biography--in disposing of references to institutions, usages, and facts in the New Testament, this necessary harmony between principle and practice in the government, should be continually present to the thoughts of the interpreter. Principles assert what practice must be. Whatever principle condemns, God condemns. ”

“ Even the most complex and rigid institutions may be looked upon as consisting of innumerable personal influences or acts of sympathy, organized, in the case of institutions, into a definite and continuing whole by means of some system of permanent symbols, such as laws, constitutions, sacred writings, and the like, in which personal influences are preserved. And, turning the matter around, we may look upon every act of sympathy 134as a particular expression of the history, institutions, and tendencies of the society in which it takes place. ”

“ In the wondrous old quilt work of inherited, or ancestral predispositions which make your being you may be gifted with all these seven powers in equal and well balanced degree; if you are so blessed you have a great career before you. If, as is more likely, you have in full measure only a part of each, or some in large [Pg 44] measure, some in small, keep on the daily examination of your chart as giving you the canons of a liberal education and of a productive mind. ”

“ But with respect to that whereon the true Scholar can and ought to communicate with the general public,—with respect to Ideas,—there is an infallible test whereby this public may determine for itself whether any doctrine which is presented to it is, or is not, mere Mysticism. ”