Transience

“ It was the great work of the period of transition, and especially of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to effect this change, "to awaken in man a consciousness of his powers, to give him confidence in himself, to show him the beauty of the world and the joy of life, and to make him feel his living connection with the past and the greatness of the future he might create." ”

“ For many and many a century, nay, even for millennia, the [3] slow course of evolution goes on quietly without much observation, and then suddenly comes a change—a change of a dying and a birthing race, a transition stage, a transition age in which all movement is rapid, in which catastrophes are frequent, in which sudden changes make themselves felt, in which men grow in a year more than their forefathers grew perhaps in a century. In such a transition age again the world is standing at the present time. ”

“ It is the fashion to say, as if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness, that every age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more full of change than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the struggle for change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so great a scale as in this in which we are taking part. ”

“ The names of these others are the foremost names of our time, and we instinctively recognise the fact that all of them, those who went before and those who followed after, form but one company. They do. They form the company of the Age of Transition. They close the epoch. They pass the lamp of life to the New Race. They pause on the threshold of the New World. ”

“ And at the present time we are in a cycle of transition, when, as a transition period should indicate, everything in philosophy, religion, and society is changing. In a transition period the full and complete figures and rules respecting cycles are not given out to a generation which elevates money above all thoughts and scoffs at the spiritual view of man and nature. ”

“ We, who thousands of years ago passed through the transition, from the personal, animal view of life to the socialized view, imagine that that transition was an inevitable and natural one; but this transition through which we have been passing for the last eighteen hundred years seems arbitrary, unnatural, and alarming. ”

“ And the transition is a process of generation and destruction, into and from being and not-being, the one and the others. For the generation of the one is the destruction of the others, and the generation of the others is the destruction of the one. There is also separation and aggregation, assimilation and dissimilation, increase, diminution, equalization, a passage from motion to rest, and from rest to motion in the one and many. ”

“ Under the fashionable name of progress what these idealists sincerely cherish is the vital joy of transition; and usually the joy of this transition lies much more in shedding their present state than in attaining a better one. ”

“ Here is a corner of the world in which the evidences of change—of transition are—so patent that a glance reveals them to the dullest beholder. It is as if Nature were here trying to impress upon her children a great object-lesson, as if the universal Dame had said: "Behold! ”

“ I believe, Ladies and Gentlemen, that out of the suffering and struggle of our difficult period of transition, a wholly new and more emotional interest in humanity and its fate, in its exceptional position between the realms of nature and mind, in its mystery and its destiny will emerge, a humanistic impulse which even now is alive and active in the best hearts and minds. This new humanism will have a different character, a different color and tone than the earlier related movements. ”

“ In terms of optimism/pessimism, future studies will tell if the congruence defended in the present transition analyses, a major progress for the debate about the tree of life, can be considered as the solution or if the debate will keep going on. ”

“ I feel with more pain than many Americans do the sorrow of this transition-time; but I do know that it is transition, that it is crisis, and that you will come out of the fire purified, stainless, having had the angel of a great cause walking with you in the furnace. ”

“ Transformations have passed, transformations are on the way. For mercy's sake, cannot they show us transformations in the act? Must the facts of the past and the facts of the future necessarily exclude the facts of the present? ”

“ Reckoning from some point or other within these last forty years, we have, it must be acknowledged by all, entered upon a grand and decisive epoch in the history of the world; and our attention can not be too often or too strongly directed to the fact, that we stand at the critical point of transition from one great period to another. ”

“ It was the beginning of a gradual transformation which with every century, with every generation, takes some new form, and is sometimes called progress, sometimes revolution, but which moves on with the same relentless persistence as the laws that govern the earth. ”

“ For the blow had fallen at the most critical period in life, the period of transition when the newly-awakened mind is in its freshest, most receptive stage, and is most curious, most eager, when knowledge is most readily assimilated, and, above everything, when the foundations of character and the entire life of the man are laid. ”

“ Consequently, to the average mind of the modern Western world, the doctrine of transmigration remains a mere fancy, although, as we shall immediately see, it has a strange poetic charm, a deep metaphysical basis, and a high ethical and religious quality.
The first ground on which the belief rests is the various strong resemblances, both physical and psychical, connecting human beings with the whole family of lower creatures. They have all the senses in common with us, together with the rudiments of intelligence and will. ”

“ The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself over, in our day, from top to bottom ”

“ 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. ”

“ The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition, which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism. ”

“ The present civilization has reached this epochal—this transition—period. In one hundred years from now we shall either have accomplished what no previous civilization accomplished, or we shall have ceased to exist as a race. ”

“ The transformation in the way that great numbers of ordinary people are coming to see themselves—a change that is dramatically abrupt in the perspective of the history of civilization—raises fundamental questions about the role assigned to the general body of humanity in the planning of our planet’s future. ”

“ But such periods of transition do not occur in the life of all peoples, and where they do occur, they are not usually of long duration when compared with the whole of the people's history. Fourthly, there are many important general propositions which are true of all or of nearly all the individuals in any given class. To establish such general propositions by historical evidence will be my task in the present chapters and in any future additions which I may be able to make to them. ”

“ Its aim was rest, or exemption from transmigration, to be attained by looking steadily at the whole united universe, and recognising that man, and all which is created, is transitory, but that beyond the transitory is the eternal. ”

“ Naturally enough:—in the last quarter of each century you have the influx of spiritual forces; which influx, it is to be supposed, can hardly fail to produce changes inwardly,—a new temperature, new conditions in the world of mind. So there must be readjustments; there is a disharmony between outer and inner things, between the world of causes and the world of effects; and one commonly finds the first two decades of the new century filled with the noise and confusion of readjustment. ”

“ But with the wild rush of change in the pace, scope, materials, scale, and possibilities of human life that then occurred, the old boundaries, the old seclusions and separations were violently broken down. All the old settled mental habits and traditions of men found themselves not simply confronted by new conditions, but by constantly renewed and changing new conditions. ”

“ These, and a multitude of the similar questions which people interested in educational progress are asking themselves, arise out of the process of transition that is seemingly one of the fundamental propositions of the universe. All things change, and are changing, from the smallest cell to the most highly organized creature, the noblest mountain range, and the vastest sun in the heavens. ”

“ For, civilization being a progression and not a fixed condition, without incentives, that is without something to escape from and something to escape to, there could be no transition, and hence no civilization. ”

“ When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speaking was prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us the new order which succeeded it already seems antique, even our parents having known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at the suddenness with which a transition so profound beyond all previous experience of the race must have been effected. ”

“ Hence the thought whose course we have to follow is thought in transition, dealing with the old questions, yet waking to the new, quickened by what is behind to enquire into what is within and foreshadow what is before. But, while the thought that is to concern us may thus be described as moving in the realm of our ultimate religious ideas, the thought that is not to concern us moves in the realm of political and social theory. ”

“ There is a third way, in addition to the ghost world of the primitive faith of barbarians, and the resurrection climax of the Christian and Parsee and Hebrew and Moslem creeds, in which the imagination of man, moved by his instinct and reason, has concreted the idea of a future life; namely, by the doctrine of transmigration. ”

“ The favourite idea of classical antiquity was not the idea of progress, but the idea of a cycle of changes in which departure from the original unity and return to it, or, as we should say, differentiation and integration, are not united, but follow each other. ”

“ At each stage the germinal soul represents the totality, the net outcome of its existences, as in each generation of a plant the seed may be said to do. So far, the doctrine of transmigration is a doctrine of the evolution of a soul, a declaration that in a sense we are all that we have been, that virtue and vice will have their reward, that in a sense "men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves." ”

“ For those, and they were many, who were blissfully slumbering upon their faith in progress, a progress from which there was to be no looking back, the awakening has been rude. Without transition, such persons have passed from the absurd excesses of slothful optimism to the vertigo of unplumbed pessimism. ”

“ As a becoming always lies at the base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of becoming is that which history gives us, therefore history is the original world-form, and Nature—the fully elaborated world-mechanism—is the late world-form that only the men of a mature Culture can completely actualize. ”

“ But without soaring to the stars, the moment that this theory of progression, which seems so natural to us amid an advancing civilization, looks around the world, it comes against an enormous fact—the fixed, petrified civilizations. ”

“ Always in social evolution, as in other evolution, the external form suited to earlier needs is but slowly outgrown; and the period of transition, while the new functions are fumbling through the old organs, and slowly forcing mechanical expression for themselves, is necessarily painful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the past six months I have made the sudden transition from the highest stratum of society to the one in which I am to-day. We cannot, and do not desire to pose as contented men, or as men who are looking for mild solutions of the problems that are now pressing for settlement. ”

“ Transmigration, in some form, has certainly been, if not hereafter to be, the lot of man. I do not believe the Platonic conception of this great truth to be the correct one, nor that man will ever undergo the doom again; yet. that the soul has reached its present through many an inferior state, is a self-evident fact to me. ”

“ Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for what we term "independent creation," or the direct intervention of the Supreme Cause, must simply be considered as an avowal that we deem the question to lie beyond the domain of science. ”

“ Perhaps in rational philosophy none could be better chosen than this scheme of migration, which would draw us from the immediate scene of our woe, and, leading us through pleasant and picturesque countries, amuse for a time our despair. ”