and right beliefs are rewarded--though very often the erroneous belief
is based upon a more conscientious study of the facts than the right
belief.
CCCXXX
If we are to assume that anybody has designedly set this wonderful
universe going, it is perfectly clear to me that he is no more entirely
benevolent and just in any intelligible sense of the words, than that he
is malevolent and unjust. Infinite benevolence need not have invented
pain and sorrow at all--infinite malevolence would very easily have
deprived us of the large measure of content and happiness that falls to
our lot. After all, Butler's "Analogy" is unassailable, and there is
nothing in theological dogmas more contradictory to our moral sense,
than is to be found in the facts of nature. From which, however, the
Bishop's conclusion that the dogmas are true doesn't follow.
CCCXXXI
It appears to me that if every person who is engaged in an industry had
access to instruction in the scientific principles on which that
industry is based; in the mode of applying these principles to practice;
in the actual use of the means and appliances employed; in the language
of the people who know as much about the matter as we do ourselves; and
lastly, in the art of keeping accounts, Technical Education would have
done all that can be required of it.
CCCXXXII
Though under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that
over-instruction may be worse.
CCCXXXIII
There are two things I really care about--one is the progress of
scientific thought, and the other is the bettering of the condition of
the masses of the people by bettering them in the way of lifting
themselves out of the misery which has hitherto been the lot of the
majority of them. Posthumous fame is not particularly attractive to me,
but, if I am to be remembered at all, I would rather it should be as "a
man who did his best to help the people" than by other title.
CCCXXXIV
I am of opinion that our Indian Empire is a curse to us. But so long as
we make up our minds to hold it, we must also make up our minds to do
those things which are needful to hold it effectually, and in the
long-run it will be found that so doing is real justice both for
ourselves, our subject population, and the Afghans themselves.
CCCXXXV
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn
peace and self-respect.
CCCXXXVI
The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for
them. Only let us be sure that it is truth.
CCCXXXVII
Your astonishment at the tenacity of life of fallacies, permit me to
say, is shockingly unphysiological. They, like other low organisms, are
independent of brains, and only wriggle the more, the more they are
smitten on the place where the brains ought to be.
CCCXXXVIII
I don't know what you think about anniversaries. I like them, being
always minded to drink my cup of life to the bottom, and take my chance
of the sweets and bitters.
CCCXXXIX
Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life--the jamming
common-sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.
CCCXL
Life is like walking along a crowded street--there always seem to be
fewer obstacles to getting along on the opposite pavement--and yet, if
one crosses over, matters are rarely mended.
CCCXLI
The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigour as long as
one lives, and death as soon as vigour flags.
CCCXLII
Whether motion disintegrates or integrates is, I apprehend, a question
of conditions. A whirlpool in a stream may remain in the same spot for
any imaginable time. Yet it is the effect of the motion of the particles
of the water in that spot which continually integrate themselves into
the whirlpool and disintegrate themselves from it. The whirlpool is
permanent while the conditions last, though its constituents incessantly
change. Living bodies are just such whirlpools. Matter sets into them in
the shape of food,--sets out of them in the shape of waste products.
Their individuality lies in the constant maintenance of a characteristic
form, not in the preservation of material identity.
CCCXLIII
Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions
"Force," "Gravity," "Vitality," which our own brains have created. I do
not know anything about "inert" things in nature. If we reduce the world
to matter and motion, the matter is not "inert," inasmuch as the same
amount of motion affects different kinds of matter in different ways. To
go back to my own illustration. The fabric of the watch is not inert,
every particle of it is in violent and rapid motion, and the winding-up
simply perturbs the whole infinitely complicated system in a particular
fashion. Equilibrium means death, because life is a succession of
changes, while a changing equilibrium is a contradiction in terms. I am
not at all clear that a living being is comparable to a machine running
down. On this side of the question the whirlpool affords a better
parallel than the watch. If you dam the stream above or below, the
whirlpool dies; just as the living being does if you cut off its food,
or choke it with its own waste products. And if you alter the sides or
bottom of the stream you may kill the whirlpool, just as you kill the
animal by interfering with its structure. Heat and oxidation as a source
of heat appear to supply energy to the living machine, the molecular
structure of the germ furnishing the "sides and bottom of the stream,"
that is, determining the results which the energy supplied shall
produce.
CCCXLIV
I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new
fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of
evolution--intelligible to the young.
CCCXLV
Government by average opinion is merely a circuitous method of going to
the devil; those who profess to lead but in fact slavishly follow this
average opinion are simply the fastest runners and the loudest squeakers
of the herd which is rushing blindly down to its destruction.
CCCXLVI
It's very sad to lose your child just when he was beginning to bind
himself to you, and I don't know that it is much consolation to reflect
that the longer he had wound himself up in your heart-strings the worse
the tear would have been, which seems to have been inevitable sooner or
later. One does not weigh and measure these things while grief is fresh,
and in my experience a deep plunge into the waters of sorrow is the
hopefullest way of getting through them on to one's daily road of life
again. No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but
love and sympathy count for something.
CCCXLVII
There is amazingly little evidence of "reverential care for unoffending
creation" in the arrangements of nature, that I can discover. If our
ears were sharp enough to hear all the cries of pain that are uttered in
the earth by men and beasts, we should be deafened by one continuous
scream!
And yet the wealth of superfluous loveliness in the world condemns
pessimism. It is a hopeless riddle.
CCCXLVIII
A man who has only half as much food as he needs is indubitably starved,
even though his short rations consist of ortolans and are served upon
gold plate.
CCCXLIX
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
CCCL
We men of science, at any rate, hold ourselves morally bound to "try all
things and hold fast to that which is good"; and among public
benefactors, we reckon him who explodes old error, as next in rank to
him who discovers new truth.
CCCLI
Whatever Linnaeus may say, man is not a rational animal--especially in
his parental capacity.
CCCLII
The inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of history is just
as much a question of pure science as the inquiry into the truth or
falsehood of a matter of geology, and the value of evidence in the two
cases must be tested in the same way. If anyone tells me that the
evidence of the existence of man in the miocene epoch is as good as that
upon which I frequently act every day of my life, I reply that this is
quite true, but that it is no sort of reason for believing in the
existence of miocene man.
Surely no one but a born fool can fail to be aware that we constantly,
and in very grave conjunctions, are obliged to act upon extremely bad
evidence, and that very often we suffer all sorts of penalties in
consequence. And surely one must be something worse than a born fool to
pretend that such decision under the pressure of the enigmas of life
ought to have the smallest influence in those judgments which are made
with due and sufficient deliberation.
CCCLIII
1. The Church founded by Jesus has _not_ made its way; has _not_
permeated the world--but _did_ become extinct in the country of its
birth--as Nazarenism and Ebionism.
2. The Church that did make its way and coalesced with the State in the
4th century had no more to do with the Church founded by Jesus than
Ultramontanism has with Quakerism. It is Alexandrian Judaism and
Neoplatonistic mystagogy, and as much of the old idolatry and demonology
as could be got in under new or old names.
3. Paul has said that the Law was schoolmaster to Christ with more truth
than he knew. Throughout the Empire the synagogues had their cloud of
Gentile hangers-on--those who "feared God"--and who were fully prepared
to accept a Christianity, which was merely an expurgated Judaism and the
belief in Jesus as the Messiah.
4. The Christian "Sodalitia" were not merely religious bodies, but
friendly societies, burial societies, and guilds. They hung together for
all purposes--the mob hated them as it now hates the Jews in Eastern
Europe, because they were more frugal, more industrious, and lived
better lives than their neighbours, while they stuck together like
Scotchmen.
If these things are so--and I appeal to your knowledge of history that
they are so--what has the success of Christianity to do with the truth
or falsehood of the story of Jesus?
CCCLIV
It is Baur's great merit to have seen that the key to the problem of
Christianity lies in the Epistle to the Galatians. No doubt he and his
followers rather overdid the thing, but that is always the way with
those who take up a new idea.
CCCLV
If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had
better turn to hand work--it is an indication on Nature's part that she
did not mean him to be a head worker.
CCCLVI
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our
beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our
instincts.
CCCLVII
Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a
condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even
possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express my
opinion that, if there is no hope of a large improvement of the
condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that
the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over Nature
which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that
dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of
Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation, among the
masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet,
which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation.
What profits it to the human Prometheus that he has stolen the fire of
heaven to be his servant, and that the spirits of the earth and of the
air obey him, if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very
vitals and keep him on the brink of destruction?
CCCLVIII
No induction, however broad its basis, can confer certainty--in the
strict sense of the word. The experience of the whole human race through
innumerable years has shown that stones unsupported fall to the ground,
but that does not make it certain that any day next week unsupported
stones will not move the other way. All that it does justify is the very
strong expectation, which hitherto has been invariably verified, that
they will do just the contrary.
Only one absolute certainty is possible to man--namely, that at any
given moment the feeling which he has exists.
All other so-called certainties are beliefs of greater or less
intensity.
CCCLIX
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of
exclusively human manufacture--and very much to our credit.
CCCLX
There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human
affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection--except the sense
of having worked according to one's capacity and light, to make things
clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. That was the lesson I
learned from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me
all my life.
You may make more of failing to get money, and of succeeding in getting
abuse--until such time in your life (if you are teachable) you have
ceased to care much about either.
CCCLXI
The doctrine of the conservation of energy tells neither one way nor the
other [on the doctrine of immortality]. Energy is the cause of movement
of body, _i.e._ things having mass. States of consciousness have no
mass, even if they can be conceded to be movable. Therefore even if they
are caused by molecular movements, they would not in any way affect the
store of energy.
Physical causation need not be the only kind of causation, and when
Cabanis said that thought was a function of the brain, in the same way
as bile secretion is a _function_ of the liver, he blundered
philosophically. Bile is a product of the transformation of material
energy. But in the mathematical sense of the word "function," thought
may be a function of the brain. That is to say, it may arise only when
certain physical particles take on a certain order.
By way of a coarse analogy, consider a parallel-sided piece of glass
through which light passes. It forms no picture. Shape it so as to be a
bi-convex, and a picture appears in its focus.
Is not the formation of the picture a "function" of the piece of glass
thus shaped?
So, from your own point of view, suppose a mind-stuff--[Greek:
logos]--a noumenal cosmic light such as is shadowed in the fourth
gospel. The brain of a dog will convert it into one set of phenomenal
pictures, and the brain of a man into another. But in both cases the
result is the consequence of the way in which the respective brains
perform their "function."
CCCLXII
The actions we call sinful are as much the consequence of the order of
nature as those we call virtuous. They are part and parcel of the
struggle for existence through which all living things have passed, and
they have become sins because man alone seeks a higher life in voluntary
association.
Therefore the instrument has never been marred; on the contrary, we are
trying to get music out of harps, sacbuts, and psalteries, which never
were in tune and seemingly never will be.
CCCLXIII
I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I
have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned;
thus and thus have I learned it: go thou and learn better; but do not
thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you
elect to take, on my authority, conclusions, the value of which you
ought to have tested for yourself.
CCCLXIV
There is endless backwoodsman's work yet to be done. If "those also
serve who only stand and wait," still more do those who sweep and
cleanse; and if any man elect to give his strength to the weeder's and
scavenger's occupation, I remain of the opinion that his service should
be counted acceptable, and that no one has a right to ask more of him
than faithful performance of the duties he has undertaken. I venture to
count it an improbable suggestion that any such person--a man, let us
say, who has well-nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and has
graduated in all the faculties of human relationships; who has taken his
share in all the deep joys and deeper anxieties which cling about them;
who has felt the burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has
stood alone with his dead before the abyss of the eternal--has never had
a thought beyond negative criticism. It seems to me incredible that such
an one can have done his day's work, always with a light heart, with no
sense of responsibility, no terror of that which may appear when the
factitious veil of Isis--the thick web of fiction man has woven round
nature--is stripped off.
CCCLXV
If the doctrine of a Providence is to be taken as the expression, in a
way "to be understanded of the people," of the total exclusion of chance
from a place even in the most insignificant corner of Nature, if it
means the strong conviction that the cosmic process is rational, and the
faith that, throughout all duration, unbroken order has reigned in the
universe, I not only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most
important of all truths. As it is of more consequence for a citizen to
know the law than to be personally acquainted with the features of those
who will surely carry it into effect, so this very positive doctrine of
Providence, in the sense defined, seems to me far more important than
all the theorems of speculative theology. If, further, the doctrine is
held to imply that, in some indefinitely remote past aeon, the cosmic
process was set going by some entity possessed of intelligence and
foresight, similar to our own in kind, however superior in degree, if,
consequently, it is held that every event, not merely in our planetary
speck, but in untold millions of other worlds, was foreknown before
these worlds were, scientific thought, so far as I know anything about
it, has nothing to say about that hypothesis. It is, in fact, an
anthropomorphic rendering of the doctrine of evolution.
It may be so, but the evidence accessible to us is, to my mind, wholly
insufficient to warrant either a positive or a negative conclusion.
CCCLXVI
It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration
recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews--Micah, Isaiah,
and the rest--who took no count whatever of what might or what might not
happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point
should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.
CCCLXVII
Belief in majorities is not rooted in my breast, and if all the world
were against me the fact might warn me to revise and criticise my
opinions, but would not in itself supply a ghost of a reason for
forsaking them. For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a
millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share
the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn,
because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities
which it shudders to look at.
CCCLXVIII
Moral duty consists in the observance of those rules of conduct which
contribute to the welfare of society, and by implication, of the
individuals who compose it.
The end of society is peace and mutual protection, so that the
individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man. The
rules of conduct by which this end is to be attained are
discoverable--like the other so-called laws of Nature--by observation
and experiment, and only in that way.
Some thousands of years of such experience have led to the
generalisations, that stealing and murder, for example, are inconsistent
with the ends of society. There is no more doubt that they are so than
that unsupported stones tend to fall. The man who steals or murders,
breaks his implied contract with society, and forfeits all protection.
He becomes an outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature.
Criminal law indicates the ways which have proved most convenient for
dealing with him.
All this would be true if men had no "moral sense" at all, just as there
are rules of perspective which must be strictly observed by a
draughtsman, and are quite independent of his having any artistic sense.
CCCLXIX
The moral sense is a very complex affair--dependent in part upon
associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation formed
by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of
moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which
is possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally
devoid of it--just as some children draw, or are enchanted by music
while mere infants, while others do not know "Cherry Ripe" from "Rule
Britannia," nor can represent the form of the simplest thing to the end
of their lives.
Now for this last sort of people there is no reason why they should
discharge any moral duty, except from fear of punishment in all its
grades, from mere disapprobation to hanging, and the duty of society is
to see that they live under wholesome fear of such punishment short,
sharp, and decisive.
For the people with a keen innate sense of moral beauty there is no
need of any other motive. What they want is knowledge of the things they
may do and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is to be
attained. Good people so often forget this that some of them
occasionally require hanging almost as much as the bad.
If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations)
obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the mass in whom it is
weak? I can only reply by putting another question--Why do the few in
whom the sense of beauty is strong--Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven,
carry the less endowed multitude away? But they do, and always will.
People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes
on about them.
Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man. I have great
respect for him. The force of genial common-sense respectability could
no further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet
one understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin
did not.
CCCLXX
As to whether we can fulfil the moral law, I should say hardly any of
us. Some of us are utterly incapable of fulfilling its plainest
dictates. As there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually
idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be
kept straight not even by punishment. For these people there is nothing
but shutting up, or extirpation.
CCCLXXI
The cardinal fact in the University questions appears to me to be this:
that the student to whose wants the mediaeval University was adjusted,
looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern looks to
the future and seeks the knowledge of things.
The mediaeval view was that all knowledge worth having was explicitly or
implicitly contained in various ancient writings; in the Scriptures, in
the writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the Christian Fathers.
Whatever apparent novelty they put forward, was professedly obtained by
deduction from ancient data.
The modern knows that the only source of real knowledge lies in the
application of scientific methods of enquiry to the ascertainment of the
facts of existence; that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than
the ascertained, and that the chief business of the teacher is not so
much to make scholars as to train pioneers.
From this point of view, the University occupies a position altogether
independent of that of the copingstone of schools for general education,
combined with technical schools of Theology, Law, and Medicine. It is
not primarily an institution for testing the work of schoolmasters, or
for ascertaining the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers, or
doctors.
It is an institution in which a man who claims to devote himself to
Science or Art, should be able to find some one who can teach him what
is already known, and train him in the methods of knowing more.
CCCLXXII
The besetting sin of able men is impatience of contradiction and of
criticism. Even those who do their best to resist the temptation, yield
to it almost unconsciously and become the tools of toadies and
flatterers. "Authorities," "disciples," and "schools" are the curse of
science; and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit
than all its enemies.
CCCLXXIII
People never will recollect, that mere learning and mere cleverness are
of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the
things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.
CCCLXXIV