APHORISMS and REFLECTIONS (continued 3)

Under these circumstances, it does not appear to me to be open to doubt that the primary act of outward labour in the series which necessarily accompany the life of man is dependent upon the pre-existence of a stock of material which is not only of use to him, but which is disposed in such a manner as to be utilisable with facility. And I further imagine that the propriety of the application of the term "capital" to this stock of useful substance cannot be justly called in question; inasmuch as it is easy to prove that the essential constituents of the work-stuff accumulated in the child's muscles have merely been transferred from the store of food-stuffs, which everybody admits to be capital, by means of the maternal organism to that of the child, in which they are again deposited to await use. Every subsequent act of labour, in like manner, involves an equivalent consumption of the child's store of work-stuff—its vital capital; and one of the main objects of the process of breathing is to get rid of some of the effects of that consumption. It follows, then, that, even if no other than the respiratory work were going on in the organism, the capital of work-stuff, which the child brought with it into the world, must sooner or later be used up, and the movements of breathing must come to an end; just as the see-saw of the piston of a steam-engine stops when the coal in the fireplace has burnt away. Milk, however, is a stock of materials which essentially consists of savings from the food-stuffs supplied to the mother. And these savings are in such a physical and chemical condition that the organism of the child can easily convert them into work-stuff. That is to say, by borrowing directly from the vital capital of the mother, indirectly from the store in the natural bodies accessible to her; it can make good the loss of its own. The operation of borrowing, however, involves further work; that is, the labour of sucking, which is a mechanical operation of much the same nature as breathing. The child thus pays for the capital it borrows m labour; but as the value in work-stuff of the milk obtained is very far greater than the value of that labour, estimated by the consumption of work-stuff it involves, the operation yields a large profit to the infant. The overplus of food-stuff suffices to increase the child's capital of work-stuff; and to supply not only the materials for the enlargement of the "buildings and machinery" which is expressed by the child's growth, but also the energy required to put all these materials together, and to carry them to their proper places. Thus, throughout the years of infancy, and so long thereafter as the youth or man is not thrown upon his own resources, he lives by consuming the vital capital provided by others.

CCLXI

Let us now suppose the child come to man's estate in the condition of a wandering savage, dependent for his food upon what he can pick up or catch, after the fashion of the Australian aborigines. It is plain that the place of mother, as the supplier of vital capital, is now taken by the fruits, seeds, and roots of plants and by various kinds of animals....

The savage, like the child, borrows the capital he needs, and, at any rate, intentionally, does nothing towards repayment; it would plainly be an improper use of the word "produce" to say that his labour in hunting for the roots, or the fruits, or the eggs, or the grubs and snakes, which he finds and eats, "produces" or contributes to "produce" them. The same thing is true of more advanced tribes, who are still merely hunters, such as the Esquimaux. They may expend more labour and skill; but it is spent in destruction.

CCLXII

When we find set forth as an "absolute" truth the statement that the essential factors in economic production are land, capital and labour—when this is offered as an axiom whence all sorts of other important truths may be deduced—it is needful to remember that the assertion is true only with a qualification. Undoubtedly "vital capital" is essential; for, as we have seen, no human work can be done unless it exists, not even that internal work of the body which is necessary to passive life. But, with respect to labour (that is, human labour) I hope to have left no doubt on the reader's mind that, m regard to production, the importance of human labour may be so small as to be almost a vanishing quantity.

CCLXIII

The one thing needful for economic production is the green plant, as the sole producer of vital capital from natural inorganic bodies. Men might exist without labour (in the ordinary sense) and without land; without plants they must inevitably perish.

CCLXIV

Since no amount of labour can produce an ounce of food-stuff beyond the maximum producible by a limited number of plants, under the most favourable circumstances in regard to those conditions which are not affected by labour, it follows that, if the number of men to be fed increases indefinitely, a time must come when some will have to starve. That is the essence of the so-called Malthusian doctrine; and it is a truth which, to my mind, is as plain as the general proposition that a quantity which constantly increases will, some time or other, exceed any greater quantity the amount of which is fixed.

CCLXV

"Virtually" is apt to cover more intellectual sins than "charity" does moral delicts.

CCLXVI

The notion that the value of a thing bears any necessary relation to the amount of labour (average or otherwise) bestowed upon it, is a fallacy which needs no further refutation than it has already received. The average amount of labour bestowed upon warming-pans confers no value upon them in the eyes of a Gold-Coast negro; nor would an Esquimaux give a slice of blubber for the most elaborate of ice-machines.

CCLXVII

Who has ever imagined that wealth which, in the hands of an employer, is capital, ceases to be capital if it is in the hands of a labourer? Suppose a workman to be paid thirty shillings on Saturday evening for six days' labour, that thirty shillings comes out of the employer's capital, and receives the name of "wages" simply because it is exchanged for labour. In the workman's pocket, as he goes home, it is a part of his capital, in exactly the same sense as, half an hour before, it was part of the employer's capital; he is a capitalist just as much as if he were a Rothschild.

CCLXVIII

I think it may be not too much to say that, of all the political delusions which are current in this queer world, the very stupidest are those which assume that labour and capital are necessarily antagonistic; that all capital is produced by labour and therefore, by natural right, is the property of the labourer; that the possessor of capital is a robber who preys on the workman and appropriates to himself that which he has had no share in producing.

On the contrary, capital and labour are necessarily, close allies; capital is never a product of human labour alone; it exists apart from human labour; it is the necessary antecedent of labour; and it furnishes the materials on which labour is employed. The only indispensable form of capital—vital capital—cannot be produced by human labour. All that man can do is to favour its formation by the real producers. There is no intrinsic relation between the amount of labour bestowed on an article and its value in exchange. The claim of labour to the total result of operations which are rendered possible only by capital is simply an a priori iniquity.

CCLXIX

The vast and varied procession of events, which we call Nature, affords a sublime spectacle and an inexhaustible wealth of attractive problems to the speculative observer. If we confine our attention to that aspect which engages the attention of the intellect, nature appears a beautiful and harmonious whole, the incarnation of a faultless logical process, from certain premisses in the past to an inevitable conclusion in the future. But if it be regarded from a less elevated, though more human, point of view; if our moral sympathies are allowed to influence our judgment, and we permit ourselves to criticize our great mother as we criticize one another; then our verdict, at least so far as sentient nature is concerned, can hardly be so favourable.

In sober truth, to those who have made a study of the phenomena of life as they are exhibited by the higher forms of the animal world, the optimistic dogma, that this is the best of all possible worlds, will seem little better than a libel upon possibility. It is really only another instance to be added to the many extant, of the audacity of a priori speculators who, having created God in their own image, find no difficulty in assuming that the Almighty must have been actuated by the same motives as themselves. They are quite sure that, had any other course been practicable, He would no more have made infinite suffering a necessary ingredient of His handiwork than a respectable philosopher would have done the like.

But even the modified optimism of the time-honoured thesis of physico-theology, that the sentient world is, on the whole, regulated by principles of benevolence, does but ill stand the test of impartial confrontation with the facts of the case. No doubt it is quite true that sentient nature affords hosts of examples of subtle contrivances directed towards the production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain; and it may be proper to say that these are evidences of benevolence. But if so, why is it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no less necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are evidences of malevolence?

If a vast amount of that which, in a piece of human workmanship, we should call skill, is visible in those parts of the organization of a deer to which it owes its ability to escape from beasts of prey, there is at least equal skill displayed in that bodily mechanism of the wolf which enables him to track, and sooner or later to bring down, the deer. Viewed under the dry light of science, deer and wolf are alike admirable; and, if both were non-sentient automata, there would be nothing to qualify our admiration of the action of the one on the other. But the fact that the deer suffers, while the wolf inflicts suffering, engages our moral sympathies. We should call men like the deer innocent and good, men such as the wolf malignant and bad; we should call those who defended the deer and aided him to escape brave and compassionate, and those who helped the wolf in his bloody work base and cruel. Surely, if we transfer these judgments to nature outside the world of man at all, we must do so impartially. In that case, the goodness of the right hand which helps the deer, and wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the wolf, will neutralize one another: and the course of nature will appear to be neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.

This conclusion is thrust upon us by analogous facts in every part of the sentient world; yet, mas-much as it not only jars upon prevalent prejudices, but arouses the natural dislike to that which is painful, much ingenuity has been exercised in devising an escape from it.

CCLXX

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. He must admit that the skill and training displayed are wonderful. But he must shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both vanquished and victor. And since the great game is going on in every corner of the world, thousands of times a minute; since, were our ears sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of hell to hear—

—it seems to follow that, if this world is governed by benevolence, it must be a different sort of benevolence from that of John Howard.

CCLXXI

This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense. A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimistic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every twenty-four—a supposition which many tolerably vigorous people know, to their cost, is not extravagant—the burden of life would have been immensely increased without much practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse conditions than these.

CCLXXII

There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which renders the hypothesis that the course of sentient nature is dictated by malevolence quite untenable. A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are to all appearance unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who experience them, few delights can be more entrancing than such as are afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts, and especially by music; but they are products of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known, in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of mankind.

CCLXXIII

The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that, if Ormuzd has not had his way in this world, neither has Ahriman. Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism. If we desire to represent the course of nature in terms of human thought, and assume that it was intended to be that which it is, we must say that its governing principle is intellectual and not moral; that it is a materialized logical process, accompanied by pleasures and pains, the incidence of which, in the majority of cases, has not the slightest reference to moral desert That the rain falls alike upon the just and the unjust, and that those upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were no worse than their neighbours, seem to be Oriental modes of expressing the same conclusion.

CCLXXIV

In the strict sense of the word "nature," it denotes the sum of the phenomenal world, of that which has been, and is, and will be; and society, like art, is therefore a part of nature. But it is convenient to distinguish those parts of nature in which man plays the part of immediate cause, as something apart; and therefore, society, like art, is usefully to be considered as distinct from nature. It is the more desirable, and even necessary, to make this distinction, since society differs from nature in having a definite moral object; whence it comes about that the course shaped by the ethical man—the member of society or citizen—necessarily runs counter to that which tne non-ethical man—the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom—tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, like any other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle.

CCLXXV

The first men who substituted the state of mutual peace for that of mutual war, whatever the motive which impelled them to take that step, created society. But, in establishing peace, they obviously put a limit upon the struggle for existence. Between the members of that society, at any rate, it was not to be pursued à outrance. And of all the successive shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of individual against individual is most strictly limited. The primitive savage, tutored by Istar, appropriated whatever took his fancy, and killed whosoever opposed him, if he could. On the contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of others; he seeks the common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as an essential part of his own welfare. Peace is both end and means with him; and he founds his life on a more or less complete self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence. He tries to escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man, governed upon the principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral end, but in its perfection, social life, is embodied morality.

CCLXXVI

I was once talking with a very eminent physician* about the vis medicatrix naturæ. "Stuff!" said he; "nine times out of ten nature does not want to cure the man: she wants to put him in his coffin."

CCLXXVII

Let us look at home. For seventy years peace and industry have had their way among us with less interruption and under more favourable conditions than in any other country on the face of the earth. The wealth of Croesus was nothing to that which we have accumulated, and our prosperity has filled the world with envy. But Nemesis did not forget Croesus: has she forgotten us?

CCLXXVIII

Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be less satisfactory than the position in which we find ourselves. In a real, though incomplete, degree we have attained the condition of peace which is the main object of social organization; and, for argument's sake, it may be assumed that we desire nothing but that which is in itself innocent and praiseworthy—namely, the enjoyment of the fruits of honest industry. And lo! in spite of ourselves, we are in reality engaged in an internecine struggle for existence with our presumably no less peaceful and well-meaning neighbours. We seek peace and we do not ensue it. The moral nature in us asks for no more than is compatible with the general good; the non-moral nature proclaims and acts upon that fine old Scottish family motto, "Thou shalt starve ere I want." Let us be under no illusions, then. So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, or is likely to be devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself, in its intensest form, of that struggle for existence the limitation of which is the object of society. And however shocking to the moral sense this eternal competition of man against man and of nation against nation may be; however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole; this state of things must abide, and grow continually worse, so long as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation which does not solve it will sooner or later be devoured by the monster itself has generated.

CCLXXIX

It would be folly to entertain any ill-feeling towards those neighbours and rivals who, like ourselves, are slaves of Istar; but if somebody is to be starved, the modern world has no Oracle of Delphi to which the nations can appeal for an indication of the victim. It is open to us to try our fortune; and, if we avoid impending fate, there will be a certain ground for believing: that we are the right people to escape. Securus judical orbis.

To this end, it is well to look into the necessary conditions of our salvation by works. They are two, one plain to all the world and hardly needing insistence; the other seemingly not so plain, since too often it has been theoretically and practically left out of sight The obvious condition is that our produce snail be better than that of others. There is only one reason why our goods should be referred to those of our rivals—our customers must find them better at the price. That means that we must use more knowledge, skill, and industry in producing them, without a proportionate increase in the cost of production; and, as the price of labour constitutes a large element in that cost, the rate of wages must be restricted within certain limits. It is perfectly true that cheap production and cheap labour are by no means synonymous; but it is also true that wages cannot increase beyond a certain proportion without destroying cheapness. Cheapness, then, with, as part and parcel of cheapness, a moderate price of labour, is essential to our success as competitors in the markets of the world.

The second condition is really quite as plainly indispensable as the first, if one thinks seriously about the matter. It is social stability. Society-is stable when the wants of its members obtain as much satisfaction as, life being what it is, common sense and experience show may be reasonably expected. Mankind, in general, care very little for forms of government or ideal considerations of any sort; and nothing really stirs the great multitude to break with custom and incur the manifest perils of revolt except the belief that misery in this world, or damnation in the next, or both, are threatened by the continuance of the state of things in which they have been brought up. But when they do attain that conviction, society becomes as unstable as a package of dynamite, and a very small matter will produce the explosion which sends it back to the chaos of savagery.

CCLXXX

Intelligence, knowledge, and skill are undoubtedly conditions of success; but of what avail are they likely to be unless they are backed up by honesty, energy, goodwill, and all the physical and moral faculties that go to the making of manhood, and unless they are stimulated by hope of such reward as men may fairly look to? And what dweller in the slough of want, dwarfed in body and soul, demoralized, hopeless, can reasonably be expected to possess these qualities?

CCLXXXI

I am as strongly convinced as the most pronounced individualist can be, that it is desirable that every man should be free to act in every way which does not limit the corresponding freedom of his fellow-man. But I fail to connect that great induction of political science with the practical corollary which is frequently drawn from it: that the State—that is, the people in their corporate capacity—has no business to meddle with anything but the administration of justice and external defence. It appears to me that the amount of freedom which incorporate society may fitly leave to its members is not a fixed quantity, to be determined a priori by deduction from the fiction called "natural rights"; but that it must be determined by, and vary with, circumstances. I conceive it to be demonstrable that the higher and the more complex the organization of the social body, the more closely is the life of each member bound up with that of the whole; and the larger becomes the category of acts which cease to be merely self-regarding, and which interfere with the freedom of others more or less seriously.

If a squatter, living ten miles away from any neighbour, chooses to burn his house down to get rid of vermin, there may be no necessity (in the absence of insurance offices) that the law should interfere with his freedom of action; his act can hurt nobody but himself. But if the dweller in a street chooses to do the same thing, the State very properly makes such a proceeding a crime, and punishes it as such. He does meddle with his neighbour's freedom, and that seriously. So it might, perhaps, be a tenable doctrine, that it would be needless, and even tyrannous, to make education compulsory in a sparse agricultural population, living in abundance on the produce of its own soil; but, in a densely populated manufacturing country, struggling for existence with competitors, every ignorant person tends to become a burden upon, and, so far, an infringer of the liberty of, his fellows, and an obstacle to their success. Under such circumstances an education rate is, in fact, a war tax, levied for purposes of defence.

CCLXXXII

That State action always has been more or less misdirected, and always will be so, is, I believe, perfectly true. But I am not aware that it is more true of the action of men in their corporate capacity than it is of the doings of individuals. The wisest and most dispassionate man in existence, merely wishing to go from one stile in a field to the opposite, will not walk quite straight—he is always going a little wrong, and always correcting himself; and I can only congratulate the individualist who is able to say that his general course of life has been of a less undulatory character. To abolish State action, because its direction is never more than approximately correct, appears to me to be much the same thing as abolishing the man at the wheel altogether, because, do what he will, the ship yaws more or less. "Why should I be robbed of my property to pay for teaching another man's children?" is an individualist question, which is not unfrequently put as if it settles the whole business. Perhaps it does, but I find difficulties in seeing why it should. The parish in which I live makes me pay my share for the paving and lighting of a great many streets that I never pass through; and I might plead that I am robbed to smooth the way and lighten the darkness of other people. But I am afraid the parochial authorities would not let me off on this plea; and I must confess I do not see why they should.

CCLXXXIII

I cannot speak of my own knowledge, but I have every reason to believe that I came into this world a small reddish person, certainly without a gold spoon in my mouth, and in fact with no discernible abstract or concrete "rights" or property of any description. If a foot was not set upon me at once, as a squalling nuisance, it was either the natural affection of those about me, which I certainly had done nothing to deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was painfully built up by the society into which I intruded, that prevented that catastrophe. If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from the vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did anything to deserve those advantages. And, if I possess anything now, it strikes me that, though I may have fairly earned my day's wages for my day's work, and may justly call them my property—yet, without that organization of society, created out of the toil and blood of long generations before my time, I should probably have had nothing but a flint axe and an indifferent hut to call my own; and even those would be mine only so long as no stranger savage came my way.

So that if society, having, quite gratuitously, done all these things for me, asks me in turn to do something towards its preservation—even if that something is to contribute to the teaching of other men's children—I really, in spite of all my individualist learnings, feel rather ashamed to say no. And, if I were not ashamed, I cannot say that I think that society would be dealing unjustly with me in converting the moral obligation into a legal one. There is a manifest unfairness in letting all the burden be borne by the willing horse.

CCLXXXIV

It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the fact that efficient teachers of science and of technology are not to be made by the processes in vogue at ordinary training colleges. The memory loaded with mere bookwork is not the thing wanted—is, in fact, rather worse than useless—in the teacher of scientific subjects. It is absolutely essential that his mind should be full of knowledge and not of mere learning, and that what he knows should have been learned in the laboratory rather than in the library.

CCLXXXV

The attempt to form a just conception of the value of work done in any department of human knowledge, and of its significance as an indication of the intellectual and moral qualities of which it was the product, is an undertaking which must always be beset with difficulties, and may easily end in making the limitations of the appraiser more obvious than the true worth of that which he appraises. For the judgment of a contemporary is liable to be obscured by intellectual incompatibilities and warped by personal antagonisms; while the critic of a later generation, though he may escape the influence of these sources of error, is often ignorant, or forgetful, of the conditions under which the labours of his predecessors have been carried on. He is prone to lose sight of the fact that without their clearing of the ground and rough-hewing of the foundation-stones, the stately edifice of later builders could not have been erected.

CCLXXXVI

The vulgar antithesis of fact and theory is founded on a misconception of the nature of scientific theory, which is, or ought to be, no more than the expression of fact in a general form. Whatever goes beyond such expression is hypothesis; and hypotheses are not ends, but means. They should be regarded as instruments by which new lines of inquiry are indicated; or by the aid of which a provisional coherency and intelligibility may be given to seemingly disconnected groups of phenomena. The most useful of servants to the man of science, they are the worst of masters. And when the establishment of the hypothesis becomes the end, and fact is alluded to only so far as it suits the "Idee," science has no longer anything to do with the business.

CCLXXXVII

Scientific observation tell us that living birds form a group or class of animals, through which a certain form of skeleton runs; and that this kind of skeleton differs in certain well-defined characters from that of mammals. On the other hand, if anyone utterly ignorant of osteology, but endowed with the artistic sense of form, were set before a bird skeleton and a mammalian skeleton, he would at once see that the two were similar and yet different. Very likely he would be unable to give clear expression to his just sense of the differences and resemblances; perhaps he would make great mistakes in detail if he tried. Nevertheless, he would be able to draw from memory a couple of sketches, in which all the salient points of likeness and unlikeness would be reproduced with sufficient accuracy. The mere osteologist, however accurately he might put the resemblances and differences into words, if he lacked the artistic visualising faculty, might be hopelessly incompetent to perform any such feat; lost in details, it might not even occur to him that it was possible; or, still more probably, the habit of looking for differences might impair the perception of resemblances.

Under these circumstances, the artist might be led to higher and broader views, and thus be more useful to the progress of science than the osteological expert. Not that the former attains the higher truth by a different method; for the way of reaching truth is one and indivisible. Whether he knows it or not, the artist has made a generalization from two sets of facts, which is perfectly scientific in form; and trustworthy so far as it rests upon the direct perception of similarities and dissimilarities. The only peculiarity of the artistic application of scientific method lies in the artist's power of visualizing the result of his mental processes, of embodying the facts of resemblance in a visible "type," and of showing the manner in which the differences may be represented as modifications of that type; he does, in fact, instinctively, what an architect, who desires to demonstrate the community of plan in certain ancient temples, does by the methodical construction of plans, sections, and elevations; the comparison of which will furnish him with the "type" of such temples.

Thus, what I may term the artistic fashion of dealing with anatomy is not only perfectly legitimate, but has been of great utility. The harm of it does not begin until tine attempt is made to get more out of this visual projection of thought than it contains; until the origin of the notion of "type" is forgotten and the speculative philosopher deludes himself with the supposition that the generalization suggested by fact is an "Idea" of the Pure Reason, with which fact must, somehow or other, be made to agree.

CCLXXXVIII

Flowers are the primers of the morphologist; those who run may read in them uniformity of type amidst endless diversity, singleness of plan with complex multiplicity of detail. As a musician might say, every natural group of flowering plants is a sort of visible fugue, wandering about a central theme which is never forsaken, however it may, momentarily, cease to be apparent.

CCLXXXIX

Like all the really great men of literature, Goethe added some of the qualities of the man of science to those of the artist, especially the habit of careful and patient observation of Nature. The great poet was no mere book-learned speculator. His acquaintance with mineralogy, geology, botany and osteology, the fruit of long and wide studies, would have sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate in those days, if only he could have pleaded ignorance of everything else. Unfortunately for Goethe's credit with his scientific contemporaries, and, consequently, for the attention attracted by his work, he did not come forward as a man of science until the public had ranged him among the men of literature. And when the little men have thus classified a big man, they consider that the last word has been said about him; it appears to the thought hardly decent on his part if he venture to stray beyond the speciality they have assigned to him. It does not seem to occur to them that a clear intellect is an engine capable of supplying power to all sorts of mental factories; nor to admit that, as Goethe somewhere pathetically remarks, a man may have a right to live for himself as well as for the public; to follow the line of work that happens to interest him, rather than that which interests them.

On the face of the matter it is not obvious that the brilliant poet had less chance of doing good service in natural science than the dullest of dissectors and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured to indicate, there was considerable reason, a hundred years ago, for thinking that an infusion of the artistic way of looking at things might tend to revivify the somewhat mummified body of technical zoology and botany. Great ideas were floating about; the artistic apprehension was needed to give these airy nothings a local habitation and a name; to convert vague suppositions into definite hypotheses. And I apprehend that it was just this service which Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the intermaxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on the metamorphoses of plants.

CCXC

All this is mere justice to Goethe; but, as it is the unpleasant duty of the historian to do justice upon, as well as to, great men, it behoves me to add that the germs of the worst faults of later ioeculative morphologists are no less visible in his writings than their great merits. In the artist-philosopher there was, at best, a good deal more artist than philosopher; and when Goethe ventured into the regions which belong to pure science, this excess of a virtue had all the consequences of a vice. "Trennen und zahlen lag nicht in meiner Natur," says he; but the mental operations of which "analysis and numeration" are partial expressions are indispensable for every step of progress beyond happy glimpses, even in morphology; while, in physiology and in physics, failure in the most exact performance of these operations involves sheer disaster, as indeed Goethe was afforded abundant opportunity of learning. Yet he never understood the sharp lessons he received, and put down to malice, or prejudice, the ill-reception of his unfortunate attempts to deal with purely physical problems.

CCXCI

There was never any lack of the scientific imagination about the great anatomist; and the charge of indifference to general ideas, sometimes brought against him, is stupidly unjust. But Cuvier was one of those happily endowed persons in whom genius never parts company with common-sense; and whose perception of the importance of sound method is so great that they look at even a truth, hit upon by those who pursue an essentially vicious method, with the sort of feeling with which an honest trader regards the winnings of a gambler. They hold it better to remain poor than obtain riches by the road that, as a rule, leads to ruin.

CCXCII

The irony of history is nowhere more apparent than in science. Here we see the men, over whose minds the coming events of the world of biology cast their shadows, doing their best to spoil their case in stating it; while the man who represented sound scientific method is doing his best to stay the inevitable progress of thought and bolster up antiquated traditions. The progress of knowledge during the last seventy years enables us to see that neither Geoffroy, nor Cuvier, was altogether right nor altogether wrong; and that they were meant to hunt m couples instead of pulling against one another. Science has need of servants of very different qualifications; of artistic constructors no less than of men of business; of people to design her palaces and of others to see that the materials are sound and well-fitted together; of some to spur investigators, and of others to keep their heads cool. The only would-be servants, who are entirely unprofitable, are those who do not take the trouble to interrogate Nature, but imagine vain things about her; and spin, from their inner consciousness, webs, as exquisitely symmetrical as those of the most geometrical of spiders, but alas! as easily torn to pieces by some inconsidered bluebottle of a fact.

CCXCIII

There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or wrecks one's self on.

CCXCIV

A Local Museum should be exactly what its name implies, viz., "Local"—illustrating local Geology, local Botany, local Zoology, and local Archaeology.

Such a museum, if residents who are interested in these sciences take proper pains, may be brought to a great degree of perfection and be unique of its kind. It will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance. Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindoo idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells—who shall describe the weary inutility of it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for the objects of science elsewhere than under their noses. What they want to know is that their "America is here," as Wilhelm Meister has it.

CCXCV

A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good-will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.

CCXCVI

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

CCXCVII

I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. <

Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness. But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, "I believe such and such to be true." All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms.

CCXCVIII

I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena of my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatize a word, and it alters nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than I was before.

CCXCIX

I do not know whether the animals persist after they disappear or not. I do not even know whether the infinite difference between us and them may not be compensated by their persistence and my cessation after apparent death, just as the humble bulb of an annual fives, whilst the glorious flowers it has put forth die away.

CCC

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

CCCI

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow numbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

CCCII

There are, however, other arguments commonly brought forward in favour of the immortality of man, which are to my mind not only delusive but mischievous. The one is the notion that the moral government of the world is imperfect without a system of future rewards and punishments. The other is: that such a system is indispensable to practical morality. I believe that both these dogmas are very mischievous lies.

With respect to the first, I am no optimist, but I have the firmest belief that the Divine Government (if we may use such a phrase to express the sum of the "customs of matter") is wholly just The more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of my own), the more obvious it is to me that the wicked does not flourish nor is the righteous punished. But for this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all forget, that the rewards of life are contingent upon obedience to the whole Law—physical as well as moral—and that moral obedience will not atone for physical sin, or vice versa.

CCCIII

The ledger of the Almighty is strictly kept, and every one of us has the balance of his operations paid over to him at the end of every minute of his existence.

Life cannot exist without a certain conformity to the surrounding universe—that conformity involves a certain amount of happiness in excess of pain. In short, as we live we are paid for living.

CCCIV

It is to be recollected in view of the apparent discrepancy between men's acts and their rewards that Nature is juster than we. She takes into account what a man brings with him into the world, which human justice cannot do. If I, born a bloodthirsty and savage brute, inheriting these qualities from others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang me, but I shall not be visited with the horrible remorse which would be my real punishment if, my nature being higher, I had done the same thing.

CCCV

The absolute justice of the system of things is as clear to me as any scientific fact The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so—for experimental proof of the fact is within reach of us all—nay, is before us all in our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it.

CCCVI

Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this life leads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.

CCCVII

If the expectation of hell hereafter can keep me from evil-doing, surely a fortiori the certainty of hell now will do so? If a man could be firmly impressed with the belief that stealing damaged him as much as swallowing arsenic would do (and it does), would not the dissuasive force of that belief be greater than that of any based on mere future expectations?

CCCVIII

As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, "If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all that was best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge.

CCCIX

He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great unknown, his life has been one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.

CCCX

Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be made to agree with the statements as to the matters of fact laid down in Genesis—whether the Gospels are historically true or not—are matters of comparatively small moment in the face of the impassable gulf between the anthropomorphism (however refined) of theology and the passionless impersonality of the unknown and unknowable which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena.

CCCXI

I am too much a believer in Butler and in the great principle of the "Analogy" that "there is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel it by a greater absurdity of Nature" (it is not commonly stated in this way), to have any difficulties about miracles. I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school.

CCCXII

This universe is, I conceive, like to a great game being played out, and we poor mortals are allowed to take a hand. By great good fortune the wiser among us have made out some few of the rules of the game, as at present played. We call them "Laws of Nature," and honour them because we find that if we obey them we win something for our pains. The cards are our theories and hypotheses, the tricks our experimental verifications. But what sane man would endeavour to solve this problem: given the rules of a game and the winnings, to find whether the cards are made of pasteboard or gold-leaf? Yet the problem of the metaphysicians is to my mind no saner.

CCCXIII

I have not the smallest sentimental sympathy with the negro; don't believe in him at all, in short. But it is clear to me that slavery means, for the white man, bad political economy; bad social morality; bad internal political organisation, and a bad influence upon free labour and freedom all over the world.

CCCXIV

At the present time the important question for England is not the duration of her coal, but the due comprehension of the truths of science, and the labours of her scientific men.

CCCXV

It is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.

CCCXVI

A good book is comparable to a piece of meat, and fools are as flies who swarm to it, each for the purpose of depositing and hatching his own particular maggot of an idea.

CCCXVII

Children work a greater metamorphosis in men than any other condition of life. They ripen one wonderfully and make life ten times better worth having than it was.

CCCXVIII

Teach a child what is wise, that is morality, Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!

CCCXIX

People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.

CCCXX

We are in the midst of a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only the continuation of that movement But there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the bottom of the movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between free thought and traditional authority. One or other will have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration, which will have as side issues vast political and social troubles. I have no more doubt that free thought will win in the long run than I have that I sit here writing to you, or that this free thought will organize itself into a coherent system, embracing human life and the world as one harmonious whole. But this organization will be the work of generations of men, and those who further it most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and to rest in no verbal delusions.

CCCXXI

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

CCCXXII

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

CCCXXIII

Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigour and capacity.

CCCXXIV

We have heard a great deal lately about the physical disabilities of women. Some of these alleged impediments, no doubt, are realty inherent in their organization, but nine-tenths of them are artificial—the products of their modes of life. I believe that nothing would tend so effectually to get rid of these creations of idleness, weariness, and that "over stimulation of the emotions" which, in plainer-spoken days, used to be called wantonness, than a fair share of healthy work, directed towards a definite object, combined with an equally fair share of healthy play, during the years of adolescence; and those who are best acquainted with the acquirements of an average medical practitioner will find it hardest to believe that the attempt to reach that standard is like to prove exhausting to an ordinarily intelligent and well-educated young woman.

CCCXXV

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance.

CCCXXVI

I ask myself—suppose you knew that by inflicting prolonged pain on 100 rabbits you could discover a way to the extirpation of leprosy, or consumption, or locomotor ataxy, or of suicidal melancholia among human beings, dare you refuse to inflict that pain? Now I am quite unable to say that I dare. That sort of daring would seem to me to be extreme moral cowardice, to involve gross inconsistency.

For the advantage and protection of society, we all agree to inflict pain upon man—pain of the most prolonged and acute character—in our prisons, and on our battlefields. If England were invaded, we should have no hesitation about inflicting the maximum of suffering upon our invaders for no other object than our own good.

But if the good of society and of a nation is a sufficient plea for inflicting pain on men, I think it may suffice us for experimenting on rabbits or dogs.

At the same time, I think that a heavy moral responsibility rests on those who perform experiments of the second kind.

The wanton infliction of pain on man or beast is a crime; pity is that so many of those who (as I think rightly) hold this view, seem to forget that the criminality lies in the wantonness and not in the act of inflicting pain per se.

CCCXXVII

The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Education cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever station of society they are to be found, and the universities ought to be and may be, the fortresses of the higher life of the nation.

CCCXXVIII

As a matter of fact, men sin, and the consequences of their sins affect endless generations of their progeny. Men are tempted, men are punished for the sins of others without merit or demerit of their own; and they are tormented for their evil deeds as long as their consciousness lasts.

CCCXXIX

I find that as a matter of experience, erroneous beliefs are punished, and right beliefs are rewarded—though very often the erroneous belief is based on a more conscientious study of the facts than 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 m 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 Linnæus 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 Ultra-montanism 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—]—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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 coping-stone 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

In my opinion a man's first duty is to find a way of supporting himself, thereby relieving other people of the necessity of supporting him. Moreover, the learning to do work of practical value in the world, in an exact and careful manner, is of itself a very-important education, the effects of which make themselves felt in all other pursuits. The habit of doing that which you do not care about when you would much rather be doing something else, is invaluable.

CCCLXXV

Success in any scientific career requires an unusual equipment of capacity, industry and energy. If you possess that equipment you will find leisure enough after your daily commercial work is over, to make an opening in the scientific ranks for yourself. If you do not, you had better stick to commerce.

Nothing is less to be desired than the fate of a young man, who, as the Scotch proverb says, in 'trying to make a spoon spoils a horn' and becomes a mere hanger-on in literature or in science, when he might have been a useful and a valuable member of Society in other occupations.

CCCLXXVI

Playing Providence is a game at which one is very apt to burn one's fingers.

CCCLXXVII

I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientifc methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.

CCCLXXVIII

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

CCCLXXIX

I have not the slightest doubt about the magnitude of the evils which accrue from the steady increase of European armaments; but I think that this regrettable fact is merely the superficial expression of social forces, the operation of which cannot be sensibly affected by agreements between Governments.

In my opinion it is a delusion to attribute the growth of armaments to the "exactions of militarism." The "exactions of industrialism," generated by international commercial competition, may, I believe, claim a much larger share in prompting that growth. Add to this the French thirst for revenge, the most just determination of the German and Italian peoples to assert their national unity; the Russian Panslavonic fanaticism and desire for free access to the western seas; the Papacy steadily fishing in the troubled waters for the means of recovering its lost (I hope for ever lost) temporal possessions and spiritual supremacy; the "sick man," kept alive only because each of his doctors is afraid of the other becoming his heir.

When I think of the intensity of the perturbing agencies which arise out of these and other conditions of modern European society, I confess that the attempt to counteract them by asking Governments to agree to a maximum military expenditure, does not appear to me to be worth making; indeed I think it might do harm by leading people to suppose that the desires of Governments are the chief agents in determining whether peace or war shall obtain in Europe.

CCCLXXX

I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And the importance of scientific method in modern practical life—always growing and increasing—is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are the strength of the priests.

CCCLXXXI

There is such a thing as a science of social life, for which, if the term had not been so helplessly degraded, Politics is the proper name.

Men are beings of a certain constitution, who, under certain conditions, will as surely tend to act in certain ways as stones will tend to fall if you leave them, unsupported. The laws of their nature are as invariable as the laws of gravitation, only the applications to particular cases offer worse problems than the case of the three bodies.

The Political Economists have gone the right way to work—the way that the physical philosopher follows in all complex affairs—by tracing out the effects of one great cause of human action, the desire of wealth, supposing it to be unchecked.

If they, or other people, have forgotten that there are other potent causes of action which may interfere with this, it is no fault of scientific method but only their own stupidity.

Hydrostatics is not a "dismal science," because water does not always seek the lowest level—e.g. from a bottle turned upside down, if there is a cork in the neck!

There is much need that somebody should do for what is vaguely called "Ethics" just what the Political Economists have done. Settle the question of what will be done under the unchecked action of certain motives, and leave the problem of "ought" for subsequent consideration.

For, whatever they ought to do, it is quite certain the majority of men will act as if the attainment of certain positive and negative pleasures were the end of action.

We want a science of "Eubiotics" to tell us exactly what will happen if human beings are exclusively actuated by the desire of well-being in the ordinary sense. Of course the utilitarians have laid the foundations of such a science, with the result that the nicknamer of genius called this branch of science "pig philosophy," making just the same blunder as when ne called political economy "dismal science."

"Moderate well-being" may be no more the worthiest end of life than wealth. But if it is the best to be had in this queer world—it may be worth trying for.

CCCLXXXII

Those who wish to attain to some clear and definite solution of the great problems which Mr. Darwin was the first person to set before us in later times must base themselves upon the facts which are stated in his great work, and, still more, must pursue their inquiries by the methods of which he was so brilliant an exemplar throughout the whole of his life. You must have his sagacity, his untiring search after the knowledge of fact, his readiness always to give up a preconceived opinion to that which was demonstrably true, before you can hope to carry his doctrines to their ultimate issue; and whether the particular form in which he has put them before us may be such as is finally destined to survive or not is more, I venture to think, than anybody is capable at this present moment of saying. But this one thing is perfectly certain—that it is only by pursuing his methods, by that wonderful single-mindedness, devotion to truth, readiness to sacrifice all things for the advance of definite knowledge, that we can hope to come any nearer than we are at present to the truths which he struggled to attain.

CCCLXXXIII

Dean Stanley told me he thought being made a bishop destroyed a man's moral courage. I am inclined to think that the practice of the methods of political leaders destroys their intellect for all serious purposes.

CCCLXXXIV

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

CCCLXXXV

Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness and camel-malice—-with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as they please, they are very hard to drive.