Faith in the Invisible, not as real only, but as the only Reality. Time through every meanest moment of it resting on Eternity.
If we see into anything and not merely dismiss it with a name, there is wonder for us at every turn.
The green flowery rock-built Earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many sounding seas; – that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior Insight that we escape the difficulty: it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it.
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Science has done much for us; but it is a poor Science that would hide from us the great deep infinitude of the Unknowable.
Force: . . . nay, surely to the Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too.
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WORSHIP is transcendental wonder. Every object a window through which we may look into Infinitude itself. Every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object is a root or fibre of the tree of Spirit Life, but the deepest root of all – the tap root – is the wonder at Man Himself.
Trying to prove to others your Faith by logic – chopping is to sow fear in your own heart.
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The Hero is a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all. “Sincerity, I think, is better than grace.” – Carlyle
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A lever held farther away from the fulcrum works more effectively. And so a suggestion (in the normal state) the more indirect it is, the more effective.
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The first duty for man is still that of subduing fear. We must get rid of fear: we cannot act at all till then. A man’s acts are slavish, not true, but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet. Now and always the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is.
Old Norse kings, about to die, had their body laid into a ship; the ship sent forth, with sails set and slow fire burning it, that once out at sea, it might blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean!
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“Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.” – Marcus Aurelius
Conscience = Persistent social instinct, looking back-wards and serving as a guide for the future.
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We cannot do without our inheritance from the forefathers; the society which renounces it must be destroyed from without. Still less we can do with too much of it; the society in which it dominates must be destroyed from within.
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What is Science but a kind of wantonness and luxury of the mind, a greediness and gluttony of the brain?
That longs to eat forbidden fruit again; and grows more desperate like the worst diseases, upon the nobler part, the mind it seizes?
Q: If mind was under law, moral responsibility could not exist?
A: When we stumble over a stone, we attach no responsibility to the stone: we neither punish nor reward it. But if a dog trips us up by running between our legs, we hold him responsible and administer punishment. Wherever we have reason to believe that punishment or reward will be effectual in procuring what we desire or preventing what we dislike, there we place responsibility, that means simply adding a new link to the chain of causation, (already in operation) an idiot or infant not responsible.
By punishment or reward we aim at creating a stronger desire than the desire to steal, viz., the desire to avoid the pain of punishments
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“Pain may be likened to the heat produced in a machine by destructive friction, and pleasure to that musical hum which comes from a machine that is doing its work without injury to itself.”
Every individual lives, moves, and has his being under the influence of the opinions and feelings of those of his fellows with whom he comes in social contact.