Culture and Anarchy quotes

but he had opened an Independent chapel in it, and now Church and Dissent were pretty equally divided, with sharp contests between them. I said that seemed a pity.

“A pity?” cried he; “not at all! Only think of all the zeal and activity which the collision calls forth!”

“Ah, but, my dear friend,” I answered, “only think of all the nonsense which you now hold quite firmly, which you would never have held if you had not been contradicting your adversary in it all these years!”

They do not listen to us, and they rush into the arena of politics, where their merits, indeed, seem to be little appreciated as yet; and then they complain of the reformed constituencies, and call the new Parliament a Philistine Parliament.

As if a nation, nourished and reared as ours has been, could give us, just yet, anything but a Philistine Parliament!

—and would a Barbarian Parliament be even so good, or a Populace Parliament? For our part, we rejoice to see our dear old friends, the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in the Valley of Jehoshaphat previous to their final conversion, which will certainly come.

often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself.

What is freedom but machinery? what is population but machinery? what is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organisations but machinery?

Now almost every voice in England is accustomed to speak of these things as if they were precious ends in themselves, and therefore had some of the characters of perfection indisputably joined to them. I have once before now noticed Mr.

We are all of us included in some religious organisation or other; we all call ourselves, in the sublime and aspiring language of religion which I have before noticed, children of God.

Children of God;⁠—it is an immense pretension!⁠—and how are we to justify it?

By the works which we do, and the words which we speak. And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London!

and that it is wholesomely counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete, a harmonious perfection.

Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, its desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom from fanaticism

, by its attitude towards all this machinery, even while it insists that it is machinery.

Why, this is just the very style of laudation with which Mr. Roebuck or Mr. Lowe debauches the minds of the middle classes, and makes such Philistines of them.

It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the tabernacle he has built.

Only the middle classes are told they have done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews.

Frederic Harrison asks that question, it reminds us that the perfection of human nature is sweetness and light. It is of use because, like religion—that other effort after perfection—it testifies that, where bitter envying and strife are, there is confusion and every evil work.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred;

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has but one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man;

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has but one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

It has one even yet greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man;

… shows us that aristocracies, being by the very nature of things inaccessible to ideas, unapt to see how the world is going, must be somewhat wanting in light, and must therefore be, at a moment when light is our great requisite, inadequate to our needs.

Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are for epochs of concentration.

In epochs of expansion, epochs such as that in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is again heard:

“

Intemperance in talk makes a dreadful havoc in the heart.

” Mr. Bradlaugh, like our types of excess in the aristocratic and middle classes, is evidently capable, if he had his head given him, of running us all into great dangers and confusion.

we are only safe from one another’s tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when, therefore, anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn.

But by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony.

We are in no peril from giving authority to this, because it is the truest friend we all of us can have; and when anarchy is a danger to us, to this authority we may turn with sure trust.

In short—to go back yet once more to Bishop Wilson—of these two excellent rules of Bishop Wilson’s for a man’s guidance:

“Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness,”

we English have followed with praiseworthy zeal the first rule, but we have not given so much heed to the second. We have gone manfully according to the best light we have;

I often, therefore, when I want to distinguish clearly the aristocratic class from the Philistines proper, or middle class, name the former, in my own mind, the Barbarians.

And when I go through the country, and see this and that beautiful and imposing seat of theirs crowning the landscape, “There,” I say to myself, “is a great fortified post of the Barbarians.”

It is obvious that that part of the working class which, working diligently by the light of Mrs.

Everyone is thus in every possible way encouraged to trust in his own heart; but, “he that trusteth in his own heart,” says the Wise Man, “is a fool;” and at any rate this, which Bishop Wilson says, is undeniably true: “

The number of those who need to be awakened is far greater than that of those who need comfort.

”

Humboldt’s object in this book is to show that the operation of government ought to be severely limited to what directly and immediately relates to the security of person and property.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most beautiful souls that have ever existed, used to say that one’s business in life was first to perfect one’s self by all the means in one’s power, and secondly, to try and create in the world around one an aristocracy, the most numerous that one possibly could, of talents and characters.

He saw, of course, that, in the end, everything comes to this—that the individual must act for himself, and must be perfect in himself;

This fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking.

Now this preference is a main element in our nature, and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side.

And to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them, we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism.

Hebraism and Hellenism⁠—between these two points of influence moves our world.

At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.

Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson, who says:

“First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness.”

We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not darkness.

An unclouded clearness of mind, an unimpeded play of thought, is what this bent drives at.

The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing.

But there is a saying which I have heard attributed to Mr. Carlyle about Socrates—a very happy saying, whether it is really Mr. Carlyle’s or not—which excellently marks the essential point in which Hebraism differs from Hellenism.

“Socrates,” this saying goes, “is terribly at ease in Zion.”

Hebraism—and here is the source of its wonderful strength—has always been severely preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion;

… this fashion of alternate preponderance, and not of mutual understanding and balance, the side which is uppermost does not really provide in a satisfactory manner for the needs of the side which is undermost, and a state of confusion is, sooner or later, the result.

The Hellenic half of our nature, bearing rule, makes a sort of provision for the Hebrew half, but it turns out to be an inadequate provision

; and again the Hebrew half of our nature, bearing rule, makes a sort of provision for the Hellenic half, but this, too, turns out to be an inadequate provision. The true and smooth order of humanity’s development is not reached in either way.

There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points.

The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points.

Instead of our “one thing needful,” justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence—our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence, are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it …

… bring out against us, in disparagement of what we call culture, and in praise of a man’s sticking to the one thing needful—he knows, says Hebraism, his Bible!—whenever we hear this said, we may, without any elaborate defence of culture, content ourselves with answering simply:

“No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.”

Now the force which we have so much neglected, Hellenism, may be liable to fail in moral strength and earnestness, but by the law of its nature—the very same law which makes it sometimes deficient in intensity when intensity is required—it opposes itself to the …

Thought and knowledge, as we have said before, is eminently something individual, and of our own; the more we possess it as strictly of our own, the more power it has on us.

Man worships best, therefore, with the community; he philosophises best alone.

So it seems that whoever would truly give effect to Jesus Christ’s declaration that his religion is a force of inward persuasion acting on the soul, would leave our thought on the intellectual aspects of Christianity as individual as possible, but would make Christian worship …

This, however, their organisation in congregations forbids us to admit. They are members of congregations, not isolated thinkers; and a free play of individual thought is at least as much impeded by membership of a small congregation as by membership of a great Church.

Thinking by batches of fifties is to the full as fatal to free thought as thinking by batches of thousands.

Accordingly, we have had occasion already to notice that Nonconformity does not at all differ from the Established Church by having worthier or more philosophical ideas about God, and the ordering of the world, than the Established Church has.

And again he says: “Our salvation does in some measure depend upon that of others.” And the author of the Imitation puts the same thing admirably when he says:—

“Obscurior etiam via ad coelum videbatur quando tam pauci regnum coelorum quaerere curabant; the fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.”

So all our fellow-men, in the East of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress towards perfection, if we ourselves really, as we profess, want to be perfect;

and that far more is lost than is gained by permitting them.

Because a State in which law is authoritative and sovereign, a firm and settled course of public order, is requisite if man is to bring to maturity anything precious and lasting now, or to found anything precious and lasting for the future.

Thus, in our eyes, the very framework and exterior order of the State, whoever may administer the State, is sacred; and culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish.