Samuel W. Baker - "Ismailia"

(A.E.) George William Russell - "Imaginations and Reveries"

J. Henri Fabre - "The Mason bees"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1584 85"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




For our own part we cannot conceive worship being offered by a sane
worshipper to any but a conscious being, in other words to a person. The
fetish worshipper himself probably invests his fetish with a vague
personality such as would render it capable of propitiation. But how
can we invest with a collective personality the fleeting generations of
mankind? Even the sum of mankind is never complete, much less are the
units blended into a personal whole, or as it has been called a colossal
man.

There is a gulf here, as it seems to us, which cannot be bridged, and
can barely be hidden from view by the retention of religious
phraseology. In truth, the anxious use of that phraseology betrays
weakness, since it shows that you cannot do without the theological
associations which cling inseparably to religious terms.

You look forward to a closer union, a more complete brotherhood of man,
an increased sacredness of the human relation. Some things point that
way; some things point the other way. Brotherhood has hardly a definite
meaning without a father; sacredness can hardly be predicated without
anything which consecrates. We can point to an eminent writer who tells
you that he detests the idea of brotherly love altogether; that there
are many of his kind whom, so far from loving, he hates, and that he
would like to write his hatred with a lash upon their backs. Look again
at the severe Prussianism which betrays itself in the New Creed of
Strauss. Look at the oligarchy of enlightenment and enjoyment which
Renan, in his _Moral Reform of France_, proposes to institute for
the benefit of a select circle, with sublime indifference to the lot of
the vulgar, who, he says, "must subsist on the glory and happiness of
others." This does not look much like a nearer approach to a brotherhood
of man than is made by the Gospel. We are speaking, of course, merely of
the comparative moral efficiency of religion and the proposed
substitutes for it, apart from the influence exercised over individual
conduct by the material needs and other non-theological forces of
society.

For the immortality of the individual soul, with the influences of that
belief, we are asked to substitute the immortality of the race. But
here, in addition to the difficulty of proving the union and
intercommunion of all the members, we are met by the objection that
unless we live in God, the race, in all probability, is not immortal.
That our planet and all it contains will come to an end appears to be
the decided opinion of science. This "holy" being, our relation to which
is to take the place of our relation to an Eternal Father, by the
adoration of which we are to be sustained and controlled, if it exist at
all, is as ephemeral compared with eternity as a fly. We shall be told
that we ought to be content with an immortality extending through tens
of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years. To the
_argumentum ad verecundiam_ there is no reply. But will this banish
the thought of ultimate annihilation? Will it prevent a man, when he is
called upon to make some great sacrifice for the race, from saying to
himself, that, whether he makes the sacrifice or not, one day all will
end in nothing?

Evidently these are points which must be made quite clear before you
can, with any prospect of success, call upon men either to regard
Humanity with the same feelings with which they have regarded God, or to
give up their own interest or enjoyment for the future benefit of the
race. The assurance derived from the fondness felt by parents for their
offspring, and the self-denying efforts made for the good of children,
will hardly carry us very far, even supposing it certain that parental
love would remain unaffected by the general change. It is evidently a
thing apart from the general love of Humanity. Nobody was ever more
extravagantly fond of his children, or made greater efforts for them,
than Alexander Borgia.

It has been attempted, however, with all the fervour of conviction, and
with all the force of a powerful style, to make us see not only that we
have this corporal immortality as members of the "colossal man," but
that we may look forward to an actual though impersonal existence in the
shape of the prolongation through all future time of the consequences of
our lives. It might with equal truth be said that we have enjoyed an
actual though impersonal existence through all time past in our
antecedents. But neither in its consequences nor in its antecedents can
anything be said to live except by a figure. The characters and actions
of men surely will never be influenced by such a fanciful use of
language as this! Our being is consciousness; with consciousness our
being ends, though our physical forces may be conserved, and traces of
our conduct--traces utterly indistinguishable--may remain. That with
which we are not concerned cannot affect us either presently or by
anticipation; and with that of which we shall never be conscious, we
shall never feel that we are concerned. Perhaps if the authors of this
new immortality would tell us what they understand by non-existence, we
might be led to value more highly by contrast the existence which they
propose for a soul when it has ceased to think or feel, and for an
organism when it has been scattered to the winds.

They would persuade us that their impersonal and unconscious immortality
is a brighter hope than an eternity of personal and conscious existence,
the very thought of which they say is torture. This assumes, what there
seems to be no ground for assuming, that eternity is an endless
extension of time; and, in the same way, that infinity is a boundless
space. It is more natural to conceive of them as emancipation
respectively from time and space, and from the conditions which time and
space involve; and among the conditions of time may apparently be
reckoned the palling of pleasure or of existence by mere temporal
protraction. Even as we are, sensual pleasure palls; so does the merely
intellectual: but can the same be said of the happiness of virtue and
affection? It is urged, too, that by exchanging the theological
immortality for one of physical and social consequences, we get rid of
the burden of self, which otherwise we should drag for ever. But surely
in this there is a confusion of self with selfishness. Selfishness is
another name for vice. Self is merely consciousness. Without a self, how
can there be self-sacrifice? How can the most unselfish motive exist if
there is nothing to be moved? "He that findeth his life, shall lose it;
and he that loseth his life, shall find it," is not a doctrine of
selfishness, but it implies a self. We have been rebuked in the words of
Frederick to his grenadiers--"Do you want to live for ever?" The
grenadiers might have answered, "Yes; and therefore we are ready to
die."

It is not when we think of the loss of anything to which a taint of
selfishness can adhere--it is not even when we think of intellectual
effort cut short for ever by death just as the intellect has ripened and
equipped itself with the necessary knowledge--that the nothingness of
this immortality of conservated forces is most keenly felt: it is when
we think of the miserable end of affection. How much comfort would it
afford anyone bending over the deathbed of his wife to know that forces
set free by her dissolution will continue to mingle impersonally and
indistinguishably with forces set free by the general mortality?
Affection, at all events, requires personality. One cannot love a group
of consequences, even supposing that the filiation could be distinctly
presented to the mind. Pressed by the hand of sorrow craving for
comfort, this Dead Sea fruit crumbles into ashes, paint it with
eloquence as you will.

Humanity, it seems to us, is a fundamentally Christian idea, connected
with the Christian view of the relations of men to their common Father
and of their spiritual union in the Church. In the same way the idea of
the progress of Humanity seems to us to have been derived from the
Christian belief in the coming of the Kingdom of God through the
extension of the Church, and to that final triumph of good over evil
foretold in the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the founders of the
Religion of Humanity will admit that the Christian Church is the matrix
of theirs so much their very nomenclature proves and we would fain ask
them to review the process of disengagement and see whether the essence
has not been left behind.

No doubt there are influences at work in modern civilisation which tend
to the strengthening of the sentiment of humanity by making men more
distinctly conscious of their position as members of a race. On the
other hand the unreflecting devotion of the tribesman which held
together primitive societies dies. Man learns to reason and calculate
and when he is called upon to immolate himself to the common interest of
the race he will consider what the common interest of the race when he
is dead and gone will be to him and whether he will ever be repaid for
his sacrifice.

Of Cosmic Emotion it will perhaps be fair to say that it is proposed as
a substitute for religious emotion rather than as a substitute for
religion since nothing has been said about embodying it in a cult. It
comes to us commended by glowing quotations from Mr. Swinburne and Walt
Whitman and we cannot help admitting that for common hearts it stands in
need of the commendation. The transfer of affection from an all loving
Father to an adamantine universe is a process for which we may well seek
all the aid that the witchery of poetry can supply. Unluckily we are
haunted by the consciousness that the poetry itself is blindly ground
out by the same illimitable mill of evolution which grinds out Virtue
and affection. We are by no means sure that we understand what Cosmic
Emotion is even after leading an exposition of its nature by no ungifted
hand. Its symbola so to speak are the feelings produced by the two
objects of Kant's peculiar reverence--the stars of heaven and the moral
faculty of man. But after all these are only like anything else
aggregations of molecules in a certain stage of evolution. To the
unscientific eye they may be awful because they are mysterious, but let
science analyse them and then awfulness disappears. If the interaction
of all parts of the material universe is complete we fail to see why one
object or one feeling is more cosmic than another. However we will not
dwell on that which as we have already confessed we do not feel sure
that we rightly apprehend. What we do clearly see is that to have cosmic
emotion or cosmic anything you must have a cosmos. You must be assured
that the universe is a cosmos and not a chaos. And what assurance of
this can materialism or any non theological system give? Law is a
theological term, it implies a lawgiver or a governing intelligence of
some kind. Science can tell us nothing but facts, single or accumulated
as experience, which would not make a law though they had been observed
through myriads of years. Law is a theological term, and cosmos is
equally so, if it may not rather be said to be a Greek name for the
aggregate of laws. For order implies intelligent selection and
arrangement. Our idea of order would not be satisfied by a number of
objects falling by mere chance into a particular figure, however
intricate and regular. All the arguments which have been used against
design seem to tell with equal force against order. We have no other
universe wherewith we can compare this, so as to assure ourselves that
this universe is not a chaos, but a cosmos. Both on the earth and in the
heavens we see much that is not order, but disorder; not cosmos, but
acosmia. If we divine, nevertheless, that order reigns, and that there
is design beneath the seemingly undesigned, and good beneath the
appearance of evil, it is by virtue of something not dreamed of in the
philosophy of materialism.

Have we really come to this, that the world has no longer any good
reason for believing in a God or a life beyond the grave? If so, it is
difficult to deny that with regard to the great mass of mankind up to
this time Schopenhauer and the Pessimists are right, and existence has
been a cruel misadventure. The number of those who have suffered
lifelong oppression, disease, or want, who have died deaths of torture
or perished miserably by war, is limited though enormous; but probably
there have been few lives in which the earthly good has not been
outweighed by the evil. The future may bring increased means of
happiness, though those who are gone will not be the better for them;
but it will bring also increase of sensibility, and the consciousness of
hopeless imperfection and miserable futility will probably become a
distinct and growing cause of pain. It is doubtful even whether, after
such a raising of Mokanna's veil, faith in everything would not expire
and human effort cease. Still we must face the situation: there can be
no use in self-delusion. In vain we shall seek to cheat our souls and to
fill a void which cannot be filled by the manufacture of artificial
religions and the affectation of a spiritual language to which, however
persistently and fervently it may be used, no realities correspond. If
one of these cults could get itself established, in less than a
generation it would become hollower than the hollowest of
ecclesiasticisms. Probably not a few of the highest natures would
withdraw themselves from the dreary round of self mockery by suicide,
and if a scientific priesthood attempted to close that door by
sociological dogma or posthumous denunciation the result would show the
difference between the practical efficacy of a religion with a God and
that of a cult of "Humanity" or "Space."

Shadows and figments, as they appear to us to be in themselves these
attempts to provide a substitute for religion are of the highest
importance, as showing that men of great powers of mind, who have
thoroughly broken loose not only from Christianity but from natural
religion and in some cases placed themselves in violent antagonism to
both, are still unable to divest themselves of the religious sentiment
or to appease its craving for satisfaction. There being no God, they
find it necessary, as Voltaire predicted it would be, to invent one, not
for the purposes of police (they are far above such sordid Jesuitism),
but as the solution of the otherwise hopeless enigma of our spiritual
nature. Science takes cognizance of all phenomena, and this apparently
ineradicable tendency of the human mind is a phenomenon like the rest.
The thoroughgoing Materialist, of course, escapes all these
philosophical exigencies, but he does it by denying Humanity as well as
God and reducing the difference between the organism of the human animal
and that of any other animal to a mere question of complexity. Still,
even in this quarter, there has appeared of late a disposition to make
concessions on the subject of human volition hardly consistent with
Materialism. Nothing can be more likely than that the impetus of great
discoveries has carried the discoverers too far.

Perhaps with the promptings of the religious sentiment there is combined
a sense of the immediate danger with which the failure of the religious
sanction threatens social order and morality. As we have said already,
the men of whom we specially speak are far above anything like social
Jesuitism. We have not a doubt but they would regard with abhorrence any
schemes of oligarchic illuminism for guarding the pleasures of the few
by politic deception of the multitude. But they have probably begun to
lay to heart the fact that the existing morality, though not dependent
on any special theology, any special view of the relations between soul
and body, or any special theory of future rewards and punishments, is
largely dependent on a belief in the indefeasible authority of
conscience, and in that without which conscience can have no
indefeasible authority--the presence of a just and all-seeing God. It
may be true that in primaeval society these beliefs are found only in the
most rudimentary form, and, as social sanctions, are very inferior in
force to mere gregarious instincts or the pressure of tribal need. But
man emerges from the primaeval state, and when he does, he demands a
reason for his submission to moral law. That the leaders of the anti-
theological movement in the present day are immoral, nobody but the most
besotted fanatic would insinuate; no candid antagonist would deny that
some of them are in every respect the very best of men. The fearless
love of truth is usually accompanied by other high qualities; and
nothing could be more unlikely than that natures disposed to virtue,
trained under good influences, peculiarly sensitive to opinion and
guarded by intellectual tastes, would lapse into vice as soon as the
traditional sanction was removed. But what is to prevent the withdrawal
of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the
morality of the mass of mankind? The commercial swindler or the
political sharper, when the divine authority of conscience is gone, will
feel that he has only the opinion of society to reckon with, and he
knows how to reckon with the opinion of society. If Macbeth is ready,
provided he can succeed in this world, to "jump the life to come," much
more ready will villainy be to "jump" the bad consequences of its
actions to humanity when its own conscious existence shall have closed.
Rate the practical effect of religious beliefs as low and that of social
influences as high as you may, there can surely be no doubt that
morality has received some support from the authority of an inward
monitor regarded as the voice of God. The worst of men would have wished
to die the death of the righteous; he would have been glad, if he could,
when death approached, to cancel his crimes; and the conviction, or
misgiving, which this implied, could not fail to have some influence
upon the generality of mankind, though no doubt the influence was
weakened rather than strengthened by the extravagant and incredible form
in which the doctrine of future retribution was presented by the
dominant theology.

The denial of the existence of God and of a Future State, in a word, is
the dethronement of conscience; and society will pass, to say the least,
through a dangerous interval before social science can fill the vacant
throne. Avowed scepticism is likely to be disinterested and therefore to
be moral; it is among the unavowed sceptics and conformists to political
religions that the consequences of the change may be expected to appear.

But more than this, the doctrines of Natural Selection and the Survival
of the Fittest are beginning to generate a morality of their own, with
the inevitable corollary that the proof of superior fitness is to
survive--to survive either by force or cunning, like the other animals
which by dint of force or cunning have come out victorious from the
universal war and asserted for themselves a place in nature. The
"irrepressible struggle for empire" is formally put forward by public
writers of the highest class as the basis and the rule of the conduct of
this country towards other nations; and we may be sure that there is not
an entire absence of connection between the private code of a school and
its international conceptions. The feeling that success covers
everything seems to be gaining ground and to be overcoming, not merely
the old conventional rules of honour, but moral principle itself. Both
in public and private there are symptoms of an approaching failure of
the motive power which has hitherto sustained men both in self-
sacrificing effort and in courageous protest against wrong, though as
yet we are only at the threshold of the great change, and established
sentiment long survives, in the masses, that which originally gave it
birth. Renan says, probably with truth, that had the Second Empire
remained at peace, it might have gone on forever; and in the history of
this country the connection between political effort and religion has
been so close that its dissolution, to say the least, can hardly fail to
produce a critical change in the character of the nation. The time may
come, when, as philosophers triumphantly predict, men, under the
ascendancy of science, will act for the common good, with the same
mechanical certainty as bees; though the common good of the human hive
would perhaps not be easy to define. But in the meantime mankind, or
some portions of it, may be in danger of an anarchy of self-interest,
compressed for the purpose of political order, by a despotism of force.

That science and criticism, acting--thanks to the liberty of opinion won
by political effort--with a freedom never known before, have delivered
us from a mass of dark and degrading superstitions, we own with
heartfelt thankfulness to the deliverers, and in the firm conviction
that the removal of false beliefs, and of the authorities or
institutions founded on them, cannot prove in the end anything but a
blessing to mankind. But at the same time the foundations of general
morality have inevitably been shaken, and a crisis has been brought on
the gravity of which nobody can fail to see, and nobody but a fanatic of
Materialism can see without the most serious misgiving.

There has been nothing in the history of man like the present situation.
The decadence of the ancient mythologies is very far from affording a
parallel. The connection of those mythologies with morality was
comparatively slight. Dull and half-animal minds would hardly be
conscious of the change which was partly veiled from them by the
continuance of ritual and state creeds; while in the minds of Plato and
Marcus Aurelius it made place for the development of a moral religion.
The Reformation was a tremendous earthquake: it shook down the fabric of
mediaeval religion, and as a consequence of the disturbance in the
religious sphere filled the world with revolutions and wars. But it left
the authority of the Bible unshaken, and men might feel that the
destructive process had its limit, and that adamant was still beneath
their feet. But a world which is intellectual and keenly alive to the
significance of these questions, reading all that is written about them
with almost passionate avidity, finds itself brought to a crisis the
character of which any one may realize by distinctly presenting to
himself the idea of existence without a God.




THE LABOUR MOVEMENT

_(This Lecture was delivered before the Mechanics' Institute of
Montreal, and the Literary Society of Sherbrooke, and published in the
CANADIAN MONTHLY, December, 1872. The allusions to facts and events must
be read with reference to the date.)_


We are in the midst of an industrial war which is extending over Europe
and the United States, and has not left Canada untouched. It is not
wonderful that great alarm should prevail, or that, in panic-stricken
minds, it should assume extravagant forms. London deprived of bread by a
bakers' strike, or of fuel by a colliers' strike, is a serious prospect;
so is the sudden stoppage of any one of the wheels in the vast and
complicated machine of modern industry. People may be pardoned for
thinking that they have fallen on evil times, and that they have a dark
future before them. Yet, those who have studied industrial history know
that the present disturbance is mild compared with the annals of even a
not very remote past. The study of history shows us where we are, and
whither things are tending. Though it does not diminish the difficulties
of the present hour, it teaches us to estimate them justly, to deal with
them calmly and not to call for cavalry and grapeshot because one
morning we are left without hot bread.

One of the literary janissaries of the French Empire thought to prove
that the working class had no rights against the Bonapartes, by showing
that the first free labourers were only emancipated slaves. One would
like to know what he supposed the first Bonapartes were. However though
his inference was not worth much, except against those who are pedantic
enough, to vouch parchment archives for the rights and interests of
humanity, he was in the right as to the fact. Labour first appears in
history as a slave, treated like a beast of burden, chained to the door-
post of a Roman master, or lodged in the underground manstables
(ergastula) on his estate, treated like a beast, or worse than a beast,
recklessly worked out and then cast forth to die, scourged, tortured,
flung in a moment of passion to feed the lampreys, crucified for the
slightest offence or none. "Set up a cross for the slave," cries the
Roman matron, in, Juvenal. "Why, what has the slave done?" asks her
husband.

One day labour strikes; finds a leader in Spartacus, a slave devoted as
a gladiator to the vilest of Roman pleasures; wages a long and terrible
servile war. The revolt is put down at last, after shaking the
foundations of the state. Six thousand slaves are crucified along the
road from Rome to Capua. Labour had its revenge, for slavery brought the
doom of Rome.