Henry Seton Merriman - "The Last Hope"

Henry van Dyke - "Music and Other Poems"

Fr. Vincent de Paul - "Memoir"

Henrik Ibsen - "The Lady From The Sea"

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: Literary and Philosophical Essays

V >> Various >> Literary and Philosophical Essays




It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the
understanding only deserves respect when it reacts on the character;
to a certain extent it is from the character that this light
proceeds; for the road that terminates in the head must pass through
the heart. Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time
is to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to
render efficacious in practice the improvement of ideas, but to call
this improvement into existence.

LETTER IX.

But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning?
Theoretical culture must it seems bring along with it practical
culture, and yet the latter must be the condition of the former. All
improvement in the political sphere must proceed from the ennobling
of the character. But, subject to the influence of a social
constitution still barbarous, how can character become ennobled? It
would then be necessary to seek for this end an instrument that the
state does not furnish, and to open sources that would have
preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption.

I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended
that have engaged me up to the present time. This instrument is the
art of the beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal
models.

Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all
that is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the
arbitrary will of men. The political legislator may place their
empire under an interdict, but he cannot reign there. He can
proscribe the friend of truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade
the artist, but he cannot change art. No doubt, nothing is more
common than to see science and art bend before the spirit of the
age, and creative taste receive its law from critical taste. When
the character becomes stiff and hardens itself, we see science
severely keeping her limits, and art subject to the harsh restraint
of rules; when the character is relaxed and softened, science
endeavours to please and art to rejoice. For whole ages philosophers
as well as artists show themselves occupied in letting down truth
and beauty to the depths of vulgar humanity. They themselves are
swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential vigour and
indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious
fight, and issue triumphant from the abyss.

No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if
he is its disciple or even its favourite. Let a beneficent deity
carry off in good time the suckling from the breast of its mother,
let it nourish him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to
grow up and arrive at virility under the distant sky of Greece. When
he has attained manhood, let him come back, presenting a face
strange to his own age; let him come, not to delight it with his
apparition, but rather to purify it, terrible as the son of
Agamemnon. He will, indeed, receive his matter from the present
time, but he will borrow the form from a nobler time and even beyond
all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable unity. There,
issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the source
of all beauty, which was never tainted by the corruption of
generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it in dark
eddies. Its matter may be dishonoured as well as ennobled by fancy,
but the ever chaste form escapes from the caprices of imagination.
The Roman had already bent his knee for long years to the divinity
of the emperors, and yet the statues of the gods stood erect; the
temples retained their sanctity for the eye long after the gods had
become a theme for mockery, and the noble architecture of the
palaces that shielded the infamies of Nero and of Commodus were a
protest against them. Humanity has lost its dignity, but art has
saved it, and preserves it in marbles full of meaning; truth
continues to live in illusion, and the copy will serve to re-
establish the model. If the nobility of art has survived the
nobility of nature, it also goes before it like an inspiring genius,
forming and awakening minds. Before truth causes her triumphant
light to penetrate into the depth of the heart, poetry intercepts
her rays, and the summits of humanity shine in a bright light, while
a dark and humid night still hangs over the valleys.

But how will the artist avoid the corruption of his time which
encloses him on all hands? Let him raise his eyes to his own
dignity, and to law; let him not lower them to necessity and
fortune. Equally exempt from a vain activity which would imprint its
trace on the fugitive moment, and from the dreams of an impatient
enthusiasm which applies the measure of the absolute to the paltry
productions of time, let the artist abandon the real to the
understanding, for that is its proper field. But let the artist
endeavour to give birth to the ideal by the union of the possible
and of the necessary. Let him stamp illusion and truth with the
effigy of this ideal; let him apply it to the play of his
imagination and his most serious actions, in short, to all sensuous
and spiritual forms; then let him quietly launch his work into
infinite time.

But the minds set on fire by this ideal have not all received an
equal share of calm from the creative genius--that great and patient
temper which is required to impress the ideal on the dumb marble, or
to spread it over a page of cold, sober letters, and then entrust it
to the faithful hands of time. This divine instinct, and creative
force, much too ardent to follow this peaceful walk, often throws
itself immediately on the present, on active life, and strives to
transform the shapeless matter of the moral world. The misfortune of
his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart of
the man of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder; enthusiasm
is inflamed, and in souls endowed with energy the burning desire
aspires impatiently to action and facts. But has this innovator
examined himself to see if these disorders of the moral world wound
his reason, or if they do not rather wound his self-love? If he does
not determine this point at once, he will find it from the
impulsiveness with which he pursues a prompt and definite end. A
pure, moral motive has for its end the absolute; time does not exist
for it, and the future becomes the present to it directly, by a
necessary development, it has to issue from the present. To a reason
having no limits the direction towards an end becomes confounded
with the accomplishment of this end, and to enter on a course is to
have finished it.

If, then, a young friend of the true and of the beautiful were to
ask me how, notwithstanding the resistance of the times, he can
satisfy the noble longing of his heart, I should reply: Direct the
world on which you act towards that which is good, and the measured
and peaceful course of time will bring about the results. You have
given it this direction if by your teaching you raise its thoughts
towards the necessary and the eternal; if, by your acts or your
creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the object of your
leanings. The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary, must
fall, and it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is
tottering. But it is important that it should not only totter in the
external but also in the internal man. Cherish triumphant truth in
the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form
through beauty, that it may not only be the understanding that does
homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly grasp its appearance.
And that you may not by any chance take from external reality the
model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its
dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you
have a good escort furnished by ideal nature. Live with your age,
but be not its creation; labour for your contemporaries, but do for
them what they need, and not what they praise. Without having shared
their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and
bend under the yoke which they find is as painful to dispense with
as to bear. By the constancy with which you will despise their good
fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice
that you submit to their sufferings. See them in thought such as
they ought to be when you must act upon them; but see them as they
are when you are tempted to act for them. Seek to owe their suffrage
to their dignity; but to make them happy keep an account of their
unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of your heart
will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced
to nothingness by their unworthiness. The gravity of your principles
will keep them off from you, but in play they will still endure
them. Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is by their
taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In vain will
you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their actions; but
you can try your moulding hand on their leisure. Drive away caprice,
frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you will banish
them imperceptibly from their acts, and at length from their
feelings. Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great,
noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of
perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over
nature.

LETTER X.

Convinced by my preceding letters, you agree with me on this point,
that man can depart from his destination by two opposite roads, that
our epoch is actually moving on these two false roads, and that it
has become the prey, in one case, of coarseness, and elsewhere of
exhaustion and de pravity. It is the beautiful that must bring it
back from this twofold departure. But how can the cultivation of the
fine arts remedy, at the same time, these opposite defects, and
unite in itself two contradictory qualities? Can it bind nature in
the savage, and set it free in the barbarian? Can it at once tighten
a spring and loose it, and if it cannot produce this double effect,
how will it be reasonable to expect from it so important a result as
the education of man?

It may be urged that it is almost a proverbial adage that the
feeling developed by the beautiful refines manners, and any new
proof offered on the subject would appear superfluous. Men base this
maxim on daily experience, which shows us almost always clearness of
intellect, deli cacy of feeling, liberality and even dignity of
conduct, associated with a cultivated taste, while an uncultivated
taste is almost always accompanied by the opposite qualities. With
considerable assurance, the most civilised nation of antiquity is
cited as an evidence of this, the Greeks, among whom the perception
of the beautiful attained its highest development, and, as a
contrast, it is usual to point to nations in a partial savage state,
and partly barbarous, who expiate their insensibility to the
beautiful by a coarse or, at all events, a hard austere character.
Nevertheless, some thinkers are tempted occasionally to deny either
the fact itself or to dispute the legitimacy of the consequences
that are derived from it. They do not entertain so unfavourable an
opinion of that savage coarseness which is made a reproach in the
case of certain nations; nor do they form so advantageous an opinion
of the refinement so highly lauded in the case of cultivated
nations. Even as far back as in antiquity there were men who by no
means regarded the culture of the liberal arts as a benefit, and who
were consequently led to forbid the entrance of their republic to
imagination.

I do not speak of those who calumniate art, because they have never
been favoured by it. These persons only appreciate a possession by
the trouble it takes to acquire it, and by the profit it brings; and
how could they properly appreciate the silent labour of taste in the
exterior and in terior man? How evident it is that the accidental
disadvantages attending liberal culture would make them lose sight
of its essential advantages! The man deficient in form despises the
grace of diction as a means of corruption, courtesy in the social
relations as dissimulation, delicacy and generosity in conduct as an
affected exaggeration. He cannot forgive the favourite of the Graces
for having enlivened all assemblies as a man of the world, of having
directed all men to his views like a statesman, and of giving his
impress to the whole century as a writer; while he, the victim of
labour, can only obtain, with all his learning, the least attention
or overcome the least difficulty. As he cannot learn from his
fortunate rival the secret of pleasing, the only course open to him
is to deplore the corruption of human nature, which adores rather
the appearance than the reality.

But there are also opinions deserving respect, that pronounce
themselves adverse to the effects of the beautiful, and find
formidable arms in experience, with which to wage war against it.
"We are free to admit"--such is their language--"that the charms of
the beautiful can further honourable ends in pure hands; but it is
not repugnant to its nature to produce, in impure hands, a directly
contrary effect, and to employ in the service of injustice and error
the power that throws the soul of man into chains. It is exactly
because taste only attends to the form and never to the substance;
it ends by placing the soul on the dangerous incline, leading it to
neglect all reality and to sacrifice truth and morality to an
attractive envelope. All the real difference of things vanishes, and
it is only the appearance that determines their value! How many men
of talent"--thus these arguers proceed--"have been turned aside from
all effort by the seductive power of the beautiful, or have been led
away from all serious exercise of their activity, or have been
induced to use it very feebly? How many weak minds have been
impelled to quarrel with the organisation of society, simply because
it has pleased the imagination of poets to present the image of a
world constituted differently, where no propriety chains down
opinion and no artifice helds nature in thraldom? What a dangerous
logic of the passions they have learned since the poets have painted
them in their pictures in the most brilliant colours and since, in
the contest with law and duty, they have commonly re mained masters
of the battlefield. What has society gained by the relations of
society, formerly under the sway of truth, being now subject to the
laws of the beautiful, or by the external impression deciding the
estimation in which merit is to be held? We admit that all virtues
whose appearance produces an agreeable effect are now seen to
flourish, and those which, in society, give a value to the man who
possesses them. But, as a compensation, all kinds of excesses are
seen to prevail, and all vices are in vogue that can be reconciled
with a graceful exterior." It is certainly a matter entitled to
reflection that, at almost all the periods of history when art
flourished and taste held sway, humanity is found in a state of
decline; nor can a single instance be cited of the union of a large
diffusion of aesthetic culture with political liberty and social
virtue, of fine manners associated with good morals, and of
politeness fraternising with truth and loyalty of character and
life.

As long as Athens and Sparta preserved their independence, and as
long as their institutions were based on respect for the laws, taste
did not reach its maturity, art remained in its infancy, and beauty
was far from exer cising her empire over minds. No doubt, poetry had
already taken a sublime flight, but it was on the wings of genius,
and we know that genius borders very closely on savage coarseness,
that it is a light which shines readily in the midst of darkness,
and which therefore often argues against rather than in favour of
the taste of the time. When the golden age of art appears under
Pericles and Alexander, and the sway of taste becomes more general,
strength and liberty have abandoned Greece; eloquence corrupts the
truth, wisdom offends it on the lips of Socrates, and virtue in the
life of Phocion. It is well known that the Romans had to exhaust
their energies in civil wars, and, corrupted by Oriental luxury, to
bow their heads under the yoke of a fortunate despot, before Grecian
art triumphed over the stiffness of their character. The same was
the case with the Arabs: civilisation only dawned upon them when the
vigour of their military spirit became softened under the sceptre of
the Abbassides. Art did not appear in modern Italy till the glorious
Lombard League was dissolved, Florence submitting to the Medici, and
all those brave cities gave up the spirit of independ ence for an
inglorious resignation. It is almost super fluous to call to mind
the example of modern nations, with whom refinement has increased in
direct proportion to the decline of their liberties. Wherever we
direct our eyes in past times, we see taste and freedom mutually
avoiding each other. Everywhere we see that the beautiful only
founds its sway on the ruins of heroic virtues.

And yet this strength of character, which is commonly sacrificed to
establish aesthetic culture, is the most power ful spring of all
that is great and excellent in man, and no other advantage, however
great, can make up for it. Accordingly, if we only keep to the
experiments hitherto made, as to the influence of the beautiful, we
cannot certainly be much encouraged in developing feelings so
dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of being hard and
coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this dissolving
force of the beautiful, rather than see human nature a prey to its
enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages.
However, experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to
decide such a question; before giving so much weight to its
testimony, it would be well to inquire if the beauty we have been
discussing is the power that is condemned by the previous examples.
And the beauty we are discussing seems to assume an idea of the
beautiful derived from a source different from experience, for it is
this higher notion of the beautiful which has to decide if what is
called beauty by experience is entitled to the name.

This pure and rational idea of the beautiful--supposing it can be
placed in evidence--cannot be taken from any real and special case,
and must, on the contrary, direct and give sanction to our judgment
in each special case. It must therefore be sought for by a process
of abstraction, and it ought to be deduced from the simple
possibility of a nature both sensuous and rational; in short, beauty
ought to present itself as a necessary condition of humanity. It is
therefore essential that we should rise to the pure idea of
humanity, and as experience shows us nothing but individuals, in
particular cases, and never humanity at large, we must endeavour to
find in their individual and variable mode of being the absolute and
the permanent, and to grasp the necessary conditions of their
existence, suppressing all accidental limits. No doubt this
transcendental procedure will remove us for some time from the
familiar circle of phaenomena and the living presence of objects, to
keep us on the unproductive ground of abstract ideas; but we are
engaged in the search after a principle of knowledge solid enough
not to be shaken by anything, and the man who does not dare to rise
above reality will never conquer this truth.

LETTER XI.

If abstraction rises to as great an eievation as possible, it
arrives at two primary ideas, before which it is obliged to stop and
to recognise its limits. It distinguishes in man something that
continues, and something that changes in cessantly. That which
continues it names his person; that which changes his position, his
condition.

The person and the condition, I and my determinations, which
we represent as one and the same thing in the neces sary being,
are eternally distinct in the finite being. Not withstanding
all continuance in the person, the condition changes; in spite of
all change of condition, the person remains. We pass from rest to
activity, from emotion to indifference, from assent to contradiction,
but we are always we ourselves, and what immediately springs from
ourselves remains. It is only in the absolute subject that all his
determinations continue with his personality. All that Divinity is,
it is because it is so; consequently it is eternally what
it is, because it is eternal.

As the person and the condition are distinct in man, be cause he is
a finite being, the condition cannot be founded on the person, nor
the person on the condition. Admitting the second case, the person
would have to change; and in the former case, the condition would
have to continue. Thus in either supposition either the personality
or the quality of a finite being would necessarily cease. It is not
because we think, feel, and will, that we are; it is not because we
are that we think, feel, and will. We are because we are. We feel,
think, and will, because there is out of us something that is not
ourselves.

Consequently the person must have its principle of exist ence in
itself because the permanent cannot be derived from the changeable,
and thus we should be at once in possession of the idea of the
absolute being, founded on itself; that is to say, of the idea of
freedom. The condition must have a foundation, and as it is not
through the person, and is not therefore absolute, it must be a
sequence and a result; and thus, in the second place, we should have
arrived at the condition of every dependent being, of everything in
the process of becoming something else: that is, of the idea of
time. "Time is the necessary condition of all processes, of becoming
(werden);" this is an indentical proposition, for it says nothing
but this: "That something may follow, there must be a succession."

The person which manifests itself in the eternally continuing Ego,
or I myself, and only in him, cannot become something or begin in
time, because it is much rather time that must begin with him,
because the permanent must serve as basis to the changeable. That
change may take place, something must change; this something cannot
therefore be the change itself. When we say the flower opens and
fades, we make of this flower a permanent being in the midst of this
transformation; we lend it, in some sort, a personality, in which
these two conditions are manifested. It cannot be objected that man
is born, and becomes something; for man is not only a person simply,
but he is a person finding himself in a determinate condition. Now
our determinate state of condition springs up in time, and it is
thus that man, as a phenomenon or appearance, must have a beginning,
though in him pure intelligence is eternal. Without time, that is,
without a becoming, he would not be a determinate being; his
personality would exist virtually, no doubt, but not in action. It
is not by the succession of its perceptions that the immutable Ego
or person manifests himself to himself.

Thus, therefore, the matter of activity, or reality, that the
supreme intelligence draws from its own being, must be received by
man; and he does, in fact, receive it, through the medium of
perception, as something which is outside him in space, and which
changes in him in time. This matter which changes in him is always
accompanied by the Ego, the personality, that never changes; and the
rule prescribed for man by his rational nature is to remain
immutably himself in the midst of change, to refer all perceptions
to experience, that is, to the unity of knowledge, and to make of
each of its manifestations of its modes in time the law of all time.
The matter only exists in as far as it changes; he, his personality,
only exists in as far as he does not change. Consequently,
represented in his perfection, man would be the permanent unity,
which remains always the same, among the waves of change.

Now, although an infinite being, a divinity could not become (or be
subject to time), still a tendency ought to be named divine which
has for its infinite end the most characteristic attribute of the
divinity; the absolute manifestation of power--the reality of all
the possible--and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the
necessity of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears
within himself, in his personality, a predisposition for divinity.
The way to divinity--if the word "way" can be applied to what never
leads to its end-is open to him in every direction.

Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his
personality is nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible
infinite manifestation, and so long as there is neither intuition
nor feeling, it is nothing more than a form, an empty power.
Considered in itself, and independently of all spontaneous activity
of the mind, sensuousness can only make a material man; without it,
it is a pure form; but it cannot in any way establish a union
between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and acts
under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world, if
by this word we point out only the formless contents of time.
Without doubt, it is only his sensuousness that makes his strength
pass into efficacious acts, but it is his personality alone that
makes this activity his own. Thus, that he may not only be a world,
he must give form to matter, and in order not to be a mere form, he
must give reality to the virtuality that he bears in him. He gives
matter to form by creating time, and by opposing the immutable to
change, the diversity of the world to the eternal unity of the Ego.
He gives a form to matter by again suppressing time, by maintaining
permanence in change, and by placing the diversity of the world
under the unity of the Ego.