Passages about history and progress

The first man who enclosed a piece of ground and took it into his head to say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Man is naturally good, and it is our institutions alone that have made him bad.

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity.

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Two loves, then, have made two cities.

Remove justice, and what is a kingdom but a great band of robbers?

Human knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

In every republic there are two different inclinations, that of the people and that of the great men, and all the laws that are made in favour of liberty are born of the disunion between them.

For as good customs have need of laws to maintain them, so laws have need of good customs in order to be observed.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.

Above him there was now nothing but the sky, the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds slowly creeping across it.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.

The True is the whole.

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge.

There is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.

Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself.

In the middle of all sits the sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once?

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

We have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not.

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

The history of the world is nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.

The worker therefore feels himself only when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.

Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?

The paradox is the passion of thought, and a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

It was unearthly, and the men were. No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it, this suspicion of their not being inhuman.

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Political liberty is not the power of doing what we please. Liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.

Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

Society is indeed a contract, but it is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

I have observed that the philosophers, in order to insinuate their polluted atheism into young minds, systematically flatter all their passions.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Consider the herd that is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is, it leaps about, eats, rests, digests, leaps about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day.

There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense which injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a culture.

April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.

The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.

I will name this the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is no arbitrary question. Why are there beings at all instead of nothing, this is manifestly the first of all questions.

Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being.

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking.

It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

O Sugarman done fly away, Sugarman done gone, Sugarman cut across the sky, Sugarman gone home.

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.

The Athenians followed a policy of allowing everyone to share in the government, thinking that the multitude ought to be sovereign in all matters.

The Council of Five Hundred is chosen by lot, fifty from each of the ten tribes, and each tribe presides in turn for one tenth of the year, so that every citizen may, if his name is drawn, take his turn at the center of the city's business.

A Greek hostage in Rome set out to explain how Rome conquered nearly the whole known world in fifty-three years, from 220 to 167 BCE, treating this rapid conquest's speed and scope as the central historical puzzle requiring genuine explanation.

The surviving books cover the Punic Wars, Hannibal's crossing of the Alps and Cannae, the wars in Greece and Macedon, and the sack of Carthage, giving detailed access to the actual military campaigns through which Rome achieved its expansion.

If the situation is as I have described, then not much would be left of the sciences, and we should still be as ignorant as the ancients, without any small addition.

Galen himself, more than anyone, points out the errors of Hippocrates, and yet he loves and reveres him above all physicians; this did not prevent him from opposing him whenever the truth required it.

Ibn Khaldun opens by exposing the errors and uncritical credulity of earlier historians, arguing that mere chronicle of events without attention to underlying causes produces unreliable history, and proposing instead a genuine science investigating the actual causes of social and political change.

He defines asabiyya as the group solidarity that binds kin together under hard conditions, arguing that nomadic peoples possess this solidarity in abundance, using it to conquer settled, city-dwelling populations whose own comfortable circumstances have eroded their capacity for similar cohesion.

The narrative allegorizes the Roman, Anglican and dissenting churches as three brothers, Peter, Martin and Jack, who twist their father's will to justify altering the coats he left them.

The brothers' story is repeatedly interrupted by digressions in the voice of a modern hack writer, on critics, on madness, on digressions themselves, that parody the pedantry and self-importance of contemporary authors.

Johnson's Preface describes the considerable labor of compiling the Dictionary almost single-handedly across nine years, and reflects with genuine honesty on lexicography's actual limits, concluding that no dictionary can permanently fix a living language against its own continued drift and change.

Johnson defines lexicographer as a harmless drudge, one of many entries where his own opinionated wit and personality enter directly into what might otherwise remain dry reference material, a quality that has made individual Dictionary entries quoted long after their original lexicographical purpose.

Goldsmith opens by addressing Auburn directly as the loveliest village of the plain, recalling in loving, specific detail its parson, its schoolmaster, its alehouse and the evening games and gatherings that once filled its now-empty green.

He describes a single rich landowner enclosing the common land that had once supported the village's many small farming families, converting shared agricultural ground into a private pleasure park and driving the villagers from the land that had sustained them for generations.

Lessing proposes that revelation is to the human race what education is to the individual, giving humanity early what it could have reached by unaided reason alone but only much later and with considerably greater difficulty, converting apparent scriptural limitation into evidence of deliberate pedagogical design.

Lessing reads the Old Testament as a primer suited to a childish people, still requiring the promise of immediate earthly reward and punishment, and the New Testament as a considerably more advanced second primer suited to humanity's adolescence, appealing instead to the promise of a future life.

Wollstonecraft accuses Burke of sentimental theatricality, of feeling for the queen of France and the pageantry of the old order while the sufferings of the poor, the pressed sailor and the game-law victim, leave him unmoved.

Against Burke's defence of property and hereditary privilege in the name of tradition she sets natural rights grounded in reason and God, arguing that the age of a custom is no argument for it.

Condorcet asks by what right men, half of humanity, have excluded women, the other half, from participation in framing the laws they are equally bound to obey, and finds no rational or just answer that would not equally justify excluding some men from the same rights.

He argues that the abolition of slavery is not a matter of gradual accommodation to be delayed for practical convenience, but an immediate demand of justice that admits no legitimate exception or postponement.

Schiller argues that political freedom cannot be achieved by people who are inwardly divided, and that modern specialisation has split the human being into a sense drive and a form drive, a psychological diagnosis with direct political consequences.

Only beauty, through the play drive, can reconcile the sense drive and the form drive, Schiller argues, giving aesthetic experience unusually consequential stakes as the necessary psychological precondition for any genuinely free political order.

In Marbury v. Madison of 1803, Chief Justice Marshall holds that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void and that it is for the courts to say so, while declining the jurisdiction Congress had tried to give the Court.

Justice Gibson's dissent in Eakin v. Raub, a Pennsylvania case of 1825, argues the other side, that the legislature answers to the people rather than to judges, preserving the genuine counterargument against judicial review with unusual clarity.

Shelley argues that poetry in the broad sense, the imaginative making of order, underlies language, law, religion and science, and that poets have been the founders of civil society, considerably expanding poetry's claimed scope beyond verse alone.

Poetry enlarges the sympathetic imagination, which is the instrument of moral good, giving aesthetic experience direct ethical consequence and connecting imaginative literature's pleasures to genuine moral development rather than treating them as merely decorative.

Hugo divides human history into three successive ages, primitive, ancient and modern, arguing that each age naturally produces its own characteristic literary form, lyric poetry, epic poetry and drama respectively, treating literary form itself as developing alongside broader historical change.

He argues that modern art must mix the sublime and the grotesque within a single work, as Shakespeare did, rejecting the classical separation of tragedy and comedy into distinct, formally pure genres in favor of a considerably more mixed and historically accurate representation of human experience.

Macaulay sets out to explain how a man of evident patriotism and personal integrity could have written The Prince, a text whose apparently cold, amoral treatment of political power seemed genuinely difficult to reconcile with everything else known about Machiavelli's own character and civic commitments.

Macaulay argues that Italian society in the Renaissance valued cunning over courage, just as the northern nations valued courage over cunning, so that Machiavelli's morality was that of his own time and place rather than a peculiar individual wickedness distinct from his contemporaries.

Lyell argues that the earth's surface has been shaped over immense stretches of time by the same causes now in operation, rivers, volcanoes, earthquakes, erosion and deposition, acting at roughly their present intensity, rather than by ancient catastrophes no longer occurring in the observable present.

The first volume reviews the history of geology as a discipline and surveys present-day geological processes in detail, establishing the observational foundation for the uniformitarian method the subsequent volumes will apply more extensively to the rock record.

The extracts survey the progress of geology from the ancient Greeks through the eighteenth-century theories of Hutton and Werner, tracing how earlier thinkers had attempted to account for the earth's visible transformations before Lyell's own uniformitarian synthesis.

The extracts set out Lyell's central principle directly, that the causes now acting on the earth's surface, given enough time, account for all its past changes, presenting this claim in compact, essential form rather than surrounded by the extensive supporting evidence of the complete work.

Comte states that in the theological stage the mind explains phenomena by the direct and continuous action of supernatural beings, in the metaphysical stage by abstract forces or entities substituted for those beings, and in the positive stage by observed laws of succession and resemblance among facts, without appeal to either cause.

He arranges the sciences, mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology, in an order of decreasing generality and increasing complexity, arguing that each depends on the principles of the ones before it while adding genuinely new laws the earlier sciences cannot supply.

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the Physician's Aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Hegel argues that beauty in art ranks above beauty in nature because artistic beauty is born of spirit, and spirit and its productions stand higher than nature and its appearances, giving art a philosophical dignity natural beauty, however striking, cannot possess.

He identifies art, alongside religion and philosophy, as one of the three ways in which spirit comes to know itself, giving art genuine philosophical significance as a vehicle through which truth achieves concrete, sensuous existence in the world.

Sir Walter Scott, in speaking of him, we are to speak chiefly of the literary man, though it was not chiefly as a literary man that he wished to be regarded, or perhaps was regarded, either by himself or by the world.

The Waverley Novels, without one true delineation of human passion or human character, have taught all men this, at least, that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men.

Mazzini takes Byron and Goethe as the twin summits of the age just ended, Byron the poet of the individual, of subjective will and rebellion, and Goethe the poet of objective contemplation and serene detachment, representing between them the full range of Romantic individualist achievement.

Mazzini argues that each poet is genuinely incomplete, that Byron's subjective rebellion and Goethe's objective detachment each capture only half of what poetry should actually accomplish, brilliant but partial achievements rather than fully realized artistic completeness.

Newman argues that Christian doctrine has genuinely developed since the apostles, that development is what one would expect of a living idea, and that the developments found in Roman Catholicism are true growths rather than corruptions of primitive apostolic teaching.

Newman proposes seven notes for telling true developments from corruptions, among them preservation of type, continuity of principles and chronic vigour, and applies them systematically across Church history to argue his case with historical specificity.

The elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. mourns the death of Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam across many short sections written over years, moving slowly from despair toward a trust that has absorbed doubt rather than dismissed it.

The dramatic monologues Ulysses and Tithonus give voice to an aged king who cannot rest from travel and a lover granted immortality without youth, opposed longings for more life and for release.

Emerson argues that great men exist to be used, not worshipped, and that the real value of studying them lies in discovering that the specific power each one demonstrates at unusual scale is actually latent, in smaller measure, in every person who studies them.

Emerson praises Montaigne for an honesty so complete it refuses even the comfort of settled philosophical conclusion, presenting genuine, sustained skepticism not as a failure of nerve but as itself a rare and difficult form of intellectual courage.

Sainte-Beuve asks what makes a writer a classic and answers that it is not conformity to ancient rules but the enrichment of the human mind in a form that is at once new and old, large and fine, easily contemporary with every age.

Sainte-Beuve surveys Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and the French seventeenth century, demonstrating his criterion's genuine cross-cultural applicability rather than remaining merely a parochial defense of any single national or period-specific literary tradition.

Emerson describes the English as a people of remarkable physical stamina and stubborn practicality, possessing a genius for machinery and trade that has made them, in his assessment, the most formidable nation currently existing, even as he confesses genuine doubt about whether this practical genius leaves adequate room for spiritual ambition.

He records his visit to Thomas Carlyle at Craigenputtock, describing Carlyle's conversation as possessing a force and a seriousness Emerson found almost nowhere else during his time in England, a visit that opens the book and frames everything that follows against this initial, exceptional encounter.

Tocqueville argues that the French Revolution completed work the monarchy had already begun: centralisation, the destruction of local liberty, the separation of classes and the growing equality of Frenchmen under a single administration were all in place before 1789.

The nobility had been reduced to a caste with privileges but no function, and it was precisely when its privileges ceased to buy the peasants any service that they became intolerable.

Helmholtz begins from the long, unbroken history of failed attempts across many decades to build a perpetual motion machine, arguing that this consistent failure is not mere accident or engineering incompetence but expresses a genuine underlying physical law governing all such mechanical systems.

He traces the conversion of force through numerous everyday examples, falling weights, compressed springs, heat, electricity and chemical action, demonstrating that force changes form continuously without the total quantity ever actually increasing or being destroyed within an isolated system.

Thoreau begins with the art of sauntering, which he derives from Sainte-Terre, the Holy Land, so that the walker becomes a kind of crusader, and says he needs four hours a day walking through woods and fields to keep his health and spirits.

He notices that his steps tend westward, and takes this as an emblem of the nation's movement toward wildness, the west being for him the wild and the future.

The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. / But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

Geikie argues that the present outlines of continents and oceans are not fixed or given but are themselves the outcome of a long history that geology can actually read and reconstruct, making geography a subject to be studied as evolution rather than as static physical description.

He traces the making of Europe from the continent's most ancient surviving rock formations, found in Scandinavia and the Scottish Highlands, describing these as the oldest foundation upon which the continent's later geological history was subsequently built up.

The Physiological Theory of Fermentation, from Pasteur's 1876 studies of beer, shows that fermentation is the work of living micro-organisms rather than a purely chemical process, overturning established chemical theory with rigorous biological evidence.

The Germ Theory and Its Applications to Medicine and Surgery, read to the Academy of Medicine in 1878, connects these microbes to disease and to Lister's antiseptic surgery, giving Lister's practical methods a genuine theoretical foundation explaining why they worked.

Huxley argues directly that a man who knows no science is as poorly educated as one who knows no literature, refusing the common Victorian assumption that scientific training is merely practically useful while genuine cultural formation belongs exclusively to classical literary study.

He argues that the Renaissance humanists who first championed classical learning were themselves rebels against a dead, exhausted scholastic tradition, turning the classicists' own historical origin into an argument against treating any single fixed curriculum as permanently sufficient for genuine education.

Frazer opens with the strange rule of the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi, where the priest, called the King of the Wood, held his office only by having killed his own predecessor in single combat and would in turn be killed by whoever next succeeded in doing the same, a violent, unstable priesthood the entire subsequent book sets out to explain through comparison.

He develops the concept of sympathetic magic, the belief that actions performed on an image or representation of a thing will produce corresponding effects on the actual thing itself, and treats this principle as underlying an enormous range of magical practices recorded across widely separated and otherwise unrelated cultures.

The leisure class arose when predatory exploit became more honourable than productive work, and its members prove their standing by conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, wasting time and goods in ways that visibly cost money.

Veblen applies the idea to dress, manners, sport, religion and higher learning, finding in each an institution shaped by the need to display wealth rather than by the use it claims to serve.

John Tanner, a rich revolutionary who has written a book on the Life Force, is made guardian of Ann Whitefield and flees to Spain when he realises she means to marry him; she pursues and catches him, inverting conventional courtship dynamics with genuine comic force.

The third act, often played on its own as Don Juan in Hell, is a long debate among Don Juan, Doña Ana, the Statue and the Devil about whether life is going anywhere and what the superman would be, giving philosophical concerns direct dramatic voice.

Reason in Common Sense lays out the naturalist basis, and the sentence that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it comes from this first volume, distilling the entire project's foundation into a single memorable formulation.

The volumes trace reason in society, from love and the family to patriotism; in religion, which Santayana treats as poetry mistaken for science; in art; and in science, which he defends as the only knowledge we have after this extended survey.

Franklin's maxims, that time is money, that credit is money, that the good paymaster is lord of another man's purse, express the spirit of capitalism in its purest form: the pursuit of profit as a duty, stripped of enjoyment and of religion alike.

Calvinist predestination left believers in an unprecedented inner loneliness, anxious for signs of election, and the pastoral answer was tireless labour in a calling, which alone could dispel religious doubt and give certainty of grace.

Pope Pius X's encyclical condemns Modernism, which it calls the synthesis of all heresies, reconstructing the Modernist as philosopher, believer, theologian, historian, critic, apologist and reformer, a systematic account treating diverse intellectual tendencies as one unified movement.

The encyclical traces Modernism's whole to agnosticism about God and to the doctrine that religion arises from an inner sense and that dogma evolves, identifying a specific philosophical root generating the movement's entire range of theological and historical symptoms.

The Reader insists that the British must simply be driven out of India by force so that Indians can then run the same government, the same railways, the same courts, themselves, and the Editor answers that this would not actually be home rule at all, but English rule without the Englishman, the same disease continuing under a different name.

The Editor argues that railways have spread famine and disease more efficiently across India than they existed before, that lawyers have taught Indians to prolong quarrels for profit rather than reconcile them, and that modern civilisation as a whole represents not progress but a kind of disease that had already corrupted Britain before it ever reached Indian shores.

I have always maintained that a five-foot shelf would hold books enough to give in the course of a lifetime a good substitute for a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare only fifteen minutes a day for reading.

The purpose of this selection is to present so ample and characteristic a record of the stream of the world's thought that the observant reader's mind shall be enriched, refined, and fitted for the discussion of the leading topics of the day.

A novel in seven volumes, three of them published after Proust's death, narrated by a man looking back on his life from childhood in Combray to old age in Paris after the First World War, its subjects jealousy, snobbery, homosexuality and the Dreyfus affair.

Around the narrator move the Swanns, the Guermantes, the Verdurins, the Baron de Charlus and Albertine, whom the narrator imprisons in his flat and loses, a considerable cast of characters whose intersecting lives structure the novel's extended social world.

Neilson organizes the sixty lectures under distinct subject fields, history, poetry, natural science, philosophy, biography, prose fiction and criticism, education, political science, drama, voyages and travel, and religion, giving each area its own brief introduction to what the Harvard Classics set includes on that subject.

Each individual lecture introduces its assigned field and explains specifically what makes the corresponding volumes within the fifty-volume Harvard Classics set worth reading, giving general readers a brief orientation before they approach the actual primary texts themselves.

Dewey argues that education is not a preparation for a later life to be lived elsewhere, but is itself a mode of associated living, of communicated experience, and that a society exists and continues to exist through exactly this kind of transmission and renewal from the old to the young.

He argues that the traditional separation of liberal from vocational education reflects, historically, a division between a class destined to think, rule and enjoy leisure and a class destined only to labor with their hands, a division a genuine democracy, treating no citizen as permanently subordinate to another, cannot coherently maintain.

Lenin argues that the state is not a neutral referee standing above class conflict but is always and necessarily an instrument by which one class holds down another, a claim that directly challenges liberal and mainstream socialist assumptions about the state's essentially neutral function.

Lenin argues that the working class cannot simply take over the existing machinery of parliament, army and bureaucracy through gradual or electoral means, since this machinery was built specifically to serve the ruling class, and must instead be smashed entirely and replaced with something modeled on the Paris Commune.

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.

She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.