and that no kind of knowledge ever can surpass either in interest or
importance the knowledge of man as a social being, as the member of a
Family, of a Church, and of a State. The depreciation of moral science
which we have lately heard from Mr. Buckle and other members of that
school is a transitional phenomenon arising out of the one-sided
culture of the understanding, and a defective emotional, volitional,
and imaginative organization. If new discoveries are not every day
trumpeted in the domain of moral philosophy, it is just because this
science, like Euclid, is too certain, too fundamental, and too
indispensable to have been left to the happy chance of being found out
after the lapse of long centuries. Morals are as necessary to the
acting man as the sun’s light to the growing plant; they are not
discovered, because they always have been and always must be; and the
only great result that we have to look for then in them is that they
shall be more universally recognised, more scientifically handled, and
more practically applied. Socrates therefore was right, not only for
Greece in the fifth century before Christ, but for England at the
present moment, and for all times and places, when he proclaimed on
the house-tops that the first and most necessary wisdom for all men is
not to measure the stars, or {20} to weigh the dust, or to analyse the
air, but, according to the old Delphic sentence, to know themselves,
and to realize in all the breadth and depth of its significance what
it is to be a man, and not a pig or a god. And in attaining this
knowledge, while he would certainly find that, though a stable
physical platform to stand on and a healthy physical atmosphere to
breathe are necessary for the production of a normal humanity, yet in
general the measure of a man’s manhood is to be taken not so much
from what he attaches to himself from without as from what he brings
with him from within.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account