Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social SubjectsHousman, Laurence
Philosophy
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects
Housman, Laurence
Social ethics; Social sciences
But the possessors of these works of beauty do very often make a great
point of having their own names perpetuated, even though the vehicle is
another personality than their own. And so very frequently we have the
names passed down to us of these parasites of immortality--the tyrants
for whom palaces, or arches, or temples were built--but not the names
of the artists who designed them, whose immortality they really are.
And though the official guide may refresh our memory with snippets
of history, and say this, that, or the other about the name to which
the temple remains attached--the really important thing that lives,
survives, and influences us is not the externally applied name, but the
invested beauty which has no name, but is soul incarnate in stone to
the glory of God--the self-realisation of a being who (but for that)
has passed utterly from remembrance.
That, as I have said before, is the nearest thing to immortality that
we know. And it comes to us, in a shape which, (so to be informed with
immortality) cannot limit itself to the demands of use. When all the
claims of use are satisfied, then the life of personality begins to
show--the fullest and the most permanent form of self-realisation known
to man on earth lies in ornament.
Of course, when I say “ornament,” I use the word in a very wide sense.
What I have said of sculpture, painting or architecture, applies
equally to poetry, music or philosophy. I would even go further, and
apply it in other directions where no material matrix for it exists.
Every department of mental activity has its ornament--the culminating
expression of that particular direction of the human will. Faith is
the ornament of destiny, Hope the ornament of knowledge, Love the
ornament of sex. Without these ornaments destiny and knowledge and sex
would have no beauty that the soul of man should desire them. Those
additions or glosses were quite unnecessary to existence--up to a
point; for millions of years the world did without them, and Evolution
managed to scramble along without faith, without hope, without love.
But Evolution itself brought them into being; and then for millions of
years they existed in germ, without self-consciousness; but steadily,
as they germinated, they produced beauty and a sense of design in
their environment. Co-ordination, dovetailing (peaceful word!), the
harmonising and gentle effect of one life upon another, as opposed to
the savage and predatory, began to have effect. And in response came
ornament; faith, hope and love showed their rudimentary beginnings even
in the lower animals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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