Books and reading -- Great Britain; Conduct of life; Social problems; Women
II. {10} Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, that you
may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to
make;—you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go to them first for
clear sight, so you must stay with them, that you may share at last their
just and mighty Passion. Passion, or “sensation.” I am not afraid of
the word; still less of the thing. You have heard many outcries against
sensation lately; but, I can tell you, it is not less sensation we want,
but more. The ennobling difference between one man and another,—between
one animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one feels more than
another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got
for us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two
by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But
being human creatures, _it is_ good for us; nay, we are only human in so
far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion to our
passion.
You know I said of that great and pure society of the Dead, that it would
allow “no vain or vulgar person to enter there.” What do you think I
meant by a “vulgar” person? What do you yourselves mean by “vulgarity”?
You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence
of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent
vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and
mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callousness,
which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and
crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity.
It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the
hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar,
precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy,—of quick
understanding,—of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most
accurate term, may be called the “tact” or “touch-faculty,” of body and
soul: that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has
above all creatures;—fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond
reason;—the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but
determine what is true:—it is the God-given passion of humanity which
alone can recognise what God has made good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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