Biographers From The United Kingdom

"Ironically, philosophers of science owe the Creationists a debt. For the “scientific” Creationists have constructed a glorious fake, which we can use to illustrate the differences between science and pseudoscience. By examining their scientific pretensions, I have tried to convey a sense of the nature and methods of science."

"In almost any natural population of organisms, more offspring will be produced than are able to survive. The offspring will vary—in particular, they will vary with respect to characteristics that affect their abilities to survive and reproduce. Some organisms will survive longer and reproduce more frequently. If the advantageous characteristics are inheritable, then they will be transferred to descendants. As a result, they will become more prevalent in later generations. Over a large number of generations the common features of the population may be radically changed."

"Creationism does not merit scientific discussion. As we found in the last chapter, Creation “science” is not a promising rival to evolutionary theory. It is not integrated with the rest of science, but is a hodgepodge of doctrines, lacking independent support. It offers no startling predictions, no advances in knowledge. We cannot commend it for any ability to shed light on questions that orthodox theories are unable to answer. Nor can we praise it for offering a definite alternative that might help scientists in their quest for an improved biological or geological theory. “Scientific” Creationism has no evidence that speaks in its favor, partly because Creationists are so meticulous in leaving their doctrines blurred."

"People who live in Creationist houses should not throw methodological stones."

"Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. Although they do not refer to closed systems in stating the second law, Creationists have heard that the law only applies to such systems. So they are ready for the response I have just given. Morris even calls it “an exceedingly naive argument.” There are two popular Creationist rejoinders. The first is to pooh-pooh the concept of a closed system. The second is to change the subject."

"It was Maitland's good fortune to be only moderately successful academically as a young man, so he escaped the easy assurance of the eminently successful man looking at the world. He had to learn about documents the hard way, in a conveyancer's office. This taught him to keep close to the ground. He learned that the approach to history must be through drudgery, and that no amount of elegance, economy, and precision of mind can take the place of an enormous capacity for hard work. He had no successors. Yet in a sense all modern historical researchers are his successors. Maitland's virtues are the virtues we should all like to possess; his way of doing things is the way of all modern research."

"It was his long and dazzling introduction to Otto Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Ages that made me first realize what the history of ideas could be. When Leslie Stephen's wife died Maitland wrote to him, "I have an irrepressible wish, however foolish and wrong it may be, to touch your hand and tell you in two words what I think of you." I have the same foolish and irrepressible wish about Maitland."

"He was introducing a set of documents and not rewriting the history of parliament."

"It was a court of politicians enforcing a policy, not a court of judges administering the law."

"Maitland did not write a history of the constitution nor narrative history like Freeman. He thought that Freeman and most English historians (but not Stubbs) were insular. They had not learnt the German way of interpreting history. It should not be interpreted through their rulers, the battles they had fought and the treaties they had made. It should be interpreted through the origins of their land, their institutions, their language and their folk tales and myths. He did not, like Marx, invest an all-embracing theory that would explain the inseparable processes that determined the direction in which society must move."

"By the History of English Law, and Domesday Book and Beyond, to say nothing of Roman Canon Law in the Church of England, and his other contributions to legal history, Professor Maitland has laid students of the English constitution under obligations that are incalculable."

"Those who took the road to democracy to be the road to freedom mistook temporary means for an ultimate end."

"We may safely say that Maitland will remain a force and an inspiration when some, even of those who occupied the woolsack, are mere names. If all his theories could be overthrown, all his positive results peptonized into textbooks, he would still live as a model of critical method, a model of style, and a model of intellectual temper. He shall not be shamed, whatever records leap to light. A century hence his name will stand higher still than it does to-day."

"While others lingered among the tombs, he drew his knowledge of our law, not from the sepulchres of its sages, but straight from the source itself. For him no fetish blocked the way; for him no vain repetition of statements from the legal Talmud would make those statements true. If “Co. Litt.” was wrong, it was not blasphemy to say so; to treat its “sentence” as a judgment from which there was no appeal was worthy of the Middle Ages. I do not know, nor do I suppose that the famous Downing Professor ever said so much, but one can imagine, had he spoken out, how his witty raillery might have shocked the veterans of Bench and Bar. For in his ever vivid originality, in the daring brilliance of his style, Maitland was the Whistler of the Law."

"It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future."

"All Europe over, lawyers were being at once attracted and puzzled by the Roman doctrine of possession... Roman law compels us to hold that there are some occupiers who are not possessors. In an evil hour the English judges, who were controlling a new possessory action, which had been suggested by foreign models, adopted this theory at the expense of the termor... English law for six centuries and more will rue this youthful flirtation with Romanism."

"When the dust settles from the end of the Cold War, EP Thompson will be viewed, along with Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel, as one of the key individuals who influenced the course of events in the 1980s."

"Unlike the extreme radical, the Peace Movement does not make light of physical death. In fact, it feeds almost entirely upon the age-old fear of it. A few half-hearted realists (E.P. Thompson among them) admit that the probable consequence of unilateralist policies would be Soviet domination in some form. They know also that, much more than socialism (which they favour), it would be the end of most of what we, and even they themselves, value. But that, apparently, is less important than saving our own skins."

"E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’...has set the tone for much writing about popular protest."

"The man who has done more than anyone else to rouse the national conscience over nuclear weapons is E. P. Thompson... Like Gladstone, who felt himself called away from writing about the Christine doctrine of eternal punishment to lead the agitation over the Bulgarian atrocities, Thompson abandoned his scholar's desk and the book that he is writing on William Blake last autumn to devote himself to the anti-nuclear cause."

"The distinctive contribution of working people to the agitation for Reform between 1789 and 1832 is brilliantly invoked in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class."

"We are going to stop those piffling cruise missiles, you know, on land if not on sea. What we have to do is seize this moment of mass consciousness to move directly into the structures of the Cold War themselves, the blocs behind the missiles. We have to keep to some very large and simple ideas – like remaking Europe and putting peace and liberty together... This is the most serious political work I have ever done or will ever do in my life. It won't last long. If we succeed a little, the politicians will move in and take it off us."

"The life and work of E. P. Thompson exemplified the social and cultural struggles that were taking place in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, a period which gave the working class access to higher education in a way that had never happened before. His writings, polemical, astringent and tough minded, had an imaginative sweep which questioned social complacencies and compelled institutions and individuals to look beyond their own narrow concerns and their conception of their past."

"...class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way."

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties."

"[W]orking-class consciousness is no longer the talismanic concept it once was among historians. In retrospect it is clear that E. P. Thompson's magical evocation in The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. edn. 1968) brought a prominent line of inquiry to its culmination. Perhaps this should have been obvious at the time, given the author's determination to define class, not in material terms, but as a product of the daily experience of individual men and women."

"[I]n the early eighties, I was turned aside once again, by the emergency of the “second cold war” and by the heavy demands of the peace movement. I do not regret this: I am convinced that the peace movement made a major contribution to dispersing the cold war, which had descended like a polluting cloud on every field of political and social life."

"We must commence to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists. We must learn to be loyal, not to 'East' or 'West' but to each other, and we must disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state."

"Thompson's work combined passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst. He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but the capacity to produce something qualitatively different from the rest of us, not to be measured on the same scale. Let us simply call it genius, in the traditional sense of the word. None of his mature works could have been written by anyone else."

"John Mortimer: Now that nuclear weapons exist, you have to face the fact that you would rather be conquered by, say, the Russians than have the world blown up? Thompson: Yes, I think so. Don't you? Mortimer: Better red than dead? Thompson: Yes. Mortimer: So, if nuclear weapons had existed in 1939, we would have had to accept conquest by Hitler to save a nuclear war? Thompson: Yes."

"He once called himself the Muggletonian Marxist, and the title is too tempting to resist. He claimed some special affinity with one associate of the sect, William Blake, and all those who ever heard him lecture on the subject must at least draw some comfort from the fact that he completed this volume before his death. Almost every page offers fresh evidence, not merely of his vast, overflowing erudition, but of his wit, his humanity, his soaring historical imagination, the combination of qualities which made the publication of The Making of the English Working Class such an event not merely in the writing of English history but in the politics of our century."

"Pattison lived through a formative period in the history of the modern university in England, and in his person he embodied many of the transformations that occurred in the half century he spent at Oxford. To re-trace his life and thought is therefore to explore through the eyes of a key figure the elements of that transition to the modern university: the secularization of intellectual life, the emergence of the professional academic, and the challenge posed by the emergent German idea of the university to the traditions of English university life. When Pattison arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate in 1832, the University's chief purpose was to provide a gentlemanly education for intending clergy."

"In the Diary which begins 1845 there is a much larger infusion of secular matter. I find myself deep in the literary history of the eighteenth century, reading Gray's Correspondence, Prior's Life of Goldsmith, Hume's Life and Correspondence ..."

"... I began at the beginning, and read Hind's Logic, Whately's Logic, Reid's Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. But the book which was of most use to me on these subjects was Stewart's Elements. I found on odd volume of this in my father's study at Hauxwell. It attracted me; I read and re-read it with increasing satisfaction. To Dugald Stewart, an author now obsolete, I owe the first infusion of a taste for philosophical inquiry. ...."

"Another book read this term seized upon my interest in an exceptional way, this was Gibbon's Autobiography. I had long before got hold of a few extracts from this, which had found their way into Lord Sheffield's Memoir of the author, prefixed to an edition of the Decline and Fall which we had at home. Those extracts had fixed themselves in my memory. I now procured the whole book and devoured it, reading it again and again till I could repeat whole paragraphs. Gibbon, in fact, supplied the place of a college tutor; he not only found me advice, but secretly inspired me with the enthusiasm to follow it."

"A man who does not know what has been thought by those who have gone before him is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas—ideas which have perhaps been tried and found wanting. As accumulated learning stifles the mental powers, so original thinking has been known to bring about a puffy, unsubstantial mental condition."

"But there was in my father's mind another sentiment, less creditable to him, than the wish to give me the best education to be had. I mean those social aspirations which he continued to nourish, though by his removal to the remote situation of Hauxwell, and consequent detachment from the Castle, he was no longer able to gratify them. He had the instinct of good society, and liked to live with gentlemen, and to know what was going on in the upper world. His acquaintance with the peerage was accurate; he must have read Debrett at that time more than the Bible. Hence, in estimating colleges he was led to take the footman's view, and to prefer one which was frequented by the sons of gentlemen."

"About 1500 it seemed as if Europe was about to cast off at one effort the slough of feudal barbarism, and to step at once into the fair inheritance of the wisdom and culture of the ancient world. The Church led the van, and smiled on free inquiry and the new learning. About the third decennium of the century the resistance of the obscurantists was organised, the Catholic reaction set in, and nascent humanism was submerged beneath the rising tide of theological passion and the fatal and fruitless controversies of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, to the rival cries of the Bible and the Church. The " sacrificio d'intelletto " of Loyola took the place of the free and rationalising spirit with which Erasmus had looked out upon the world of men."

"I wanted not merely to get up my classics, but to penetrate to the secrets and mysteries which I vaguely understood to be somehow wrapt up in books, though they had not, as yet, been revealed to me. I was disconcerted to find that none of my new acquaintance had any share of this yearning curiosity."

"My father's views for me, which were to guide his choice of college, were twofold. He really wanted me to learn; to get a good education, not so much with the idea of my making my way in the world, as from the value which he had learned to set upon intellect. ... He was fond of repeating the sentence in the Eton Latin grammar—" Concessi Cantabrigiam ad capiendum ingenii cultum. . . ." This was the proverb which presided over my whole college life. Though often dimmed, it was never lost sight of, and however much I may have had to hate the grammar on other accounts, I think no other sentence of any book has had so large a share in moulding my mind and character as that one. It was then essential to my father's plans for me that the college to be selected for me should be one where the instruction given was reputed to be good."

"There is nothing so easily made offensive as good reasoning; and men of clear logical minds, if not gifted at the same time with tact, make more enemies than men with bad hearts and unsound understandings."

"A very useful book might be written with the sole object of advising what parts of what books should be read. It should not be a book of elegant extracts, but should merely refer to the passages which are advised to be read. It might also indicate what are the chief works upon any given subject. For example, take rent; the important passages in Adam Smith, Ricardo, Jones, Mill, and other writers, should be referred to."

"Soothe the present as much as we may; look forward as hopefully as we can to the future, still the dreadful past must overshadow us."

"Any one who is much talked of, must be much maligned. This seems to be a harsh conclusion; but when you consider how much more given men are to depreciate than to appreciate, you will acknowledge that there is some truth in the saying."

"The envious man desires some good which another possesses; the jealous man would often be content to be without the good so that that other did not possess it."

"Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion."

"Self-indulgence takes many forms; and we should bear in mind that there may be a sullen sensuality as well as a gay one."

"There is one statesman of the present day, of whom I always say that he would have escaped making the blunders that he has made if he had only ridden more in omnibuses."

"It has always appeared to me that there is so much to be done in this world, that all self-inflicted suffering which cannot be turned to good account for others, is a loss—a loss, if you may so express it, to the spiritual world."

"Love, like the opening of the heavens to the Saints, shows for a moment, even to the dullest man, the possibilities of the human race. He has faith, hope, and charity for another being, perhaps but a creation of his imagination: still it is a great advance for a man to be profoundly loving even in his imagination."