Linguists From England

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."

"The England of our day would fain bring up both sexes and keep all ages in profound ignorance of sexual and intersexual relations; and the consequences of that imbecility are particularly cruel and afflicting. … Shall we ever understand that ignorance is not innocence?"

"I have struggled for forty-seven years, distinguishing myself honourably in every way that I possibly could. I never had a compliment, nor a "thank you," nor a single farthing. I translate a doubtful book in my old age, and I immediately make sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money."

"Conquer thyself, till thou hast done this, thou art but a slave; for it is almost as well to be subjected to another's appetite as to thine own."

"Starting in a hollowed log of wood — some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself 'Why?' and the only echo is 'damned fool!... the Devil drives'."

"The Translator has ventured to entitle a "Lay of the Higher Law" the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the "Higher Culture." The principles which justify the name are as follows: —The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the "divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments.He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions."Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume."

"Friends of my youth, a last adieu! haply some day we meet again; Yet ne'er the self-same men shall meet; the years shall make us other men."

"Hardly we find the path of love, to sink the self, forget the "I," When sad suspicion grips the heart, when Man, the Man begins to die:"

"How Thought is imp'otent to divine the secret which the gods defend, The Why of birth and life and death, that Isis-veil no hand may rend. Eternal Morrows make our day; our is is aye to be till when Night closes in; 'tis all a dream, and yet we die, — and then and then? And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan."

"Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy thy shining hour of sun; We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?"

"There is no God, no man-made God; a bigger, stronger, crueller man; Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere Thought, the life of Life, began."

"How shall the Shown pretend to ken aught of the Showman or the Show? Why meanly bargain to believe, which only means thou ne'er canst know? How may the passing Now contain the standing Now — Eternity? — An endless is without a was, the be and never the to-be?"

"Grant an Idea, Primal Cause, the Causing Cause, why crave for more? Why strive its depth and breadth to mete, to trace its work, its aid to íimplore? Unknown, Incomprehensible, whateíer you choose to call it, call; But leave it vague as airy space, dark in its darkness mystical."

"Your childish fears would seek a Sire, by the non-human God defined, What your five wits may wot ye weet; what is you please to dub "designíd;" You bring down Heavíen to vulgar Earth; your maker like yourselves you make, You quake to own a reign of Law, you pray the Law its laws to break; You pray, but hath your thought e'er weighed how empty vain the prayer must be, That begs a boon already giv'en, or craves a change of law to see?"

"Man worships self: his God is Man; the struggling of the mortal mind To form its model as 'twould be, the perfect of itself to find."

"What call ye them or Goods or Ills, ill-goods, good-ills, a loss, a gain, When realms arise and falls a roof; a world is won, a man is slain?"

"All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own."

"What is the Truth? was askt of yore. Reply all object Truth is one As twain of halves aye makes a whole; the moral Truth for all is none."

"As palace mirror'd in the stream, as vapour mingled with the skies, So weaves the brain of mortal man the tangled web of Truth and Lies."

"What see we here? Forms, nothing more! Forms fill the brightest, strongest eye, We know not substance; 'mid the shades shadows ourselves we live and die."

""Faith mountains move" I hear: I see the practice of the world unheed The foolish vaunt, the blatant boast that serves our vanity to feed. "Faith stands unmoved"; and why? Because man's silly fancies still remain, And will remain till wiser man the day-dreams of his youth disdain."

""'Tis blessed to believe"; you say: The saying may be true enow And it can add to Life a light: — only remains to show us how."

"With God's foreknowledge man's free will! what monster-growth of human brain, What powers of light shall ever pierce this puzzle dense with words inane?"

""Be ye Good Boys, go seek for Heav'en, come pay the priest that holds the key;" So spake, and speaks, and aye shall speak the last to enter Heaven, — he."

"Yes Truth may be, but 'tis not Here; mankind must seek and find it There, But Where nor I nor you can tell, nor aught earth-mother ever bare.Enough to think that Truth can be: come sit we where the roses glow, Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to 'unknow.'"

"Words, words that gender things! The soul is a new-comer on the scene; Sufficeth not the breath of Life to work the matter-born machine? The race of Be'ing from dawn of Life in an unbroken course was run; What men are pleased to call their Souls was in the hog and dog begun: Life is a ladder infinite-stepped, that hides its rungs from human eyes; Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head soars high above the skies: No break the chain of Being bears; all things began in unity; And lie the links in regular line though haply none the sequence see."

""Th' immortal mind of mortal man!" we hear yon loud-lunged Zealot cry; Whose mind but means his sum of thought, an essence of atomic "I." Thought is the work of brain and nerve, in small-skulled idiot poor and mean; In sickness sick, in sleep asleep, and dead when Death lets drop the scene."

""Tush!" quoth the Zahid, "well we ken the teaching of the school abhorr'd "That maketh man automaton, mind a secretion, soul a word." "Of molecules and protoplasm you matter-mongers prompt to prate; "Of jelly-speck development and apes that grew to man's estate." Vain cavil! all that is hath come either by Mir'acle or by Law; — Why waste on this your hate and fear, why waste on that your love and awe?"

"Is not the highest honour his who from the worst hath drawn the best; May not your Maker make the world from matter, an it suit His hest? Nay more, the sordider the stuff the cunninger the workman's hand: Cease, then, your own Almighty Power to bind, to bound, to understand."

""Reason and Instinct!" How we love to play with words that please our pride; Our noble race's mean descent by false forged titles seek to hide! For "gift divine" I bid you read the better work of higher brain, From Instinct diff'ering in degree as golden mine from leaden vein."

"Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue: Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true."

""Fools rush where Angels fear to tread!" Angels and Fools have equal claim To do what Nature bids them do, sans hope of praise, sans fear of blame!"

"There is no Heav'en, there is no Hell; these be the dreams of baby minds, Tools of the wily Fetisheer, to 'fright the fools his cunning blinds. Learn from the mighty Spi'rits of old to set thy foot on Heav'en and Hell; In Life to find thy hell and heav'en as thou abuse or use it well."

"Hard to the heart is final death: fain would an Ens not end in Nil; Love made the senti'ment kindly good: the Priest perverted all to ill. While Reason sternly bids us die, Love longs for life beyond the grave: Our hearts, affections, hopes and fears for Life-to-be shall ever crave. Hence came the despot's darling dream, a Church to rule and sway the State; Hence sprang the train of countless griefs in priestly sway and rule innate. For future Life who dares reply? No witness at the bar have we; Save what the brother Potsherd tells, — old tales and novel jugglery. Who e'er return'd to teach the Truth, the things of Heaven and Hell to limn? And all we hear is only fit for grandam-talk and nursery-hymn."

""Who drinks one bowl hath scant delight; to poorest passion he was born; "Who drains the score must e'er expect to rue the headache of the morn." Safely he jogs along the way which "Golden Mean" the sages call; Who scales the brow of frowning Alp must face full many a slip and fall."

"When doctors differ who decides amid the milliard-headed throng? Who save the madman dares to cry: "'Tis I am right, you all are wrong"? "You all are right, you all are wrong," we hear the careless Soofi say, "For each believes his glimm'ering lamp to be the gorgeous light of day." "Thy faith why false, my faith why true? 'tis all the work of Thine and Mine, "The fond and foolish love of self that makes the Mine excel the Thine." Cease then to mumble rotten bones; and strive to clothe with flesh and blood The skel'eton; and to shape a Form that all shall hail as fair and good."

"Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause; He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell, A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell."

"From self-approval seek applause: What ken not men thou kennest, thou! Spurn ev'ry idol others raise: Before thine own Ideal bow: Be thine own Deus: Make self free, liberal as the circling air: Thy Thought to thee an Empire be; break every prison'ing lock and bar."

"And hold Humanity one man, whose universal agony Still strains and strives to gain the goal, where agonies shall cease to be. Believe in all things; none believe; judge not nor warp by "Facts" the thought; See clear, hear clear, tho' life may seem Mâyâ and Mirage, Dream and Naught. Abjure the Why and seek the How: the God and gods enthroned on high, Are silent all, are silent still; nor hear thy voice, nor deign reply. The Now, that indivisible point which studs the length of infinite line Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the puny all thou callest thine."

"Haply the Law that rules the world allows to man the widest range; And haply Fate's a Theist-word, subject to human chance and change. This "I" may find a future Life, a nobler copy of our own, Where every riddle shall be ree'd, where every knowledge shall be known; Where 'twill be man's to see the whole of what on Earth he sees in part; Where change shall ne'er surcharge the thought; nor hope defer'd shall hurt the heart."

"Hâjî Abdû has been known to me for more years than I care to record. A native, it is believed, of Dârabghird in the Yezd Province, he always preferred to style himself El-Hichmakani, a facetious "lackab" or surname, meaning "Of No-hall, Nowhere." He had travelled far and wide with his eyes open; as appears by his "couplets.""

"He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems, maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible working world they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong. Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences; will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted development; this, too, by a process, not negative and distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and constructive. I am not called upon to sit in the seat of judgment; but I may say that it would be singular if the attempt succeeded. Such a system would be all-comprehensive, because not limited by space, time, or race; its principle would be extensive as Matter itself, and, consequently, eternal. Meanwhile he satisfies himself, — the main point."

"Christianity and Islamism have been on their trial for the last eighteen and twelve centuries. They have been ardent in proselytizing, yet they embrace only one-tenth and one-twentieth of the human race. Hâjî Abdû would account for the tardy and unsatisfactory progress of what their votaries call "pure truths," by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief; rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate. Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to every progressive age."

"The Hâjî regrets the excessive importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking which, like the physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind… Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would, therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals, — the development of Humanity. With him suspension of judgment is a system."

"The "Schedule of Doctrines" of the most liberal Christian Church insists upon human depravity, and the "absolute need of the Holy Spirit's agency in man's regeneration and sanctification." But what have we here? The "original calamity" was either caused by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject. Far better and wiser is the essayist's poetical explanation now apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of the sage bard's day:—"

"The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy, contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world."

"That creatures endowed with the mere possibility of liberty should not always choose the Good appears natural. But that of the milliards of human beings who have inhabited Earth, not one should have been found invariably to choose Good, proves how insufficient is the solution. Hence no one believes in the existence of the complete man under the present state of things. The Haji rejects all popular and mythical explanation by the Fall of "Adam," the innate depravity of human nature, and the absolute perfection of certain Incarnations, which argues their divinity. He can only wail over the prevalence of evil, assume its foundation to be error, and purpose to abate it by uprooting that Ignorance which bears and feeds it. His "eschatology," like that of the Soofis generally, is vague and shadowy."

"With Hâjî Abdû the soul is not material, for that would be a contradiction of terms. He regards it, with many moderns, as a state of things, not a thing; a convenient word denoting the sense of personality, of individual identity."

"The Pilgrim's sole consolation is in self-cultivation, and in the pleasures of the affections. This sympathy may be an indirect self-love, a reflection of the light of egotism: still it is so transferred as to imply a different system of convictions. It requires a different name: to call benevolence "self-love " is to make the fruit or flower not only depend upon a root for development (which is true), but the very root itself (which is false). And, finally, his ideal is of the highest: his praise is reserved for:"

"A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles."