Philosophers From Scotland

"It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all."

"It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm."

"It reminds me of Arthur Balfour when Brockdorff-Rantzau refused to stand when he was handed the Treaty [of Versailles]. “Did he remain seated?” said someone to Balfour. “I did not notice, I do not stare at a gentleman in distress.”"

"[Balfour Declaration is] the root of the suffering of the Palestinian people and paved the way for the violation of their rights and the confiscation of their land and capabilities...the British government and everyone who participated in the implementation of this permit, [have responsibility over] the massacres and tragedies that the Palestinian people were subjected to, especially the crime of uprooting and displacing them, which is ongoing."

"Winston said, that if you wanted nothing done, AJB [Balfour] was undoubtedly the best man for the task. There was no one to equal him."

"The Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade is one of the most remarkable scientific deliverances ever made by a Prime Minister in office. It wears well and bears re-reading. I think that economists to-day would treat Balfour's doubts, hesitations, vague sensing of troubles to come, polite wonder whether unqualified laisser-faire is quite certainly always for the best, with more respect, even if not with more sympathy, than they did then."

"The game of international politics...gave free rein to his power of detached analysis. He was not always correct in his anticipations – he was slow, for instance, to recognize the German danger, seeing no rational conflict of interest, and persisted, even after the conclusion of the entente cordiale (and still in the 1920s), in regarding France as the most likely enemy. But the quality and range of his strategic memoranda are deeply impressive. It is no wonder that Asquith called him to the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1912, and to the War Council in 1914–15, on a non-party basis, as the most expert and penetrating mind available."

"I could work with Balfour, but the trouble with him is his underlying sense of class superiority. He is kind and courteous, but you feel that he feels that he is a member of a superior class. This makes him unpopular with his own people like Bonar Law, Carson, etc."

"He had a pervading charm that one felt as soon as he entered the room. There was nothing conscious about it. He did not, as it were, turn it on at will, as some charming people do. Indeed, he probably neither knew nor cared what other people felt about him. In that sense he was extremely aristocratic. But, at any rate, as an old man, he seemed to bless whatever company he was in."

"Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained."

"There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable."

"...there were some things that were true, and some things that were trite; but what was true was trite, and what was not trite was not true."

"We now know too much about matter to be materialists. The very essence of the physical order of things is that it creates nothing new. Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes. But sensibility belongs to the world of consciousness, not to the world of matter."

"A distinguished agnostic once observed that in these days Christianity was not refuted, it was explained. Doubtless the difference between the two operations was, in his view, a matter rather of form than of substance. That which was once explained needed, he thought, no further refutation. And certainly we are all made happy when a belief, which seems to us obviously absurd, is shown nevertheless to be natural in those who hold it. But we must be careful. True beliefs are effects no less than false. In this respect magic and mathematics are on a level. Both demand scientific explanation ; both are susceptible of it. Manifestly, then, we cannot admit that explanation may be treated as a kind of refutation. /.../ This way lies universal scepticism. Thus would all intellectual values be utterly destroyed."

"Everything that happened, good or bad, would subtract something from the lessening store of useful energy, till a time arrived when nothing could happen any more, and the universe, frozen into eternal repose, would for ever be as if it were not. /.../ The physical course of nature does not merely fail to indicate design, it seems loudly to proclaim its absence."

"Apart from life and thought, there is no reason to regard one form of material distribution as in any respect superior to another. A solar system may be more interesting than its parent nebula ; it may be more beautiful. But if there be none to unravel its intricacies or admire its splendours, in what respect is it better ? Its constituent atoms are more definitely grouped, the groups move in assignable orbits ; but why should the process by which these results have been achieved be regarded as other than one of purposeless change super-induced upon meaningless uniformity?"

"Theory of selection /.../ leaves untouched all that can be inferred from the existence of the conditions which make organic evolution possible: matter which lives, multiplies, and varies ; an environment which possesses the marvellously complex constitution required to make these processes possible. /.../ it cannot produce either the original environment or the original living matter. These must be due either to luck or to contrivance; and, if they be due to luck, the luck (we must own) is great. How great we cannot say."

"On questions of taste there is notoriously the widest divergence of opinion./.../ if, from a survival point of view, one taste be as good as another, it is not the varieties in taste which should cause surprise so much as the uniformities. To be sure, the uniformities have often no deep aesthetic roots. They represent /.../ tendencies to agreement, which govern our social ritual, and thereby make social life possible."

"Tall, slim and good-looking, like Asquith he was much admired. His intimate friends were few in number, and it is just possible that he didn't believe in anything or anybody. Asquith described him as a man of “superficial charm”. Others considered that his outstanding quality was his political cunning. He was, in fact, a crafty man. During the peace conference in Paris in 1919 Clemenceau used to speak of him as ‘cette vieille fille’."

"Whereas reasons may, and usually do, figure among the proximate causes of belief, and thus play a part in both kinds of series (cognitive and causal), it is always possible to trace back the causal series to a point where every trace of rationality vanishes ; where we are left face to face with conditions of beliefs social, physiological, and physical— which, considered in themselves, are quite a-logical in their character. /.../ on any merely naturalistic hypothesis, the rational elements in the causal series lie always on the surface. Penetrate but a short way down, and they are found no more."

"In art, origin and value cannot be treated as independent. Those who enjoy poetry and painting must be at least dimly aware of a poet beyond the poem and a painter beyond the picture. If by some unimaginable process works of beauty could be produced by machinery, as a symmetrical colour pattern is produced by a kaleidoscope, we might think them beautiful till we knew their origin, after which we should be rather disposed to describe them as ingenious. And this is not, I think, because we are unable to estimate works of art as they are in themselves, not because we must needs buttress up our opinions by extraneous and irrevelant considerations ; but rather because a work of art requires an artist. not merely in the order of natural causation, but as a matter of a-sthetie necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient, unless it be understood by the sender. It must be expressive."

"Romantic love goes far beyond race requirements. From this point of view it is as useless as aesthetic emotion itself. And, like aesthetic emotion of the profounder sort, it is rarely satisfied with the definite, the limited, and the immediate. It ever reaches out towards an unrealised infinity. It cannot rest content with the prose of mere fact. It sees visions and dreams dreams which to an unsympathetic world seem no better than amiable follies. Is it from sources like these—the illusions of love and the enthusiasms of ignorance—that we propose to supplement the world-outlook provided for us by sober sense and scientific observation ? Yet why not ? Here we have values which by supposition we are reluctant to lose. Neither scientific observation nor sober sense can preserve them. It is surely permissible to ask what will."

"Our admiration for natural beauty /.../ cares not to understand either the physical theories which explain what it admires, or the psychological theories which explain its admiration. It does not deny the truth of the first, nor (within due limits) the sufficiency of the second. But it requires more. It feels itself belittled unless conscious purpose can be found somewhere in its pedigree. Physics and psycho-physics, by themselves, suffice not. It longs to regard beauty as a revelation—a revelation from spirit to spirit, not from one kind of atomic agitation to the "psychic" accompaniment of another. On this condition only can its highest values be maintained.'"

"Men's wishes are not always vain, nor is every life too brief to satisfy its possessor. Only when we attempt, from the point of view permitted by physics and biology, to sum up the possibilities of collective human endeavour, do we fully realise the "vanity of vanities" proclaimed by the Preacher."

"One key to the understanding of Arthur Balfour was his conversation. Unhesitatingly I should put him down as the best talker I have ever known, one whose talk was not a brilliant monologue or a string of epigrams, but a communal effort which quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best of other people. He would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt that he had really made some contribution to human wisdom."

"The doubts that Mr. Balfour expressed nearly thirty years ago, in an Address delivered in Glasgow, have not, so far, been answered. And it is probable that many people, to whom six years ago the notion of a sudden decline or break-up of our western civilisation, as a result not of cosmic forces but of its own development, would have appeared almost fantastic, will feel much less confident to-day, notwithstanding the fact that the leading nations of the world have instituted a league of peoples for the prevention of war, the measure to which so many high priests of Progress have looked forward as meaning a long stride forward on the road to Utopia."

"[T]he real mystery... [was] The hopeless failure to make good his leadership in spite of every quality & circumstance which should have ensured its success. He stepped into it by an undisputed and acclaimed succession: he was the most popular man in the House of Commons of his generation; brilliant abilities;—a unique charm;—high character. And then—crash! ... It is as if the gift of leadership was something quite distinct from its component elements,—a kind of 6th sense which my father Lord Salisbury] had & Arthur was without, & which it is impossible to analyse."

"His is probably the acutest mind that has been dedicated to politics during the past century. As a parliamentary dialectician he has never had a superior; and his facility is such that in any field where his rare elevation of thought finds natural scope, he runs the risk of becoming eloquent in spite of himself."

"From 1887 up to the end of his Premiership in 1905, he was the most skilful of all the House of Commons speakers of his day, with the exception of...Gladstone. ... [H]e was a brave man—and a fearless one. In comparatively small things he shrank from conclusions and thus gave a false impression of irresolution, but on fundamental issues he never flinched or meandered. He was through and through a patriot and never lost confidence in the invincibility of his country...Clearly he was not the man to stimulate and organise the activity of the Navy in a crisis. But he was an ideal man for the Foreign Office and to assist the Cabinet on big issues. His contributions in the War and afterwards in the making of Peace were of the highest order. In personal charm he was easily first among all the statesmen with whom I came in contact. As to his intellectual gifts I doubt whether I ever met so illuminating an intelligence inside the Council Chamber."

"After the British captured Jerusalem from the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, a headline in the New York Herald of December 11, 1917, declared that JERUSALEM HAS BEEN RESCUED AFTER 673 YEARS OF MOSLEM RULE. That same year, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, in a declaration named after him, promised the Jewish people a national homeland in the biblical land of Palestine but stated that it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish Communities in Palestine.” In 1921, the British High Commissioner reported that Jews were only 10 percent of the population of British Mandate Palestine—most of whom had arrived in the prior forty years, including from Russia where they had fled pogroms— though they were already a majority in Jerusalem. More were arriving, and Hebrew, once rarely spoken, was being revived along with the growth of settlements, agricultural colonies planting oranges and eucalyptus and producing wine."

"Balfour's favourite weapon was the rapier, with no button on, without prejudice to a strong broadsword when it was wanted... His eye for the construction of dilemmas was incomparable, and... [h]e revelled in carrying logic all its length, and was not always above urging a weak point as if it were a strong one. Though polished and high-bred in air, he unceremoniously applied Dr. Johnson's cogent principle that to treat your adversary with respect is to give him an advantage to which he is not entitled. Of intellectual satire he was a master—when he took the trouble; for the moral irony that leaves a wound he happily had no taste, any more than he had a taste for that extremity in temper and language which was rather the fashion of leading men at the time. I still can find no better parallel to him than Macaulay's account of Halifax: "His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections, his taste refined, his sense of the ludicrous exquisite, his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration.""

"It was not surprising that, in Burke's famous language about Charles Townshend, he became the delight and ornament of his party in the country, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence, and clouds of incense daily rose about him from the prodigal superstition of innumerable admirers."

"Breakfasted with Lloyd George. ... He said that...Balfour and Chamberlain were both now practically Liberals. Balfour, for instance, was in matters of foreign policy far more Liberal than Grey."

"Parliament is the centre of the British Empire. It is the responsibility of the members of Parliament, to whatever party they belong, to see that the tradition which has insensibly grown up, which is not a product of this or that constitution-monger, but which is the result of the unthought-out efforts for the public good of the various constituent individuals who from generation to generation, either in this House or in the other, had the conduct of public affairs is continued. It is their action which has made Great Britain what it is, and has founded all over the world institutions modelled upon ours and showing that, whether the British Constitution be or be not the best Constitution in the world for all kinds and sorts of men, it is undoubtedly the best Constitution for people of British origin, British tradition, British hopes, and British ideals. That is why I am consoled by the gradual rising of new generations as old generations vanish."

"It is proof of the most vital principle of the English Constitution, which no foreigner can understand, that when they are brought together in the public interest, they never get deflected from the main issue before them by the memory of ancient conflict or the impossibility of working together. That is the great secret of the paradox that in this country alone will you see the perfection of Parliamentary Government carried to the pitch it has been."

"I am 80. I cannot take much more part in public affairs, but I rejoice to think I see growing up younger generations, one by one, who instinctively follow the great example of their forefathers and are predestined with undiminished lustre to carry to future ages the glories of the British Empire."

"I am a Scotsman addressing Scotsmen, and I feel, therefore, peculiarly qualified to speak on this subject. I absolutely refuse to allow any man, be he English or be he Scottish, to rob me of my share in Magna Charta, or Shakespeare, because of Bannockburn or Flodden."

"Biography should be written by an acute enemy."

"Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker."

"The Irish had owed their success to crime. Winston practically admitted it. They had defied British rule,—and British rulers had given in to them. How could such a state of things be said to fit in with the scheme of the Empire?"

"As you know many people have dreamed dreams since the War ended. It's partly the fault of the British nation—and of the Americans; we can't exonerate them from blame either—that this idea of “representative government” has got into the heads of nations who haven't the smallest notion of what its basis must be. ... I doubt if you would find it written in any book on the British Constitution that the whole essence of British Parliamentary government lies in the intention to make the thing Work. We take that for granted. We have spent hundreds of years in elaborating a system that rests on that alone. It is so deep in us that we have lost sight of it. But it is not so obvious to others. These peoples—Indians, Egyptians, and so on—study our learning. They read our history, our philosophy, and politics. They learn about our Parliamentary methods of obstruction, but nobody explains to them that when it comes to the point, all our Parliamentary parties are determined that the machinery shan't stop. “The king's government must go on,” as the Duke of Wellington said. But their idea is that the function of opposition is to stop the machine. Nothing easier of course, but hopeless."

"Most terrible of all the terrible Turks."

"The General Strike has taught the working classes more in four days than years of talking could have done."

"Suppose [he said to the Americans] that it was a familiar thought in your minds that there never was at any moment of the year within the limits of your State more than seven weeks food for the population, and that that food had to be replenished by overseas communication...Then you will understand why every citizen of the British Empire, whether he comes from the far Dominions of the Pacific, or the small island in the North Sea, can never forget...that without sea communication he, and the Empire to which he belongs, would perish."

"I feel, as time goes on, not that the war has produced fewer evils than I feared at the time, for the conviction grows on me that the evils are unmeasured. As year succeeds year we shall more and more see how great was the calamity, how inexplicable the crime which brought that war on humanity. There was one bright side to it. The horrors of that war did at least persuade mankind that some great effort must be made to prevent its repetition. Those who with the facile scepticism or easy cynicism of the arm-chair deride the efforts—humble, imperfect, but honest which are being made all the world over to render the repetition of those horrors impossible must be careful that they do not make themselves shares in the great crime from which we have already so bitterly suffered."

"Fairly well, but it is like talking to a lot of tombstones."

"We [Britain and the Dominions] stand on an equality, and if some foreign critics are disposed to say that standing on an equality means that we are bound to separate in a short time my view is precisely the contrary. My view most strongly is that the British Empire is now a more united organism than it has ever been before, that that organism is held together far more effectually by the broad loyalties, by the common feelings and interests—in many cases, of history—and by devotion to great world ideals of peace and freedom. A common interest in loyalty, in freedom, in ideals—that is the bond of Empire. If that is not enough, nothing else is enough."

"Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong."

"The case which the French present to us with regard to the Left Bank of the Rhine is very forcible, but very one-sided. They draw a lurid picture of future Franco-German relations. They assume that the German population will always far outnumber the French; that as soon as the first shock of defeat has passed away, Germany will organise herself for revenge; that all our attempts to limit armaments will be unsuccessful; that the League of Nations will be impotent; and, consequently, that the invasion of France, which was fully accomplished in 1870, and partially accomplished in the recent War, will be renewed with every prospect of success."

"I speak perhaps, with a warmth of indignation unbefitting a Foreign Secretary, but with the news of this outrage...I confess that I find it difficult to measure my epithets, for...this Irish packet boat, crammed as it always is with men, women, and children, in broad daylight was deliberately torpedoed by a German submarine. It was carrying no military stores. It was serving no military ends. It was pure barbarism, pure frightfulness, deliberately carried out. ... I cannot measure the wicked folly of the proceeding of which they have been guilty. ... I wish I could think that these atrocious crimes were the crimes of a small dominant military caste. I agree that the direction of policy, the direction of national policy, may be in the hands of a small caste, but it is incredible that crimes like these, perpetrated in the light of day, known to all mankind, condemned from one end of the civilized world to the other, should go on being repeated month after month of four years of embittered warfare if it did not commend itself to the population which commits them."