University Of Cambridge Faculty

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not admissible in that second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive — what we could not discover in the stone — that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g., that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed in any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. This mechanism being observed … the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker — that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use. Nor would it, I apprehend, weaken the conclusion, that we had never seen a watch made; that we had never known an artist capable of making one; that we were altogether incapable of executing such a piece of workmanship ourselves, or of understanding in what manner it was performed; all this being no more than what is true of some exquisite remains of ancient art, of some lost arts, and, to the generality of mankind, of the more curious productions of modern manufacture."

"The great revolution which has taken place in the Western World may probably conduce (and who knows but that it was designed?) to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny; and now that this contest, and the passions which attend it are no more, there may succeed perhaps a season for reflecting whether a legislature which had so long lent its assistance to the support of an institution replete with human misery, was fit to be trusted with an empire the most extensive that ever obtained in any age or quarter of the world."

"The infidelity of the Gentile world, and that more especially of men of rank and learning in it, is resolved into a principle which, in my judgment, will account for the inefficacy of any argument, or any evidence whatever, viz. contempt prior to examination."

"God, when he created the human species, wished their happiness; and made for them the provision which he has made, with that view, and for that purpose."

"This is atheism: for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature, with the difference of the side of nature of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office than are the most perfect production of human ingenuity."

"One question may possibly have dwelt in the reader's mind during the perusal of these observations, namely, Why should not the Deity have given to the animal the faculty of vision at once? ... Why resort to contrivance, where power is omnipotent? Contrivance, by its very definition and nature, is the refuge of imperfection. To have recourse to expedients, implies difficulty, impediment, restraint, defect of power. ... amongst other answers which may be given to it; beside reasons of which probably we are ignorant, one answer is this: It is only by the display of contrivance, that the existence, the agency, the wisdom of the Deity, could be testified to his rational creatures."

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion."

"There are no secrets in science."

"The official world, the corridors of power."

"I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups ... Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

"Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

"I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right."

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

"There is, of course, no complete solution. […] But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education […] There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves."

"He is a critic of great gifts, insight and integrity; but those who are not entirely for him are wholly against him; he seeks not pupils but "disciples"; those disciples he has attracted who have not broken away have been, like the master, rancid and fanatic in manner."

"If ever a man came out fighting, Leavis did: this, to many of us is one of his major virtues, because of the importance of the things he was fighting for. With others, he was working to make English grow to its place as a central subject in a contemporary humane education, with the emphasis on criticism and on cultural history rather than on academicism and the vagaries of 'taste'. He was as uncompromising as he was urgent and as angry as he was determined."

"A powerful critical talent who destroyed his own sense of proportion, Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of meningitis. His career was the clearest possible proof that the course the arts take is not under the control of criticism."

"The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy."

"The very prevalence of what one might call the ‘outsider than thou’ attitude among intellectuals indicates that there is a form of competition for a perceived cultural good at work here. Whether it is the Cambridge don and influential critic F R. Leavis describing himself as an ‘outlaw’, or the old Etonian and widely published author and journalist George Orwell casting himself as a ‘literary pariah’, or the well-connected, well-heeled, well-reviewed novelist Virginia Woolf aspiring to found a ‘Society of Outsiders’ (or, more recently, the tenured professors-cum-media stars trying to lay claim to the prestige of the ‘exile’), the very repetitiveness of the claims tells us that what we are dealing with here is a symptom of the logic of being an intellectual, not an objective description of a social or cultural location. As a self-ascribed status, outsiderdom is an empowering identity, an attempt to use the available media to address the relevant publics without, so the claim goes, succumbing to the seductions and self-deceptions of insiderdom."

"A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying."

"The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact – that is, never to say anything. I still, however think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary)."

"Try as I might, I could never feel any great affection for a man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska – sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within."

"It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life."

"Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be."

"He doesn't know what he means, and doesn't know he doesn't know."

"Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by M. R. James. I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm frightened of them. They don't come any scarier than in these superb examples of the classic English ghost story."

"There are some authors one wished one had never read in order to have the joy of reading them for the first time. For me, M. R. James is one of these."

"James is regularly cited as a – or the – founder of the ‘tradition’ of English ghost stories. It is commonplace to then wryly point out that James’s ghosts are in fact often not ghosts, but inhuman ‘demons’ of one sort or another."

"Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it."

"At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognised authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples."

"A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!""

"I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again."

"There was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's window-sill, and looking in, and I thought he was beckoning…He looked as if he was wet all over: and," he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive."

"Sly humorous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen."

"He hammers away on the importance of his message so incessantly that it loses something of its persuasiveness, and becomes rather a prophetic message for the present than a lesson drawn from a spacious survey of the past."

"This failure to recognize the true variety of historical source materials was his chief weakness as an historian. No one can read everything, but everyone should be consciously aware of all that exists waiting to be read. Whenever Butterfield turned to the technical tasks of the professional historian, a theme on which he spoke with firmness and sense, he talked only about letters and dispatches and gave no indication that he knew anything else to exist. History written on that basis cannot help but remain restricted and limited, and no major work of reconsideration, innovation or wider-ranging authority can be thus written except perhaps within the realm of that diplomatic history which Butterfield so rightly regarded as insufficient for a life's work."

"Butterfield was a great enough man, and a good enough historian, to deserve an appraisal that is weighed seriously and not coloured by adulation. And to me the verdict must be that as a practising professional historian, of the kind that he himself valued above the other roles he found himself playing, he failed to produce absolutely great work because professionally he never progressed to a full understanding of the nature, range and problems of historical evidence, and because his faith remained at war with his deeply held convictions concerning the practice of history. Such a verdict, however, must raise to an even greater height his real contributions to the study of history. These consisted, on the one hand, in his fight against cant, his proclamation of honest labour, and his repeated opening up of new territories and themes to be explored. On the other hand—and here lay his outstanding service—they consisted in his daily labour to bring the reality of history and the historical understanding to others."

"He was absolutely right in his insistence that historians must recognize and respect the limitations which the nature of history and the characteristics of historical evidence impose on their endeavours. He was right in drawing attention to the importance of the unforeseen and unforeseeable in history, to the right of every age to be studied for its own sake, to the duty not to confuse a right to arrive at conclusions about people and events with a right to deliver judgements based on some universal principle."

"His lectures gave meaning to the study of the past in a way which transcended the technicalities of research or the pressures of routine learning. Among undergraduates his influence was immense: his work added another dimension to historical study."

"Time and again he pointed to the need to look at the past in its own terms and to grasp the meaning of words and ideas in the context of their own time, to the essentially relativist character of historical interpretation, to the absence of foreknowledge in the historical agent, and to the weight of the unpredictable and contingent."

"The reader with a scientific education is asked to forbear with explanations which might seem an insult to his intelligence. So long as in our education system a state of cold war is maintained between the Sciences and the Humanities, this predicament cannot be avoided. One significant step toward ending this cold war was Professor Herbert Butterfield's Origin Modern Science, first published in 1949. Apart from this work's profundity and excellence per se, I was much impressed by the fact that the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge should venture into mediaeval Science and undertake such a gulf-bridging task. Perhaps the age of specialists is in need of creative trespassers."

"He rejected authority in historical thinking, attaching supreme importance to inventiveness, paradox, and interpretative deviance. Personally, he was modest and tolerant, was free of arrogance, and disliked the entrenched prescriptions of the progressive intellect. He felt a deep and irrational regard for rakes whom he much preferred to the "virtuous and stiff-necked". In correspondence much more than in speech he was capable of inimitable flashes of brilliance."

"His little book is full of admirable passages which historians may well read and ponder; but I have a feeling that the impulse to which we owe it was not so much intellectual curiosity about the nature of history and the function of historical writing as it was an emotional revulsion against the deification of Martin Luther and the glorification of "modern progress." Wishing, naturally enough, to exalt a difference of opinion to the level of a philosophical principle, he persuades himself that history, apprehended by a kind of objective "creative act of the historical imagination," can be made to teach eternal truths. I suspect that his "creative act of the historical imagination," although different in emphasis, is not different in kind, from that employed by the whig historians."

"History and the Marxian Method was the outcome of an unconscious compact which Butterfield had made with those of his pupils who were Marxists—a diplomatic attempt to keep them on the rails of orthodox historical study by widening the range of "bourgeois history". It accepted as the "clue" to a great deal of bourgeois thinking the assumption that "in the last analysis ideas...determine the course of history", and it accepted the Marxist allegation that this sort of analysis lay "in the centre of our bourgeois system". It presented Marxism as a valuable ally in the fight against Whiggery and Liberalism."

"It is always difficult to represent the place that power actually holds in the workings of politics and in the processes of history. Some men seem ready to speak as though power did not exist (because in their view it ought not to exist); and if others are emphatic about the reality of its presence they are assumed to be in favour of force, merely because they recognise its operation in the world."

"A brilliant young Cambridge historian, Mr. Butterfield, in a recent book called The Whig Interpretation of History, has exposed and denounced this use of history for partisan purposes. As his title indicates, he had chosen for special chastisement that view of history which sees it working out steadily towards political freedom, constitutional government, and the Protestant religion. Why Mr. Butterfield has chosen to flog this particularly dead horse at this particular moment in the post mortem I do not know. For if there has been, and is, a Whig and Protestant view of history, there has been, and is, a not less vicious Tory and Communist and Popish and Atheistic twisting of history; and I refuse, as a Protestant Whig, to have this particular vice attributed solely or chiefly to me. I have not the least intention of bearing the sins of sinners even more sinful than myself. Be that as it may, Mr. Butterfield's essay is useful as a warning against attempts to get the wrong sort of witness from history."

"I wonder nowadays whether the neglect of military history and war does not have the effect of giving some people an anaemic and unreal idea of the deeper processes of mundane history. Indeed, it is possible that our conventional history-teaching underestimates the part played by war in the development of our civilisation and our economy, as well as in the rise of the modern state. It has been noted that great constitutional concessions were won from English kings who were usually unsuccessful in their foreign policy; and certainly it is not easy to know what would have happened if King John or Charles I or James II had been more fortunate in this field. Ranke thought that the disgrace suffered by the French monarchy in its foreign policy had much to do with the outbreak of the French Revolution."

"It is more clear that two world wars in the twentieth century were largely responsible for the success of Communism over one great part of the globe, and the speeding up of egalitarianism over another great area. I remember feeling shocked when I found Ranke arguing that, in spite of Goethe, German culture and German cultural influence gained their great momentum with the rise of German power and confidence in the nineteenth century. Yet when I reflect on the cultural leadership which the United States and Russia have come to enjoy since the Second World War—and when I compare this with the situation twenty years ago—I am staggered to see how such matters are affected by a mere redistribution of power. The Golden Age of Spain at one time, of Holland at another time, and of France in the age of Louis XIV seem to give support to the same argument."

"In Christianity and History...[t]here were the same objections to the "stiffnecked" who "goad" man to "greater wickedness" than they would otherwise commit. There was the same objection to the "superficiality" of the "idealists" and the "spiritual impoverishment" of the "self-styled prophets" of the last generation, along with the same claim that "we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves" if we adopt the "lazy, unexamined doctrine of man" which rests on the "recent" and "very disastrous heresy" that one should "have faith in human nature"... It was argued that the past was not a fight of "the pure and righteous" against the "diabolically wicked" but a manifestation of the fact that "human nature is imperfect generally". It was added that the historian "must join hands with the theologian" in "tearing the mask from human nature", and that the point in doing this was to show that all human actions, souls, and systems were under judgement, that they were all doomed to decay, and that humanism, liberalism, and secular idealism were as transitory as any others."

"It was said in the middle ages that God uses intermediate agents to make the material world, mere animal life and the human body; but he creates every human soul with His own hands. Human beings, though fallen from the state of innocence, move as gods and bear the image of God; they are not part of the litter of the earth, to be left uncounted like the sands of the sea. Each is a precious jewel, each a separate well of life, each we may say a separate poem; so that, without taking them in the mass, every single one of them has a value incommensurate with anything else in the created universe. In the light of this doctrine, the riches of human personality, the possibilities that lie in human nature and the fulness of the word humanity itself, were fostered and treasured by the teaching of the church. Even if only a shadow of the Christian tradition still hangs across our path, we can hardly surrender to the mythology of the deified state."