Philosophers From The United States

"The Doctrine of Evolution is the greatest discovery ever made by the human mind. We are in the act of understanding it now, and hence are not able to appraise it at its true value. But v)^hen time has passed and we are able to look upon it historically and to realize its full significance, it will be recognized as being incomparably more epoch-making even than the prodigious contributions of Newton and Copernicus. It is more than a theory. It is a new point of view. It has necessitated an entirely new revaluation of everything in the universe."

"In a sense—in the truest sense, indeed—everything that exists is natural. And in this sense civilization is as natural as savagery—only there is not so much of it in the world, as yet. It is just as natural to be kind, and just, and altruistic as it is to be cruel, tyrannical, and selfish. But kindness, justice, and altruism are not so common as their negatives, as yet. The task that is before us is to make them so—to make them more so, indeed—to make cruelty, selfishness, and tyranny historical, and to make sympathy, reason, love, peace, altruism, and co-operation the reigning facts of our world."

"This is a wintry world. Low temperatures prevail in the hearts of men. Altruism is scarce. Gaunt but blessed hands stretch up to us everywhere for bread. They are the holy hands of Truth."

"[The Universal Kinship] has furnished me several days of deep pleasure and satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and irascibly for me."

"This man, our brother, never purposely killed a living thing until he put the pistol to his head. Poor dead dreamer, you are not the first or last mortal to learn the truth [...] I have dreamed my dreams, had my illusions and wakened from my sleep. Why do I not follow him? I do not end it all because the love of life and the shrinking fear of death in all living things stays my hand and my courage fails."

"Health is the universe to one who is without it. It is the foundation of all human values. Yet we grow up in utter ignorance of its laws. How often we hear the lament at forty, "If I had only known at fourteen what I know now, I never would have had to suffer what I am suffering." We toil over the axioms of Euclid, and the idioms of deceased languages, and strain after dates and the names of capitals and the idiocies of orthography, as if our very lives depended upon them. But we give hardly a single serious thought to those conditions of physical well-being on which the whole universe rests."

"Human institutions are inventions. They are devices to aid in the promotion of human welfare. They should be judged by the same standards of utility as agricultural implements and everything else. Whenever they can be made over to advantage, they should be made over. And whenever they can be rendered useless by something better to take their place, they should be sent without sighs or lamentations to the junkpile. Nothing is too sacred to he improved."

"Ethical culture should do for human character what physical culture should do for the body. It should produce a race of kind, honest, courageous, public-spirited, and justice-loving men and women. It is all so perfectly plain. Men are moral invalids. They come into the world bearing the curse of their animal origin. They are unfit for a life of love and co-operation. The defects of human character are as well known and as well understood as the defects of the human body. They are the cause of more unhappiness to mankind than any other one thing. They can be corrected by the application of the same remedies that have proved so efficacious in the case of mental and physical defects. The school should be the mental, physical, and moral infirmary of society."

"The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena that are more and more distant in both space and time."

"The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. Oh, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. Oh my mother! and Oh my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever."

"If it could be brought about that all the billions of beings who inhabit this sphere would refrain from all acts which would in any way mar the happiness of others, that moment the earth would be transformed. We have thousands of theories as to how to make the world better, and we struggle day and night to understand and control the great natural forces about us; but if we could only get inside of ourselves once and set ourselves to working right, the biggest step toward the Millennium would be taken."

"Man is but a single sector in the great circle of sentient life. The human species is one among a million or two of species inhabiting the earth. The beings below and around us have had the same origin as we have. They have the same general architecture of both body and mind, and are footballed by the same antithetical impulses of pleasure and pain. Whatever the beings of this world have been in the past, they can never again be anything but a family. Universal ethics is a corollary of universal kinship. Moral obligation is as boundless as feeling."

"These wider relations and obligations implied by evolution should be included in every program designed for the amelioration of the world. To ignore them is to classify ourselves as incompetents. No one but an inferior can any longer maintain that kindness, justice, sympathy, love, honesty, humanity, and charity are not as good for dogs, horses, and fishes as they are for men; or that cruelty, hatred, and inhumanity are not he same damning things wherever they fall on living souls."

"All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us. History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would look into a mirror."

"I saw the fishes playing there; I saw all that was in the whole world round; In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field, All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth. All these I saw, and say to you, That nothing lives among them without hate."

"The inextricable way pleasure and pain are mixed up with each other in this world is a mournful fact to beings who are all the time striving for pleasure alone. In the ideal world there is no pain, no misery. There is nothing but happiness. But in our world pain seems to have been the original feeling, the first one to appear in the evolution of sentiency. Pleasure is a sort of after-thought, a secondary attribute of consciousness which developed later as an aid to pain in keeping living beings straight. Pain is a whip, a penalty. Pleasure is a reward or bribe. Pain is a curse. We are all the time trying to minimize and escape it. In an ideal world the inhabitants never have any impulses that drive them to improper acts. All their impulses are good. Every act is proper and right. Ideal beings need only to live and act in order to be happy. We are not ideal beings. Our world happens to be one affording almost unlimited opportunities for improvement."

"The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the provincialism of human beings toward non-human beings another. They are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these various acts are performed by different individuals and upon different individuals, and are performed at different times and places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures. Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same species of conduct."

"The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individuals with each other and against others is a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth. To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism."

"The inhabitants of the earth are all alike in one particular—they are all striving to experience pleasure and to avoid pain. Early in the evolution of living beings, these two opposite forms of experience were hit upon as the determinants of conduct; and the plan worked so well that it has been continued ever since. It is an excellent scheme in a world where simple survival is the main thing. It promotes earnestness. But it is inconvenient, to say the least. And it ought to be changed if there could ever be found a way to do it."

"Civilisation is not an appeal to nature. It is a revolt against nature—against nature as it has been represented in man in the past. It is supernatural. Civilization is an attempt to subordinate and control those primitive impulses which have reigned in human nature in the less gracious and less rational times gone by—impulses which we have ourselves to-day to a considerable extent inherited."

"Let us be alive. Let us be liquid. Let us be Young. The Old atrophy, because they cease to flow. Let us be loyal for ever to those heavenly banners that flutter everywhere in the airs of this age—the banners of those who strive for a Better World."

"John Howard Moore wrote and worked with feverish haste, and he believed that the blind and heartless world would listen to his words and mend its ways. But humanity went on trading and dickering, lying and cheating, marrying and dying, and never heard his voice. One day he opened his eyes and knew his work was in vain, and feeling the weight of the universal sorrow on his soul, he took his life. The coroner's jury determined that "he died from his own hand, while suffering under a temporary fit of insanity." I tell you he died from his own hand while suffering under a temporary fit of sanity [...] Poor, dead dreamer! You are not the first or last mortal to learn the truth. Other men have awakened from the mad and blissful dream of saving mankind from itself. I, too, have dreamed my dreams, had my illusions, and wakened from my sleep [...] Among all who are gathered here there is but one whom we can felicitate on this event, and that one is our friend who lies peaceful and all unconscious of the world. If any word of mine could call back his troubled soul, I should feel myself guiltier far than I would to cause a brother's death."

"From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed egoist."

"The twofold function of individual culture is so to develop beings that they shall be able to perceive their proper relations to the rest of the uiniverse, to the inanimate about them, and to other beings in space and time, and realizing their relations to others, to be disposed to assume them."

"Is it any wonder, therefore, that the young, accustomed to such an environment, grow up to consider life itself a game, in which they are to strive to outwit those about them? Is it any wonder that you and I and men and women everywhere are helplessly selfish, when we were born so, when all that we know of altruism has come thru Sunday-school rumors and straggling precepts, and when we have all our lives been surrounded by selfish people and occupied in selfish pastimes and professions? Nothing could be more natural. Altruism is anomalous on the earth, and it is not astonishing."

"The criminal should be considered and pitied, not despised. He simply complies with the nature with which he came into the world, modified by the environment in which he has lived, the same as does every other being who breathes. You or I, with identical heredity and environment, would do identical deeds. Measured by his ability to do otherwise, the villain is not less divine than the humanitarian. Every creature acts out the impulses which arise in his own consciousness, and the will cannot create, but simply registers, those impulses. Punishment is one of the means possessed by society for its self-culture, and its administration should not be made an opportunity for pugilistic cocks to color their spurs."

"The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible reformation with the gentlest and most strategic deprivation."

"Parenthood is the gravest of all responsibilities. The act of generation is a momentous act. It should be illuminated. It should be more serious, and deliberate, and conscious. It should be far more frequently neglected. Human beings should know that it is a grave conspiracy, the conspiracy to bring into the universe a living being, an organism with lungs and responsibilities and the faculty for being affected. Would-be parents should ascertain whether or not they are undertaking the dissemination of disease and crime among future generations. For society not to know, nor care to know, and not to determine, nor care to determine, the character of purposed contributions to a new generation, would seem amazing, were we not born looking upon it. Were we accustomed to accomplished and scientific procreation, our indiscriminate somnambulism would scarce wear the aspects of sanity."

"Living beings who love themselves no more ardently than they love others are prodigies, and it will never be otherwise so long as beings are born as they are and live in like conditions."

"The absolute and only function of punishment is to reform the one receiving the punishment and to deter others of like impulses. No misery should be inflicted upon a criminal because he has done a wrong, but because he and others have dispositions to do other wrongs. The function of punishment is not to "satisfy" in some mysterious sense a past offense, but to provide against and curtail future offenses."

"If this ball is ever other than a globule of alloy, if the universe ever experiences the long longed for millennium of prophecy and hope, all must come thru the reformed and glorified gateway of the womb. Individual, or post-natal, reformation is, and must always be, more or less imperfect. It is powerless in determining the nature with which beings come into the world, and it is ineffectual in modifying it after it is determined."

"The well being of others is on an average as important as our own, and should as a general thing be appraised at the same value. If a certain amount of happiness is scheduled to fall to the lot of the earth, it makes absolutely no difference whether it falls on me, or on you, or on somebody a thousand miles away. It would serve the ends of absolute ethics quite as well if it fell on an insect or a horse as if it fell on a man. The only important thing from the standpoint of universal good is that the pleasure be experienced. It is not important what particular individual or species is the beneficiary. It might even go to another world, and be just as satisfactory to a universal well-wisher, who looked at Cosmos from the serene altitudes of pure reason, without any prejudices whatever one way or another in the matter. This is the ideal. It is a long, long way from our natures. But only in so far as we approximate this ideal do we rise above those imperfections of our being which have been ground out by the methods that have operated in the development of life on earth."

"Altruism should be inculcated from the cradle, and savagery should be denounced. Maxims and precepts, proclaiming the equal preciousness of all, should be assiduously dinned into the consciousness. The young should be convinced beyond all chance of deterioration that the only laudable thing in the world is the causing of happiness, and that happiness in others is just as precious and valuable as it is in themselves. They should be taught that only "happiness which comes like the red flowers of the oleander out of the bosom of the all" is true happiness, not that which is gleaned from the pain and discomfiture of others."

"To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage. There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and beasts."

"Those things, thoughts, beings, acts, and instincts which help us to the pleasurable experiences of life we call good, and those which deprive us of pleasure or which bring upon us painful experiences we call bad. This is the supreme standard—Utility. Is the thing, thought, being, act, or impulse useful? Does it lead directly or indirectly to happiness and well-being? If it does, it is right, proper, and good. If it does not, it is wrong, improper, and bad."

""Wild animals" merely strangers to us—beings who live apart from and independent of us. They suffer and enjoy the same as we do. They have their own ends and justifications of life."

"The same general moral code applies to every being that feels. In a general way, whatever is right to human beings is right also to non-human beings; and whatever is wrong to human beings is wrong to non-human beings. There are disparities everywhere—disparities in ethical standing, just as there are disparities in usefulness and feeling-power. But there are no greater disparities between men and other animals than there are between different individuals or varieties of the human species. I do not say nor do I believe that a guinea-pig has the same rights to life and to the satisfaction of its desires as an Englishman has. Neither has an Eskimo. But I do say that an ethical system that treats guinea pigs and non-humans generally with the ethical indifference that they receive to-day is a product of human provincialism pure and simple and is destined to become as obsolete as human slavery with the blooming of the ages."

"I am a vegetarian, therefore, because cannibalism is unnecessary. I can live just as well and be just as happy without drinking the blood of my fellows, and why should I slay them? Why should I not live and let live—especially when I can do it just as well as not? It is not necessary that ten thousand creatures should give up their lives in order that I may keep mine, and if I make any pretensions to morality why should I require them to do it? If you say such a thing is necessary in your case, I say to you it is not—and further, that if it were, it would be your duty as an ethical being to call on your undertaker. There is no sense in carnivora talking about ethics and justice and mercy, for their very existence is a travesty on such things. It makes me indignant and sad when I hear men deplore sin and prate about justice and love and mercy, when the very energy they expend in preaching justice and mercy is obtained from the skeletons and sensibilities of their fellows. It is a spectacle that ought to make the imps of netherdom tremble for their laurels—man, the remorseless glutton, going about with a tongue and a knife, with his tongue preaching peace, mercy, and love, and with his knife making the very earth sodden with blood."

"Teach a child to love others as it loves itself; let this be the first and most impressive injunction that invades its ears; allow it never to infringe this rule in its conduct toward others, and never to associate with those who do; teach it that the highest virtue is forbearance and helpfulness; inculcate the equal rights of all to the joys of the universe; forbid all competitive indulgence as degrading and ungallant; teach it the propriety of exercising its combativeness against the tendencies of the inanimate, never against a fellow-creature; allow only those amusements which encourage kindness and the rivalry of good-doing;—and when that child grows to manhood or womanhood, and encounters the conditions of more serious life, it will encounter them, not ideally, perhaps, but in a spirit very remote from that in which it would have approached them had it come up thru conditions of incessant egoism."

"Every being is an end. In other words, every being is to be taken into account in determining the ends of conduct. This is the only consistent outcome of the ethical process which is in course of evolution on the earth. This world was not made and presented to any particular clique for its exclusive use or enjoyment. The earth belongs, if it belongs to anybody, to the beings who inhabit it—to all of them. And when one being or set of beings sets itself up as the sole end for which the universe exists, and looks upon and acts toward others as mere means to this end, it is usurpation, nothing else and never can be anything else, it matters not by whom or upon whom the usurpation is practised."

"Let us be honest. Honour to whom honour is due. It will not emaciate our own glory to recognise the excellence and reality of others, or to come face to face with our own frailties. We are our brother's keeper. Our brethern are they that feel. Let us universalise. Our thoughts and sympathies have been too long wingless. The Universe is our Country, and our Kindred are the Populations that Mourn. It is well—it is eminently well, for it is godlike—to send our Magnanimity to the Dusts and the Deeps, our Sunrises to the Uttermost Isles, and our Charity to the Stars."

"We are striving for the amelioration of this suffering world. Let us be economical."

"Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the universe bounded by one's own skin. It may consist simply of regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which long ago came the original miscreants of this world."

"Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done, depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe."

"Human beings are bigots and egoists almost to a creature. They are so because their phyletic environment has fancied this disgusting cut of consciousness. And the only possible way to attain, with anything like alacrity, any other pattern is by means of an environment with an enlightened and inextinguishable dislike for the prevailing style of things. Let this truth be distinctly and profoundly realized. It is the essential spark of the illumination. If we would bloom into beings of beauty and light, we must acquire an environment which will insist on beings of beauty and light as the mammas and papas of posterity."

"All school-room competition should be abolished. The school should be a family, a fraternity, a colony of cooperating, helping, sympathizing brothers and sisters, not a camp of hot combatants bent on mutual discomfiture. Competition is not necessary, and if it were necessary, it would not be justifiable. If it is not possible to produce great intellects without crimes on character, then let us doze forever in the holy haze of mediocrity. A graceful nature is the most essential psychic possession of a living being."

"We know more about human heredity to-day than we did loo years ago. Human nature is not an unstained page. We come into the world with more than blank minds and helpless bodies. We come bringing with us machines, natures, which must be radically changed if we ever become more than mere fractions of men and women. Nearly all the woes of the world arise either from ignorance of the ways we should go or from hereditary waywardnesses which we bring into the world with us. It is as truly the function of the school to correct these inherent defects in our acting machinery and to put sign-boards in the mind telling which ways to go and which ways to avoid as it is to tutor the understanding or guide the growing body."

"Who, that has pity, is disposed to censure a child for rebelling against the useless and absurd rumination, thru painful years, of mummified languages and fearful mathematical formulae, which have no more real bearing, and which to the average human being never will have any more real bearing, on the great, living, performing universe around him than the esoteric nonsense of the Five Kings?"

"One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the 'idols (or illusions) of the tribe' by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up."

"It seems sometimes that I can almost see the shining spires of that Celestial Civilisation that man is to build in the ages to come on this earth—that Civilisation that will jewel the land masses of this planet in that sublime time when Science has wrought the miracles of a million years, and Man, no longer the savage he now is, breathes and to every being that feels."