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Page 107 of 1081929 · PDF PAGE 22
… a skirmish. It is only a faddist who refuses to conform with conventions of dress and the like. But our sincerity should be Roman about things that really matter to us. And I am still in doubt, as I write these words, as to how far it is right to employ strategy and diplomacy in order to gain one's point. The great men of the world have stood up and taken their medicine. Bradlaugh and Burton did not lose in the end by being downright. I never approved the super- subtlety of Huxley's campaign against Gladstone; and as for Swinburne, he died out…
1929 · PDF PAGE 250
…d Shaw's attacks of religion and morality are taken as a matter of course. But when people like Ibsen, Nietzsche and myself say the same things, we are held up to popular execration. There was no snake in my Eden; the impulse which drove me out took the positive form of Opportunity. From time to time, various friends had visited us: Gerald Kelly and his mother, Eckenstein, and so on, and a quite insignificant creature named Lieutenant-Colonel Gormley, who
1929 · PDF PAGE 309
…erver. They belong to a different scale; and they impress one with the same idea of utter indifference by nature. They fascinate, as all things vast beyond computation invariably do. I felt that if I lived with them for even a short time they would completely obsess me and possibly lure me to end my life with their eternity. I felt the same about the mountains of India, the expanse of China, the solitude of the Sahara. I feel as if the better part of me belonged to them, as if my dearest destiny would be to live and die with them. I went on to …
1929 · PDF PAGE 30
… I ask you, is it not deplorable that so important and accurate an addition to his thesis should not have been accepted with pious glee? Things went from bad to worse as I grew in moral power. Part of the time I was well enough to go to a day school in Streatham, where I learnt at long last the terrible secret which I had racked my brains to discover for nearly three years. Here was certainly a sin worth sinning and I applied myself with characteristic vigour to its practice. As my father had been accustomed to drink wine, I could not see how d…
1929 · PDF PAGE 581
…alk. But on the thirteenth I felt fit enough to go to Naples with the idea of convalescing in favourable circumstances, and buying a few things which the imminent arrival of Frater O. P. V. made requisite. Raoul was less unlucky. How could the gods help loving him, who in so many ways partook of their pure nature. At first he suffered mostly from a recurrence of malaria of many years' standing. The attacks were hard to throw off, owning to his accident at Oxford already described. Various complications ensued. We called in the doctor at the fir…
1906 · PDF PAGE 215
…theories which have nothing whatever to do with it. Suppose Edison, having perfected the phono- graph, had said, ‘‘I alone can make dumb things speak ; argal, Iam God."’ What would the world have said if telegraphy had been ex- ploited for miracle-mongering purposes? Are these miracles less or greater than those of the Gospels? Before we accept Mrs. Piper,* we want to know most exactly the conditions of the ex- periment, and to have some guarantee of the reliability of the witnesses. At Cana of Galilee the conditions of the transformation are n…
1929 · PDF PAGE 142
…e forces which prevent them rushing together should not come into operation in respect of the earth and the body. Again, you can prevent things from biting you by certain breathing exercises. Hold the breath in such a way that the body becomes spasmodically rigid, and insects cannot pierce the skin. Near my bungalow at Kandy was a waterfall with a pool. Allan Bennett used to feed the leeches every morning. {246} At any moment he could stop the leech, though already fastened to his wrist, by this breathing trick. We would put our hands together …
1929 · PDF PAGE 54
…t the easiest way out. I entered for the Moral Science Tripos with the idea that it would help me to learn something about the nature of things. I don't know why it should have interested me. It must have been my subconscious will speaking. In any case, I was profoundly disgusted to find that political economy was one of the subjects. I attended the first lecture; the professor told us that the subject was a very difficult one because there were no reliable data. It is easy to imagine the effect of such a statement on a boy who had been trained…
1904 · PDF PAGE 74
… theories which have nothing whatever to do with it. Suppose Edison, having perfected the phono- graph, had said, “I alone can make dumb things speak ; argal, I am God.” What would the world have said if telegraphy had been ex- ploited for miracle-mongering purposes ? Are these miracles less or greater than those of the Gospels ? Before we accept Mrs. Piper,* we want to know most exactly the conditions of the ex- periment, and to have some guarantee of the reliability of the witnesses. At Cana of Galilee the conditions of the transformation are…
1929 · PDF PAGE 289
…urn to be kicked. I have had a good deal of experience with mules in various parts of the world; but only in this short section did such things occur. This day was again very wet. The road led over a pass three thousand feet high. I say "road", and of course this is the main highway from Burma to China, just as the road we had followed from Srinagar is the main highway from Kashmir to Turkestan. In neither case would it be considered good going by the average goat. The day we were to arrive in Tengyueh, the ayah gave us the slip. We had camped …
1929 · PDF PAGE 266
…t another muddle. They had arrived at the camp, bringing with them some seventeen or twenty coolies, and they had not brought any of the things of which we stood in such need. Their behaviour was utterly unintelligible. The doctor did not seem to know what he was saying; his remarks were merely confusedly irritated. He did not seem to be able to answer any of my questions or give any explanation of what had happened in the past. His one idea was to hold a durbar and have himself elected leader in my place. There was no provision in our agreemen…
1929 · PDF PAGE 148
…ns seemed to lead somewhere. Buddhism repelled me by its abhorrence of action, its insistence upon the idea of sorrow as inherent in all things in themselves. Hinduism at least admits the existence of joy; the only trouble is that happiness is unstable. In practice, again, Buddhism suited Allan, whose only idea of pleasure was relief from the perpetual pain which pursued him; whereas I, with the world at my feet, was out to do something definite and even to take delight in the buffetings of fortune. I enjoyed this adventure immensely' I felt my…
1907 · PDF PAGE 248
…places, iil. 211 In the storm that divides the wild night, 1. 48 In the ways of the North and the South, i. 144 Into the inmost agony of things, ili. 115 In vain I sit by Kandy Lake, iil. 21 I, of the Moderns, have let alone Greek, il. 145 I practice then, with conscious power, il. 179 I saw in a trance or a vision, ii. 53 I saw the Russian peasants build a ring, i. 180 I scorn the thousand subtle points, ii. 151 I see the centuries wax and wane, i. 207 I shall not tell thee that I love thee, i. 222 Isis am I, and from my life are fed, i. 228 I…
1929 · PDF PAGE 103
…he surface. The tendency of most modern legislation is to bind Gulliver with packthread. I have never broken the law myself, because the things I happen to want are so utterly different from those desired by men in general, that no occasion has ever risen. {184} But I observe with regret that humanity is being compelled to turn its attention from its proper business by having to comply with innumerable petty formalities. Salmon fishing on Loch Ness should be remembered by people who are praying for "those in peril on the deep". It is a dull yea…
1929 · PDF PAGE 245
…the Law, "let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me." One day, to my amazement, having gone into the bathroom to bathe, I discovered a beetle. As I have said, I take no interest in natural history and know nothing of it. But this beetle attracted my attention at once. I had never seen anything like it before. It was about an inch and a half long and had a single horn nearly as long as itself. The horn ended in a small sphere suggestive of …
1929 · PDF PAGE 38
…to invent euphemisms for them does not alter their character. I was reduced to gloating on murder and putrefaction, simply because these things gave the most forcible denial to the assumptions current at home. Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life; but I was not allowed to take a normal view of nature. In my situation, I could not dismiss the falsities of Christianity with a smile; I was compelled to fight fire with fire and to oppose their poisoned poultices with poisoned daggers. Such was the influence of home life. But it …
1929 · PDF PAGE 517
…ther neatly call le-struggle-for-lifeisme; and that with the absolute moral certainty of being completely beaten from the very nature of things. In a country where the most week and ignorant, the least intelligent and resourceful, find it easy enough on the whole to earn a fairly decent living, and where the slightest capacity of almost any sort makes it a safe bet that ten years will put its possessor in Easy Street, I was to find myself a candidate for complete destitution. For many months I was, for the first time in my life, constantly preo…
1906 · PDF PAGE 201
…spiritual tyranny, with Jehovah! Society, in the long run, is eminently sane and practical ; under the Second Empireit ran mad. If these things are done in the green tree of Society, what shall be done in the dry tree of Bo- hemianism? Art always has a suspicion to fight against; always some poor mad Max Nordau is handy to call everything outside the kitchen the asylum. Here, however, there is a substratum of truth. Consider the intolerable long roll of names, all tainted with glorious madness. Baudelaire the diabolist, debauchee of sadism, who…
1929 · PDF PAGE 4
…doubtful about clearly remembered circumstances, whether they belong to "real life" or to dreams, and even that he has utterly forgotten things which no normal man could forget. He has, moreover, so completely overcome the illusion of time (in the sense used by the philosophers, from Lao Tzu and Plotinus to Kant and Whitehead) that he often finds it impossible to disentangle events as a sequence. He has so thoroughly referred phenomena to a single standard that they have lost their individual significance, just as when one has understood the wo…
1904 · PDF PAGE 60
…spiritual tyranny with Jehovah! Society, in the long run, is eminently sane and practical ; under the Second Empire it ran mad. If these things are done in the green tree of Society, what shall be done in the dry tree of Bo- hemianism? Art always has a suspicion to fight against ; always some poor mad Max Nordau is handy to call everything outside the kitchen the asylum. Here, however, there is a substratum of truth. Consider the intolerable long roll of names, all tainted with glorious madness. Baudelaire, the diabolist, debauchee of sadism, w…