
“All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.”
Emancipation (1840)
Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
“All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.”
Emancipation (1840)
J. S. P. Tatlock The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950) p. 485.
Criticism
“If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”
Reported in Lee Green, Sportswit (1984), p. 169.
Wells testimony, Kansas evolution hearings http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/kansas/kangaroo2.html#p681, 2005.
“The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.”
What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide? (1900)
Context: All “inspired books,” teaching that what the supernatural commands is right, and right because commanded, and that what the supernatural prohibits is wrong, and wrong because prohibited, are absurdly unphilosophic. And all “inspired books,” teaching that only those who obey the commands of the supernatural are, or can be, truly virtuous, and that unquestioning faith will be rewarded with eternal joy, are grossly immoral. Again I say: Intelligence is the only moral guide.
“When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.”
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 6 (p. 118)
“I saw no evidence of supernatural ones, alas.”
Apocalypse Descending (2002)
Context: Mars Hill was inspired by a real place near where I live on the coast of Maine, a 100+ year old Spiritualist community called Temple Heights: little carpenter's gothic cottages tumbling down a hillside overlooking the sea, very picturesque and, tragically, very susceptible to the terrible development pressure that's bearing down on the small towns around here.
So far, however, the spiritualists seem to be winning out. After I wrote "Last Summer at Mars Hill", I visited the place formally and had a reading done by a psychic there. The place was exactly as I'd imagined it, as were its (human) inhabitants. I saw no evidence of supernatural ones, alas.
“The human being, by his nature, is condemned to the supernatural.”
[2003, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, World Wisdom, 141, 978-0-94153227-3]
Human being, Specificities