"An Exposition of the Mission of England: Addressed to the Peoples of Europe" in The Reasoner, Vol. 3, No. 54 (1847), p. 321
Context: It is not, happily, within our power thus to work destruction in the universal womb of things; still within the sphere of human influence — which extends to the uttermost limit of our world's circumambient atmosphere — we can, and do, modify all nature's kingdom; bending towards good or ill, health or disease, harmony or discord, each part, each unit of the universal plan. Upon our just or erroneous comprehension then, of the laws of nature, must depend our adaptation of art for the right improvement or for the ignorant deterioration of Nature's works. And moreover, upon our just or erroneous interpretation of these in the first division of truth — the physical — will depend our interpretation of them in the intellectual and in the moral; from all which it follows, that our system of human economy will present, even as it has ever presented, a practical exhibition of that of the universe. There is more consistency in the human mind, as in the course of events, than is supposed. In both, the first link in the chain decides the last. Man hath ever made a cosmogony in keeping with his views in physics; a scheme of government in keeping with his cosmogony; a theory of ethics in keeping with his government, and a code of law and theology in keeping with his ethics. Every perception of the human mind modifies human practice. Science is but the theory of art.
“The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation.”
Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), p. 1227
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Carroll Quigley 79
American historian 1910–1977Related quotes
Katharine Chang (2017) cited in " Premier seeks goodwill after Chinese warnings on independence http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/china-taiwan-relations/2017/03/08/493122/Premier-seeks.htm" on The China Post, 8 March 2017
Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189; also partly quoted in the essay "Robinson Jeffers, Pantheist Poet" http://web.archive.org/20011119074326/members.aol.com/PHarri5642/jeffers.htm by John Courtney
Context: I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits.
I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
"Our Century's Decline"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)
Source: 1980s, Against The Grain (1986), Ch. 10, The Critic as Clown