British statesman (1848-1930)
For great as are the recent changes which have taken place in Western civilization, they have been almost entirely due to scientific discoveries, to industrial inventions, to commercial enterprise, to the occupation by Europeans of new Continents, to the slow and in the main consequential modification of our beliefs, ideas, and governing conceptions. But to these great causes of movement the State, in the cases to which I have referred, has contributed little but the external conditions under which individual effort has been able to operate unhindered—conditions consisting for the most part in a tolerable degree of security, and a tolerable degree of freedom; and the great political movements with which the historian chiefly concerns himself must be regarded as symptoms, rather than as causes, of the vital changes which have taken place.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Fix your eyes, indeed, upon one race, or one age, and you may have to admit that there have been long periods during which there has been no movement, or a movement only of retrogression. But the torpor that has paralyzed one branch of the human family has been balanced by the youthful vigor of another; now one nation, and now another, may have led the van, but the van itself has been ever pressing forward; and though there have been periods in the world's history when it may well have seemed to the most sanguine observers that the powers that make for progress were exhausted, that culture was giving place to barbarism, and civil order to unlettered anarchy, time and the event have shown that such prophets were wrong, and out of the wreck of the old order a new order has always arisen more perfect and more full of promise than that which it replaced.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Now it must at once be conceded that Handel's genius is but faintly tinged with this special emotional color. He was an unrivalled master of direct and simple sentiment; of love, fear, triumph, mourning; of patriotism untroubled by scruples, and of religion that knows no doubts. But he was in no sense modern. He no more anticipated a succeeding age in the character of the emotions to which he sought to give expression than in the technical methods which he employed to express them. To many this may seem matter of regret. With some it is undoubtedly the cause why Handel's work arouses in them but a cold and imperfect sympathy. Yet for my own part I cannot wish it otherwise. To each stage in the long development of art there is an appropriate glory. I do not grudge it to those who are the first heralds of a new order of things, in whose work is visible the earliest flush of a fresh artistic dawn.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Science also deems perception to be the source of all our knowledge of external nature. But it regards it as something more, and different. For perception is itself a part of nature, a natural process, the product of antecedent causes, the cause of subsequent effects. It requires, therefore, like other natural facts, to be observed and explained; and it is the business of science to explain it.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Everything that happened, good or bad, would subtract something from the lessening store of useful energy, till a time arrived when nothing could happen any more, and the universe, frozen into eternal repose, would for ever be as if it were not.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
I disowned, as you remember, any intention of providing you with a philosophical system—not because I despise philosophical systems or those who labor to construct them, but in part because I have none to recommend, and in part because it seems to me doubtful whether at our present stage of development a satisfactory system is possible.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Beauty is an ill-defined attribute of certain members of an ill-defined class; and for the class itself there is no very convenient name. We might describe its members as "objects of aesthetic interest" always bearing in mind that this description (as I use it) applies to objects of the most varying degrees of excellence—to the small as well as the great, the trifling as well as the sublime: to conjuring and dancing; to literature, art, and natural beauty.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
The truth is that, to every genius there is a characteristic weakness, a defect to which it naturally leans, and into which, in those inevitable moments when inspiration flags, it is apt to subside.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
If, then, we cannot attain to a scheme of belief which, whatever be its shortcomings, is good (so far as it goes) for all time, we must be content with something less.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
We perceive some object—let us say the sun. We perceive it directly and not symbolically. What we see is not a mental image of the sun, nor a complex of sensations caused by the sun; but the sun itself. Moreover, this material external object retains its identity while it varies in appearance. It is red in the morning; it is white at midday; it is red once more in the evening; it may be obscured by clouds or hidden in eclipse; it vanishes and reappears once in every twenty-four hours; yet, amid all these changes and vanishings, its identity is unquestioned. Though we perceive it differently at different times, and though there are times when we do not perceive it at all, we know it to be the same; nor do we for a moment believe (with Heraclitus) that when it is lost to view it has, on that account, either altered its character or ceased to exist.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
It is true that love is rooted in appetite, and that appetite has a survival value which I, at least, cannot find in the purely contemplative emotions.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Persecution is only an attempt to do that overtly and with violence, which the community is, in self-defense, perpetually doing unconsciously and in silence. In many societies variation of belief is practically impossible. In other societies it is permitted only along certain definite lines. In no society that has ever existed, or could be conceived as existing, are opinions equally free (in the scientific sense of the term, not the legal) to develop themselves indifferently in all directions.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
For as soon as any body of doctrine becomes the watchword of a party or a sect, it is certain to be used with the most confident assurance by multitudes who have the most imperfect apprehension of the true grounds of the opinions they are expressing. In default of reasons they quote authorities.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
But we must look forward as well as backward. The spaces still to be traversed far exceed those that have been traversed already. We can set no limits to the intellectual voyage which lies before the race. Even if we arbitrarily limit the life of men to that which is possible under terrestrial conditions, we must anticipate transformations of belief comparable in magnitude with those which already divide us from primitive mankind.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Those who enjoy poetry and painting must be at least dimly aware of a poet beyond the poem and a painter beyond the picture.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
The root principle which, by its constant recurrence in slightly different forms, binds together, like an operatic leitmotif, the most diverse material, is that if we would maintain the value of our highest beliefs and emotions, we must find for them a congruous origin.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
It might indeed at first sight appear that while the astronomer has no means of intervening in the affairs of the star, it is always open to the sociologist to appeal to the reason of the community of which he is a member. But this view depends, I think, on an erroneous view of the influence which reasoning has or can have on the course of human affairs. To hear some people talk, one would suppose that the successful working of social institutions depended as much upon cool calculation as the management of a Joint Stock Bank: that from top to bottom, and side to side, it was a mere question of political arithmetic; and that the beliefs, the affections, the passions and the prejudices of Mankind were to be considered in no other light than as obstacles in the path of progress, which it was the business of the politician to destroy or to elude. This is a natural and, perhaps in some respects, a beneficial illusion. Movement, whether of progress or of retrogression, can commonly be brought about only when the sentiments opposing it have been designedly weakened or have suffered a natural decay. In this destructive process, and in any constructive process by which it may be followed, reasoning, often very bad reasoning, bears, at least in Western communities, a large share as cause, a still larger share as symptom; so that the clatter of contending argumentation is often the most striking accompaniment of interesting social changes. Its position, therefore, and its functions in the social organism, are frequently misunderstood. People fall instinctively into the habit of supposing that, as it plays a conspicuous part in the improvement or deterioration of human institutions, it therefore supplies the very basis on which they may be made to rest, the very mold to which they ought to conform; and they naturally conclude that we have only got to reason more and to reason better, in order speedily to perfect the whole machinery by which human felicity is to be secured.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
This is a great delusion—quite unsupported by anything we know or can plausibly conjecture about the history of mankind. No one, indeed, doubts that deliberate adaptation of means to ends has helped to create, and is constantly modifying, human societies; nor yet that egoism has constantly perverted political and social institutions to merely private uses. But there is something more fundamental to be borne in mind, namely, that without loyalty there would be no societies to modify, and no institutions to pervert. If these were merely well-designed instruments like steam-engines and telegraphs, they would be worthless. They would perish at the first shock, did they not at once fall into ruin by their own weight. If they are to be useful as means, they must first impose themselves as ends; they must possess a quality beyond the reach of contrivance: the quality of commanding disinterested service and uncalculating devotion.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Morals, as I conceive them, are concerned with ends of action: and principally with ultimate ends of action. An end of action, in so far as it is ultimate, is one which is pursued for itself alone, and not as a means to some other end. Of course an end may be, and constantly is, both ultimate and contributory. It is sought for on its own account, and also as an instrument for procuring something else. It is mainly in the first of these capacities, however, that it concerns morality.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
The constant pressure of custom; the effects of imitation, of education, and of habit; the incalculable influence of man on man, produce a working uniformity of conviction more effectually than the gallows and the stake, though without the cruelty, and with far more than the wisdom that have usually been vouchsafed to official persecutors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses