Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies

Existence, being a perpetual generation, involves aspiration, and its aspiration envelops it in an atmosphere of light, the joy and the beauty of being, which is the living heav...

Nor is this surface shimmer, visible to telescopic observers, the only benefit gained: something is kept back and absorbed; some warmth sinks into the substance of the earth and...

How many an English spirit, too modest to be heard here, has now committed its secret to that same heaven! Caught by the impulse of the hour, they rose like larks in the morning...

Here is substance for an excellent ironical system of the universe, such as some philosopher in Greece might have espoused; a flux of absolute intensive existences, variously co...

The secret of English mastery is self-mastery. The Englishman establishes a sort of satisfaction and equilibrium in his inner man, and from that citadel of rightness he easily m...

At first, when she was only a vegetative Psyche, she waited in a comparatively peaceful mystical torpor for the rain or the sunshine to foster her, or for the cruel winter or ba...

When we are children we love putting on masks to astonish our elders; there is a lordly pleasure in puzzling those harmless giants who are not in the secret. We ourselves, of co...

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a fig-leaf. Art and d...

The motion of progress is thus merged with that of universal evolution, dropping the element of liberty and even of improvement. Nevertheless, in the political expression of lib...

Everything, however, has its explanation, and in the matter of English Hegelism I think I begin to see it. In the first place, I was rashly identifying England with a figment of...

Many of these Soliloquies have appeared in _The Athenaeum_ and one or more in _The London Mercury_, _The Nation_, _The New Republic_, _The Dial_, and _The Journal of Philosophy_...

England is pre-eminently a land of atmosphere. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing th...

Amongst tragic masks may be counted all systems of philosophy and religion. So long as they are still plastic in the mind of their creator, they seem to him to wear the very lin...

As to my person, my critics are very gentle, and I am sensible of the kindness, or the diffidence, with which they treat me. I do not mind being occasionally denounced for athei...

In fact, there is a philosophical principle implied in snobbery, a principle which is certainly false if made absolute, but which fairly expresses the moral relations of things...

Why the Egyptians loved things colossal I do not know, but the taste of the Romans for the grandiose is easier to understand. It seems to have been part and parcel of that yearn...

Why this monotony? Did Spanish life afford fewer contrasts, less individuality of character and idiom, than did the England of Shakespeare? Hardly: in Spain the soldier of fortu...

There is a mystical folly also among the Indians, when they assign a positive bliss to pure Being; this, too, is substance-worship. Identity with substance is deemed blessed bec...

The national expression of this kind of freedom is what the Germans call _Kultur_, a word not well understood in other countries. Every nation has certain characteristic institu...

That many Catholic bodies, if not all, should be constantly schismatic or heretical, is therefore no paradox with this conception of the church; and it is obvious that Rome itse...

Having humility, that most liberating of sentiments, having a true vision of human existence and joy in that vision, Dickens had in a superlative degree the gift of humour, of m...

Here was an odd transformation. The self-educated merchants and indignant reformers who, thumping their desks dogmatically, had appealed so roundly to the evidence of their sens...

Sanity, thy name is Greece. The Greek naturalists saw (what it needs only sanity to see) that the infinite substance of things was instinct with a perpetual motion and rhythmic...

Now there is a mystery here--though it need be no mystery--which some people find strange and distressing and would like to hush up. This profound physical sympathy may sometime...

In general, I think my critics attribute to me more illusions than I have. My dogmatism may be a fault of temper or manner, because I dislike to stop to qualify or to explain ev...