On Right and Wrong

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Chapman and Hall, 1890 - 284 pages

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Page 58 - In vain! They gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires," And unawares Morality expires. Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine ; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo ! thy dread empire, Chaos ! is restored ; Light dies before thy uncreating word ; Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, And universal darkness buries all.
Page 139 - STERN Daughter of the Voice of God ! O Duty ! if that name thou love Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove ; Thou, who art victory and law When empty terrors overawe, From vain temptations dost set free, And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity!
Page 165 - When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends, after all which done he takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him.
Page 216 - For woman is not undevelopt man, But diverse : could we make her as the man, Sweet Love were slain : his dearest bond is this, Not like to like, but like in difference. Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; The man be more of woman, she of man ; He gain in sweetness and in moral height, Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care...
Page 115 - We are all born in subjection, — all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, preexistent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.
Page 115 - Of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world ; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power...
Page 136 - Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual's mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred: that if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting upon him, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event.
Page 71 - To make my position fully understood, it seems needful to add that, corresponding to the fundamental propositions of a developed Moral Science, there have been, and still are, developing in the race, certain fundamental moral intuitions ; and that, though these moral intuitions are the results of accumulated experiences of Utility, gradually organized and inherited, they have come to be quite independent of conscious experience.
Page 78 - Psychical changes either conform to law or they do not. If they do not conform to law, this work, in common with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense : no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.
Page 106 - I say, comprehendeth all those things which men by the "light of their natural understanding evidently know, or at leastwise may know, to be beseeming or unbeseeming, virtuous or vicious, good or evil for them to do.

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