British statesman (1848-1930)
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
Some great crisis in its fate may stamp upon a race marks which neither lapse of time nor change of circumstance seem able wholly to efface; and empires may rise from barbarism to civilization and sink again from civilization into barbarism, within periods so brief that we may take it as certain, whatever be our opinion as to the transmission of acquired faculties, that no hereditary influence has had time to operate.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Consider the commonplace life of a commonplace man as it develops in the untroubled prosperity of a steady business and a quiet home. Such a career seems as orderly and uniform as the flood I have been describing is terrible and strange. Surely no supernatural calculator is required to cast the horoscope of its hero: for he does, and leaves undone, the same actions, he thinks and leaves unthought the same ideas, as thousands of his contemporaries; and, so far as outward appearance goes, he is an indistinguishable member of an undistinguished crowd.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
In the first place, history is not concerned to express beauty. I do not deny that a great historian, in narrating some heroic incident, may rival the epic and the saga. He may tell a tale which would be fascinating even if it were false. But such cases are exceptional, and ought to be exceptional. Directly it appears that the governing preoccupation of an historian is to be picturesque, his narrative becomes intolerable.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Literary immortality is an unsubstantial fiction devised by literary artists for their own especial consolation. It means, at the best, an existence prolonged through an infinitesimal fraction of that infinitesimal fraction of the world's history during which man has played his part upon it.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Growth in Knowledge, like productiveness in Art, can hardly, so far as its direct consequences are concerned, do otherwise than subserve the cause of progress.
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
There is, even from my point of view, a great difference between beauty in art and beauty in nature. For, in the case of nature, there is no artist; while, as I observed just now, "a work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of natural causation, but in the order of aesthetic necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient unless it be understood by the sender.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
introduction, The English Constitution
It seems at first sight strange that any man of genius should have patiently submitted to rules which, from the point of view of art, were perfectly arbitrary.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
It may well be that if mankind could draw up a hedonistic balance-sheet, the pleasures of mundane existence would turn out to be greater than its sufferings.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
It is only the thinnest surface layer of law and custom, belief and sentiment, which can either be successfully subjected to destructive treatment, or become the nucleus of any new growth—a fact which explains the apparent paradox that so many of our most famous advances in political wisdom are nothing more than the formal recognition of our political impotence.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
The source of knowledge must be rational. If this be granted, you rule out Mechanism, you rule out Naturalism, you rule out Agnosticism; and a lofty form of Theism becomes, as I think, inevitable.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Now it is quite true that when we examine our own system of beliefs we cannot imitate this attitude of complete detachment, since in the very act of examination some of these beliefs are assumed. But we can examine the beliefs of other people, and we do, as a matter of common-sense practice, rate low the value of the beliefs whose sources we perceive to be non-rational. How, then, can we refuse to apply to ourselves a principle of judgment which we thus apply without scruple to our neighbors?
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
It must, I think, be admitted that most men approach the difficulties of a scientific exposition far more hopefully than the difficulties of a metaphysical argument. They will take more trouble because they expect more result.
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
The oratorio, then, stands pre-eminent, at least in the infancy of orchestration, among all the modes in which music may be wedded to dramatic poetry. It, and it alone, gives the musician the utmost latitude in the choice of his subject, and in the employment of his resources. It is Handel's glory to have perceived its capabilities, and to have developed them in a manner undreamed of by his predecessors, and unsurpassed by even the greatest of his successors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
We must regard the raw material, as I have called it, of civilization as being now, in all probability, at its best, and henceforth for the amelioration of mankind we must look to the perfection of manufacture.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses