Scottish scholar (1809-1895)
Man is naturally a reasoning animal, and is only then truly a man when his passions are tempered and his conduct regulated by reason. The function of reason is the recognition and the realization of truth; truth recognised in speculation is science; truth realized in action is a moral life and a well-ordered society.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Wine is the drink of the gods, milk the drink of babes, tea the drink of women, and water the drink of beasts.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Day-book of John Stuart Blackie
I'll sing you a ditty that needs no apology--
Attend, and keep watch in the gates of your ears!--
Of the famous new science which men call Geology,
And gods call the story of millions of years.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"A Song of Geology", Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece
We miscalculate very much indeed if we imagine that the peculiar doctrines and favourite fancies of a few cultivators of physical science in this small corner of the world, and in this small half of a century, are likely to exercise any notable influence over the thoughts of men, after the one-sided impulse out of which they arose shall have spent its force.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit,
But God to man doth speak in solitude.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Highland Solitude
But it were a very great mistake to imagine that in reference to the estimate of personal worth Christianity exercises only a repressing, and as some may picture it, a depressing, influence. On the contrary, there is no religion has done so much in creating and fostering the feeling of personal worth and dignity. How is this? Plainly because, while the Christian doctrine prostrates every man in a humble equality before God, that very equality makes every man conscious of an equal personality as compared with any other man. All men are sinners; if that be a difficult doctrine to swallow there is one closely connected with it, which is more comfortable: all men are brethren; and if brethren, equal—a wise father has no favouritism.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
As for that which is commonly called love in novels and in life, though capable of affording a very exquisite bliss in its little season, it is a matter with which mere puberty and the bloom of physical life has so much to do, that except in the way of regulation (which is anything but an easy matter), it does not come under the category of morals at all.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
If the mere sensation of fear, and the recognition that there are probably other beings more powerful than one's self, are sufficient alone to constitute a religion, then we must, I think, admit that religion is general to the human race.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
The Church of the future, whether established or disestablished, or, as I think best, both together, provoking one another to love and to good works, has a great mission before it, if it keep sharply in view the two lessons which the teaching of eighteen centuries so eloquently enforces. Our evangelists must remove from the van of their evangelic force all that sharp fence of metaphysical subtlety and scholastic dogma, which, being ostentatiously paraded in creeds and catechisms, has given more just offence to those without than edification to those within the Church; the gospel must be presented to the world with all that catholic breadth, kindly humanity, and popular directness which were its boast before it was laced and screwed into artificial shapes by the decrees of intolerent councils, and the subtleties of ingenious schoolmen. And, again, they must not allow the gospel to be handled, what is too often the case, as a mere message of hope and comfort in view of a future world; but they must make it walk directly into the complex relations of modern society, and think that it has done nothing till the ideal of sentiment and conduct which it preached on Sunday has been more or less practised on Monday.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
What Does History Teach?
God hath made three beautiful things,
Birds, and women, and flowers;
And he on earth who happy would be
Must look with love on all the three;
But chiefly, in bright summer hours,
He is wise who loves the flowers,
And roams the fields with me.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"The Botanist's Song", Musa Burschicosa: A Book of Songs for Students and University Men
Religious meditation, when set up as an end, not as an exercise towards an end, can issue only with all the more highly gifted minds in transcendental reverie, but with the great majority in devout torpor and pious monotony.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
These women are always the same; they will, and they will not; their Yes so often merely a cowardly sort of a No; and their No, a coy sort of a Yes. One should be a diplomatist to understand them.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Altavona: Fact and Fiction From My Life in the Highlands
That which makes the ebullition and overflow of religious zeal so fatal in its effects, is not merely the excess of the zeal itself, which like all excess is bad, but the tendency of all religions to subordinate the moral element which they contain to the religious: to make religion a separate business instead of an ethical instrument; to hang it as an amulet round the neck, not to breathe it as an atmosphere of social health, to nurse it as a sacred fire in the heart, and to feel it as a power which purifies every passion, ennobles every motive, and braces the nerve to the robustness of all manly achievement.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Man is naturally a sympathetic and a social animal. He has, no doubt, strong, self-preserving, self-asserting, and self-advancing instincts, which, if left without counteraction, would naturally lead to isolation or mutual hostility, and ultimate extermination; but these instincts of isolated individualism are met by yet stronger instincts of sympathy, love, and fellowship, in the ascendency of which the true humanity of man as distinguished from tigerhood and spiderhood consists.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
The majority of men, like the majority of dogs I presume, are not physical cowards; the dog is naturally a fighting animal, and so is man. But that the majority of men are moral cowards is certain.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Of the noblest minds in the moral world it may always be asserted that their whole life has been rather a practical deduction from lofty truths given by original inspiration from the Divine Source of all vitality than the product of any induction from an acquired survey of facts.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Mammoth, Mammoth! mighty old Mammoth!
Strike with your hatchet and cut a good slice;
The bones you will find, and the hide of the mammoth,
Packed in stiff cakes of Siberian ice.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"A Song of Geology", Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece
It is not at all uncommon, even among ourselves, to hear persons and parties branded as atheistical, only because individuals who so stigmatize them have not been able, and perhaps are not in the least willing, to appreciate the sort of theism which they profess.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
It is needless to say that a religion which declares war against the fundamental instincts of human nature must always fail, equally on the one side in regulating the passions of the thoughtless many, and on the other in commanding the suffrages of the thoughtful few.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
We do not discover the sun; we only recognise it when the clouds are blown and the rain has exhausted itself. So it is in morals—in the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. We do not discover moral principles by a fingering induction, or in any other way; we merely remove obstructions; we can apply the bellows also and blow the small spark into a mighty flame.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals