Scottish scholar (1809-1895)
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
Rocking on a lazy billow
With roaming eyes,
Cushioned on a dreamy pillow,
Thou art now wise.
Wake the power within thee slumbering,
Trim the plot that's in thy keeping,
Thou wilt bless the task when reaping
Sweet labour's prize.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Address to the Edinburgh Students
It is of the very nature of a high ideal to be unattainable, to admit only of approximation; and one of the highest compliments that can be paid to Christianity is that, when purely presented, it is apt to seem a great deal too good for the creatures to whom it is addressed.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Though the masses may stare at the man who does violence to all his natural instincts, under the name of piety, and rends his flesh to prove the strength of his will, they will never be induced to follow his example.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
A growth is a growth, and a manufacture is a manufacture; the one possesses inherent divine vitality, the other no vitality at all.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Things absolutely necessary to healthy existence were necessarily known from the earliest ages, unless indeed we imagine that the primeval man was created in a state of physical and moral disease, that he might grope and blunder his way into health, as some theorists assert that he groped and blundered his way from a tiger into a moral being, and from a monkey into a man.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
No consideration is so powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of fashion among grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of popular error.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Love is born among groves and singing-birds.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Altavona: Fact and Fiction From My Life in the Highlands
Man is an inventive animal, and he does not invent from a compulsion of nature, as bees make cells or as swallows build nests. These are all prescribed operations which the animal must perform; but the inventive faculty in man is free, in such a manner that the course of its action cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in variety, and, above all things, shuns that uniformity which is the servile province of brute activity.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
What Does History Teach?