Carlyle and Mill: An Introduction to Victorian Thought

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Columbia University Press, 1926 - Literary Criticism - 435 pages
 

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Page 327 - I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.
Page 375 - I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.
Page 90 - The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is— what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.
Page 380 - In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every-day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.
Page 346 - Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved : wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.
Page 343 - the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.
Page 363 - Man is never recognized by him as a being capable of pursuing spiritual perfection as an end; of desiring, for its own sake, the conformity of his own character to his standard of excellence, without hope of good or fear of evil from other source than his own inward consciousness.
Page 227 - I am rather below than above par; what I could do, could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution: and if I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.
Page 374 - Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that any one can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man.
Page 323 - ... largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and...

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