Sources and editorial notes

But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself.

Oscar Wilde · Fictional dialogue: Gilbert · Intentions · Read the source

Wilde’s dialogue provocatively refuses to exchange life for a theory of life. It gives this collection a productive challenge: examining intellectual habits should deepen engagement rather than replace it.

For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson describes a thought hardening into the circumstances around it. That is a useful lens on cultural circles whose once-liberating forms become restrictions on later contributions.

But the following chapter will, I trust, make it clear that such interference of the Thought about Things with the Contemplation of Shapes is essential to the rythm of our mental life, and therefore a chief factor in all artistic production and appreciation.

Vernon Lee · The Beautiful · Read the source

Lee connects reflective thought and contemplation of form. Her account supports taking artistic judgment seriously rather than reducing a cultural life to either beautiful surfaces or practical utility.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank; that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson’s association of sincerity with independence exposes the pressure to court an audience. The article extends answerability beyond rank: dependence may constrain expression, but standing does not confer a monopoly on truth.

I say, then, this Florentine or leading Italian school proposed to itself human expression for its aim in natural truth; it strove to do that as well as it could—did it as well as it can be done—and all its greatness is rooted in that single and honest effort.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin locates artistic achievement in an effort toward truthful expression. This positive account helps distinguish inventive form from a misleading account of how a work was made.

If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood.

Robert Louis Stevenson · An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays · Read the source

Stevenson’s modest contrast between unusual discoveries and burning falsehoods questions the demand to be remarkable. A creator can relinquish an impressive claim without losing every worthwhile contribution.

He is seen enough without that: he is the centre of an illusion that he is bound to support, both, as it appears to me, by a certain self-respect which should repel idle curiosity, and by a certain deference to the public, in whom he has inspired certain prejudices which he is covenanted not to break.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt describes the public figure as the center of an illusion sustained with the audience. This concerns a social performance, not proof of self-deception; it reveals the pressure under which a flattering self-account can be protected.

Education has accordingly not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind—its rashness, presumption, and preference of what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence—but also to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey names the preference for what suits self-interest over objective evidence. The passage directly illuminates the comforting interpretation that the folded letter preserves.

But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith identifies the belief that one is admired as central to vanity. That belief can become the account a self-deceived maker protects; the article keeps admiration dependence and protected belief distinct.

But howsoever these things are thus in men’s depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon gives inquiry an affirmative place in the pursuit of truth. The closed bookstand makes a contrary choice visible: protecting oneself from the inquiry rather than merely lacking its conclusion.

On any other subject no one's opinions deserve the name of knowledge, except so far as he has either had forced upon him by others, or gone through of himself, the same mental process which would have been required of him in carrying on an active controversy with opponents.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill links knowledge to testing an account against opposition. His standard invites a specific check of the avoided question, not an obligation to master every dispute.

Many notions of science are abstract, not only because they cannot be understood without a long apprenticeship in the science (which is equally true of technical matters in the arts), but also because the whole content of their meaning has been framed for the sole purpose of facilitating further knowledge, inquiry, and speculation.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey explains technical abstractions by their role in further inquiry. Difficulty is therefore not a reason to condemn a source as evasive; the issue is whether the difficulty serves investigation or avoids it.

Beliefs that perhaps originally were the products of fairly extensive and careful observation are stereotyped into fixed traditions and semi-sacred dogmas accepted simply upon authority, and are mixed with fantastic conceptions that happen to have won the acceptance of authorities.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey traces how observations can harden into authoritative dogmas. The viewing slit illustrates this reversal, in which an inherited tool is protected against the particular it was meant to explain.

Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine moods and exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a scientific formula or a theological dogma.

Oscar Wilde · Fictional dialogue: Gilbert · Intentions · Read the source

Wilde’s dialogue presents artistic thought as fluid and resistant to a fixed formula. This is a provocative defense of responsiveness, not evidence that art permits inaccurate factual claims.

One person will bear with dissent in matters of church government, but not of dogma; another can tolerate everybody, short of a Papist or a Unitarian; another, every one who believes in revealed religion; a few extend their charity a little further, but stop at the belief in a God and in a future state.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill’s sequence of toleration with successive exclusions exposes limits hidden inside a claim to openness. The examples concern religious disagreement; the relevant insight is the protected boundary that reconsideration never reaches.

Some lose it in indifference or carelessness; others in a frivolous flippancy; many escape these evils only to become incased in a hard dogmatism which is equally fatal to the spirit of wonder.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey distinguishes indifference and flippancy from the living spirit of inquiry. The uninstalled peg shows how a busy presentation can lose the care needed for its own subject.

Carelessness and want of œconomy are universally disapproved of, not, however as proceeding from a want of benevolence, but from a want of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith locates some failures of care in attention rather than lack of benevolence. Good intentions do not establish that a reference, agreement or demonstration received reasonable scrutiny.

‘He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed.

Oscar Wilde · Fictional dialogue: Vivian · Intentions · Read the source

Wilde’s fictional speaker calls accuracy a careless habit in a deliberately inverted joke. Read as irony, the line makes a useful foil: wit about accuracy does not remove the lecturer’s responsibility to check support.

Before proceeding upon these, I would, however, ask him to reflect how this last formula of ours bears upon the old, seemingly endless, squabble as to whether or not beauty has anything to do with truth, and whether art, as certain moralists contend, is a school of lying.

Vernon Lee · The Beautiful · Read the source

Lee explicitly separates questions about beauty, truth and the supposed dishonesty of art. Her question helps keep artistic invention distinct from a beautiful but misleading assertion.

The Phidian "Theseus" represents the Greek school pursuing truth of form; the "Disputa" of Raphael, the Florentine school pursuing truth of mental expression; the "Marriage in Cana," the Venetian school pursuing truth of colour and light.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin distinguishes several kinds of artistic truth rather than treating form as empty decoration. The article’s objection is to form overriding warranted judgment, not to demanding work on form itself.

History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Oscar Wilde · Fictional dialogue: Vivian · Intentions · Read the source

Wilde’s dialogue favors complex beauty over simple truth as an artistic aim. That challenge belongs beside the article’s boundary: a work of art is not a factual report merely because it expresses a world.

An eminent artist will bring about a considerable change in the established modes of each of those arts, and introduce a new fashion of writing, music, or architecture.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith allows that an important artist can transform established forms. A genuine artistic achievement can justify change; the new wrapper alone cannot.

We have discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers; every one must still dress like other people, but the fashion may change once or twice a year.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill contrasts changing fashion with the continuing demand to resemble others. Novelty in costume can therefore coexist with conformity in judgment.

Whatever changes may be made in the customs of society, whatever new machines we may invent, whatever new manufactures we may supply, Fine Art must remain what it was two thousand years ago, in the days of Phidias; two thousand years hence, it will be, in all its principles, and in all its great effects upon the mind of man, just the same.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin’s strong claim for continuity in artistic principles supplies a countervoice to automatic novelty. The article need not accept his timeless formulation to distinguish enduring insight from mere age.

There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill defends individual independence against collective opinion. The article preserves that purpose while distinguishing reasoned dissent from allowing the collective to dictate one’s view in reverse.

Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin describes discussion organized around inquiry rather than victory or contradiction. His club’s particular rules are historical arrangements, not a proposed speech code; the useful contrast is between testing reasons and securing a win.

What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson notices the appeal of independence even in compromised conduct. This helps ask whether opposition is being credited before its reasons and consequences have been assessed.

The failure to recognize the social claim as legitimate causes the trouble; the suspicion constantly remains that woman's public efforts are merely selfish and captious, and are not directed to the general good.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams identifies a persistent suspicion that women’s public efforts must be selfish. The passage shows how an unfair motive presumption can deny a legitimate contribution without examining its actual claim.

There is a coldness, a selfishness, a levity, an insincerity, which we cannot fix upon any particular phrase or action, but we see it in their whole persons and deportment.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt describes judgments of insincerity based on a whole pattern of conduct. It is a counterpoint to universal suspicion: a particular, evidenced pattern differs from deciding every generous act must be a disguise.

The heart of every impartial spectator rejects all fellow-feeling with the selfishness of his motives, and he is the proper object of the highest disapprobation.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith condemns genuinely selfish motives through an impartial spectator. Recognizing that some motives deserve criticism does not establish that the least generous account is always correct.

The foolish liar, who endeavours to excite the admiration of the company by the relation of adventures which never had any existence, the important coxcomb who gives himself airs of rank and distinction which he well knows he has no just pretensions to, are both of them, no doubt, pleased with the applause which they fancy they meet with.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith describes invented adventures and pretended rank rewarded by imagined applause. The cultivated persona can use a different vocabulary while retaining that dependence on reception.

There is no blindman’s-buff, no conscious hints, no awkward ventriloquism, no testimonies of applause, no abstract, senseless self-complacency, no smuggled admiration of his own person by proxy: it is all plain and above-board.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt’s description distinguishes overt self-display from admiration smuggled in by proxy. It complicates the assumption that an unshowy manner must be less occupied with its audience.

I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson writes of feeling another person’s praise with unusual warmth. The affectionate context is a boundary: pleasure in admiration, especially for someone cherished, is not by itself the vice of vanity.

Why else do we pride ourselves on the superiority of our judgment, if we are not more advanced in this respect than the majority of readers?

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt’s question asks what actually warrants confidence in superior judgment. The tape measure gives the sculptor a particular reason to test authority rather than invoke it.

Educational methods that pride themselves on being exclusively analytic or exclusively synthetic are therefore (so far as they carry out their boasts) incompatible with normal operations of judgment.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey rejects methods boasting exclusive allegiance to analysis or synthesis. A favored competence becomes less useful when its claims exclude the other operations a judgment needs.

No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person's preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people's liking instead of one.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill distinguishes reasons from a preference multiplied by many people. A reputation or a confident circle cannot turn unsupported liking into an adequate argument.

The substitution of scientific for superstitious habits of inference has not been brought about by any improvement in the acuteness of the senses or in the natural workings of the function of suggestion.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey explains that better inference required more than naturally sharper senses. A past reputation for insight does not replace the habits through which present claims are tested.

The greatness of England is now all collective: individually small, we only appear capable of anything great by our habit of combining; and with this our moral and religious philanthropists are perfectly contented.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill challenges satisfaction with collective achievement alongside small individual contributions. His polemical assessment is not adopted as a verdict on a nation; it questions whether belonging to an accomplished group settles one’s own adequacy.

The sweeping of that room was my college examination, and never did any youth pass an examination for entrance into Harvard or Yale that gave him more genuine satisfaction.

Booker T. Washington · Up from Slavery · Read the source

Washington recalls satisfaction in a concrete task completed. This provides a positive boundary: earned satisfaction in actual work differs from stamping a new task with an old assurance.

Hence free mental play involves seriousness, the earnest following of the development of subject-matter.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey joins free mental play to seriousness about the subject. Play and answerability can support one another rather than function as competing identities.

It is good in discourse, and speech of conversation, to vary and intermingle speech of the present occasion with arguments, tales with reasons, asking of questions with telling of opinions, and jest with earnest; for it is a dull thing to tire, and, as we say now, to jade any thing too far.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon welcomes conversation that mingles jest and earnest. The article questions the permanent escape from ownership, not the presence of humor in a serious exchange.

And observe, in this last respect, what a peculiar importance, and responsibility, are attached to your work, when you consider its permanence, and the multitudes to whom it is addressed.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin stresses the reach and duration of an artist’s address. His demanding account helps ask what one owes an audience without requiring total emotional disclosure.

Does a wise man think to enlarge his comprehension by turning his eyes only on himself, or hope to conciliate the admiration of others by scouting, proscribing, and loathing all that they delight in?

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt questions whether loathing everything others enjoy can enlarge understanding or earn admiration. Dimming the other lamp changes the comparison without developing one’s own contribution.

He is happiest who advances more gradually to greatness, whom the public destines to every step of his preferment long before he arrives at it, in whom, upon that account, when it comes, it can excite no extravagant joy, and with regard to whom it cannot reasonably create either any jealousy in those he overtakes, or any envy in those he leaves behind.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith considers envy and jealousy in the setting of gradual public recognition. His social account does not excuse envy; it asks how the arrangement of recognition may intensify comparison.

His victories are by demonstration of superiority, and not by crossing of bayonets.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, Second Series · Read the source

Emerson contrasts demonstrated superiority with physical combat. The article takes the narrower constructive point: an achievement can offer something to understand without requiring a rival’s reduction.

The man who has received great benefits from another person, may, by the natural coldness of his temper, feel but a very small degree of the sentiment of gratitude.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith notices that received benefits and felt gratitude do not mechanically coincide. The article distinguishes a habitual refusal of appreciative regard from temperament or failure to display warmth.

They give their gratitude and admiration only in return for benefits conferred.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt argues that posterity remembers instruction and delight rather than rank alone. Gratitude attaches to a benefit received, without making later generations debtors to inherited status.

They were very thankfully receiv’d, and the kindness acknowledg’d by letters to me from the colonels of both regiments, in the most grateful terms.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin describes a particular benefit being acknowledged through letters. The example connects thanks to what was actually provided without making a public ritual or unlimited repayment the measure of gratitude.

But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen and affectation;—of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications, and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its inferiors.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt locates affected gentility in disdain for involuntary disadvantages. His criticism is especially apt where cultural standing turns unfamiliarity into supposed personal inferiority.

In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith challenges the assumed superiority of elevated social position in the conditions of happiness. The passage helps separate standing in a hierarchy from basic human consideration.

It is always more difficult to destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage but also contempt.

Oscar Wilde · Fictional dialogue: Gilbert · Intentions · Read the source

Gilbert’s aesthetic polemic embraces contempt and humiliating mockery in clearing the way for beauty. It is a countervoice, not this article’s standard: the article rejects extending judgment of art into denial of a person’s basic standing.

All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill asks for the strongest reasons on both sides rather than a familiar account of only one. Fair evaluation concerns the hearing actually given to claims, not simply the vocabulary of impartiality.

But our judgments now are of little importance, compared to what they were before; and when they are most severely impartial, can commonly produce nothing but vain regret, and unavailing repentance, without securing us from the like errors for the future.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith warns that impartial judgment after the event can arrive too late to change action. The editor’s unequal openings need examination before the preferred result is made final.

Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgment for years to come, you may begin to hope.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, Second Series · Read the source

Emerson distrusts completed praise more than the uncertain response of friends. The passage invites a circle to leave room for an unsettled judgment rather than reward the immediately reassuring one.

The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile, either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, Second Series · Read the source

Emerson connects truthfulness with independence from persons, opinions and possessions. His ideal of self-direction supports the article’s distinction between considered agreement and surrender for favor.

The greatest number of minds seem utterly incapable of fixing on any conclusion, except from the pressure of custom and authority: opposed to these, there is another class less numerous but pretty formidable, who in all their opinions are equally under the influence of novelty and restless vanity.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt contrasts submission to custom with submission to restless novelty. The apparently rebellious circle can have an approved answer just as a conventional circle can.

We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just weight to the opinion of neighbors, is but feebly developed.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams considers the pressure of social estimation among people with little room for independent action. Her account directs attention to dependence and circumstances rather than casually judging silence as a freely chosen vice.

These things I mention as a caution to young printers, and that they may be encouraged not to pollute their presses and disgrace their profession by such infamous practices, but refuse steadily, as they may see by my example that such a course of conduct will not, on the whole, be injurious to their interests.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin connects a professional standard with a costly refusal in practice. His confidence about eventual interests is a personal historical claim, not a guarantee that integrity pays; the relevant issue is whether the rule reaches its advocate.

The painter does not view things in clouds or ‘mist, the common gloss of theologians,’ but applies the same standard of truth and disinterested spirit of inquiry, that influence his daily practice, to other subjects.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt commends applying the same spirit of inquiry beyond one’s daily art. The muddy side entrance illustrates a refusal to let a publicly demanded standard govern one’s own case.

The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class, or his religious profession.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill identifies custom and professional belonging as common sources of a person’s standard. That makes it worth asking whether a convenient exemption has been mistaken for an adequate reason.

But the wrong roads are noisy,—vociferous everywhere with all kinds of demand upon you for art which is not properly art at all; and in the various meetings of modern interests, money is to be made in every way; but art is to be followed only in one way.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin describes the competing demands through which money can steer artistic work. His severe distinction between art and other demands is a perspective on responsibility, not a condemnation of earning a livelihood.

We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect; while it is still rewarded out of all proportion to any other, its possession is by no means assumed to imply the possession of the highest moral qualities.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams refuses to infer the highest moral qualities from earning capacity. Reward and standing therefore cannot by themselves certify the ethical quality of a cultural judgment.

Ordinarily our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle; as the planting interest in conflict with the commercial; the party of capitalists and that of operatives; parties which are identical in their moral character, and which can easily change ground with each other in the support of many of their measures.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, Second Series · Read the source

Emerson distinguishes the interests sustaining parties from their professions of principle. Applied carefully to a reviewer, the question is what consideration actually purchased the direction of the judgment.

And though the impracticability of executing the law has caused its repeal in several of the States which had adopted it, including the one from which it derives its name, an attempt has notwithstanding been commenced, and is prosecuted with considerable zeal by many of the professed philanthropists, to agitate for a similar law in this country.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill discusses reforming zeal through a contested coercive measure. The historical example invites examination of means and legitimate claims rather than treating the declared moral end as sufficient permission.

It was in favor of liberty of conscience, and in behalf of the Baptists, Quakers, and other sectaries that had been under persecution, ascribing the Indian wars, and other distresses that had befallen the country, to that persecution, as so many judgments of God to punish so heinous an offense, and exhorting a repeal of those uncharitable laws.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin recounts his grandfather Peter Folger’s poem against persecution. The theological explanation belongs to that historical argument, not this site’s account of disaster; the relevant claim is liberty of conscience against coercive zeal.

It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson’s friendship ideal includes difficult conditions as well as pleasant ones. Sustained fidelity can be demanding without licensing a cause to override the other person’s legitimate claims.

Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favours from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and ill-spoken of, and this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill begins by restricting his claim to people whose livelihood and material independence are secure. His dismissal of reputational fear is contestable; the article retains the economic qualification while assessing the actual cost and available response.

A crew of mischievous critics at Edinburgh having fixed the epithet of the Cockney School to one or two writers born in the metropolis, all the people in London became afraid of looking into their works, lest they too should be convicted of cockneyism.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt describes readers frightened away from writers by a critical label. The example shows how cultural ridicule can govern inquiry before the work is examined.

It is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you can be sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable occasion.

Robert Louis Stevenson · An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays · Read the source

Stevenson’s provocative association of habitual foolhardiness with occasional courage is a counterpoint, not an exercise. The article keeps courage directed toward a defensible purpose and refuses to prescribe danger for its own sake.

Mutual support and unceasing progress distinguish real and natural order from its mockery, pedantic tyranny.

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris contrasts mutual support with pedantic tyranny. This distinguishes a shared order that develops contributors from coordination achieved by taking all their handles.

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill extends concern about tyranny beyond official political acts. Cultural relationships can override agency without the controller holding public office.

The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson describes the will involved in making artistic expression possible. Control over one’s own creative process does not by itself justify control over another contributor’s choices.

The unnaturalness of the situation is intensified by the fact that the employee is practically debarred by distance and lack of leisure from her natural associates, and that her employer sympathetically insists upon filling the vacancy in interests and affections by her own tastes and friendship.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams examines an employer substituting personal friendship for an employee’s natural associations. The particular relationship differs from a studio, but the claim that one person may fill another’s whole social world is directly relevant.

The second fruit of friendship is healthful and sovereign for the understanding, as the first is for the affections; for friendship maketh indeed a fair day in the affections from storm and tempests, but it maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness and confusion of thoughts.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon values friendship as illumination of understanding. The positive purpose depends on an exchange of judgment, not ownership of the friend’s independent attachments.

Generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem, all the social and benevolent affections, when expressed in the countenance or behaviour, even towards those who are peculiarly connected with ourselves, please the indifferent spectator upon almost every occasion.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith describes the appeal of benevolent attachments even when they concern those especially close to us. Affection itself is therefore not the vice; the unjust ownership claim needs separate evidence.

Another is sympathy; the power of sharing in the feelings of living creatures, which if you destroy, you make yourselves hard and cruel.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin treats sympathy as a capacity to share other creatures’ feelings. The hidden chair asks whether artistic sensitivity reaches the actual person helping to make the work.

There is nothing more devastating to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship which makes our public opinion.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams connects fellowship with the conditions for inventive thought. A contributor’s social and practical needs are part of the work’s conditions rather than merely obstacles to inspiration.

The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, headlong, gregarious notion acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with a fastidious minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth, and as indifferent to every thing but their own frivolous and vexatious pretensions.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt condemns both the crowd and the fastidious minority when pretension displaces real attention. An exclusive circle does not become sensitive merely by using the vocabulary of discernment.

The cruelest insult, on the contrary, which can be offered to the unfortunate, is to appear to make light of their calamities.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith identifies making light of misfortune as an insult to the person suffering. A critic’s entertainment can therefore be part of the harm rather than evidence of a useful correction.

And when the poor expert is finally overwhelmed with ridicule, the Philistine shrewdly decides that a sham Leonardo is just as good as a genuine one, that these are all matters of fashion, and that there is really no disputing of tastes!

Vernon Lee · The Beautiful · Read the source

Lee describes ridicule of an expert leading an observer to a false equivalence about artworks. Humiliation can damage understanding instead of proving intellectual superiority.

She does not realize what a cruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she gives advice.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams notices the power imbalance when a giver of charity offers advice. A correction needs attention to that imbalance; the recipient’s exposure is not a harmless addition to the giver’s insight.

Revenge, therefore, the excess of resentment, appears to be the most detestable of all the passions, and is the object of the horror and indignation of every body.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith explicitly identifies revenge as an excess of resentment. The article separates the project of payback from a finite correction or fair accountability.

He may be to us an object of pity, perhaps of dislike, but not of anger or resentment; we shall not treat him like an enemy of society: the worst we shall think ourselves justified in doing is leaving him to himself, if we do not interfere benevolently by showing interest or concern for him.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill distinguishes disapproval of private conduct from treating a person as an enemy. A critic can withhold association without turning later decisions into opportunities for punishment.

This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all considering the value of the gift but looking back to the greater store it was taken from,—I rather sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lord Timon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, Second Series · Read the source

Emerson criticizes a gift experienced as usurpation and resists the offended benefactor’s anger. The passage complicates the story of injury: a demanded return of gratitude can conceal an earlier attempt to own the recipient.

Let it be considered too that resentment, though, in the degrees in which we too often see it, the most odious, perhaps, of all the passions, is not disapproved of when properly humbled and entirely brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the spectator.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith allows a fitting form of resentment while criticizing its excessive degrees. The useful distinction is proportion, not a demand that every justified objection sound placid.

That a man should be so absorbed in his own indignation as to fail to apprehend his child's thought, that he should lose his affection in his anger, simply reveals the fact that his own emotions are dearer to him than his sense of paternal obligation.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams describes indignation eclipsing attention to another person’s thought. The emotional investment in the response can displace the very obligation that supposedly prompted it.

No; the meaning of those maxims of forbearance and submission, which the Quakers have taken too literally, is, that you are not to drive out one devil by another; it aims at discouraging a resort to violence and anger, for if the temper it inculcates could become universal, there would be no injuries to resent.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt interprets forbearance as refusing to answer one destructive force with another. His religious reference is relevant to the means of response; the article does not demand passive submission to a wrong.

But while the teaching has included an ever-broadening range of obligation and has insisted upon the recognition of the claims of human brotherhood, the training has been singularly individualistic; it has fostered ambitions for personal distinction, and has trained the faculties almost exclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams directly links intellectual training with personal distinction and accumulation. The badge collection makes visible the difference between developing a contribution and collecting claims to advantage.

what is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and pre-eminence?

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith asks what the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence is for. The question helps a cultural opportunity acquire a purpose other than being another increment.

There was a remarkable instance of this tendency to the heap, this desire to cultivate an abstract passion for wealth, in a will of one of the Thellusons some time back.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt examines wealth pursued as an abstract heap. Credit and access can be accumulated in the same purposeless form without becoming more useful to the work.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith begins with an interest in others that is not reducible to direct gain. The shared studio can recognize such claims without pretending everyone has identical needs.

We have learned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for the will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest which deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we say that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow and unprogressive issues.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams links selfishness to a deliberately narrowed range of experience. The task wheel lets one person’s creative life count while the supporting labor disappears from view.

On questions of social morality, of duty to others, the opinion of the public, that is, of an overruling majority, though often wrong, is likely to be still oftener right; because on such questions they are only required to judge of their own interests; of the manner in which some mode of conduct, if allowed to be practised, would affect themselves.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill considers the position of those affected by conduct when forming a social judgment. His confidence in majorities is not adopted as a rule; affected people nevertheless have claims the convenient arrangement must hear.

Therein lies all that is indestructible of the pleasure of life; no man need ask for more than that, no man should be granted less; and if he falls short of it, it is through waste and injustice that he is kept out of his birthright.

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris connects access to worthwhile pleasure with waste and injustice. The issue is not hostility to enjoyment but the losses imposed by the way resources are used.

Wherever our reserve with regard to pleasure falls short of the most ascetic abstinence, he treats it as gross luxury and sensuality.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith describes an excessively ascetic observer who condemns everything short of abstinence. That is an important foil: temperance does not mean calling every pleasure wasteful.

I cannot enter here into political investigation; but this is a certain fact, that the wasteful and vain expenses at present indulged in by the upper classes are hastening the advance of republicanism more than any other element of modern change.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin’s historical polemic associates elite waste with political consequences. This site does not adopt that prediction as evidence; the relevant challenge is that supposedly private extravagance may draw on resources and relationships beyond the spender.

Above all things, good policy is to be used, that the treasure and moneys in a state be not gathered into few hands; for, otherwise, a state may have a great stock, and yet starve.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon’s image of a wealthy state that nevertheless starves exposes the difference between possessing resources and making fitting provision. A workshop’s preserved bulbs raise the same narrower question about use.

In Pennsylvania, as it discouraged useless expense in foreign superfluities, some thought it had its share of influence in producing that growing plenty of money which was observable for several years after its publication.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin describes discouraging useless expense as compatible with greater material provision. That positive account of thrift differs from unwillingness to spend when the resource’s proper purpose calls for it.

And if we apply that rule strictly, we shall in the first place show the builders and such-like servants of the public what we really want, we shall create a demand for real art, as the phrase goes; and in the second place, we shall surely have more money to pay for decent houses.

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris connects a changed demand for art with money available for decent housing. Resource use can be judged through what it makes possible, rather than preservation being treated as its own sufficient purpose.

Art makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to enjoyment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson challenges an account of art that treats necessary work as something merely to escape before enjoyment. The article asks whether preparation serves a purpose or protects the maker from the effort it needs.

Genius, great natural powers will give industry and ardour in the pursuit of their proper object, but not if you divert them from that object into the trammels of common-place mechanical labour.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt sharply criticizes training that diverts a maker’s particular abilities. His claim that industry alone yields mediocrity is contested; the useful challenge here is whether demanded labor serves the actual work.

I do not ask you what your leading motive is for working—that is a different thing; you may have families to support—parents to help—brides to win; you may have all these, or other such sacred and pre-eminent motives, to press the morning's labour and prompt the twilight thought.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin recognizes several serious motives for labor beyond art alone. Creative work belongs within actual responsibilities rather than requiring a romantic freedom from every practical claim.

All that can possibly be done for any one who wants ears of wheat is to show them where to find grains of wheat, and how to sow them, and then, with patience, in Heaven's time, the ears will come—or will perhaps come—ground and weather permitting.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin’s seed-growing analogy includes both patience and conditions beyond the learner’s control. Allowing duration does not guarantee an outcome or justify blame when conditions are adverse.

By what forethought, pains, and patience, can we make endurable those strange dwellings—the basest, the ugliest, and the most inconvenient that men have ever built for themselves, and which our own haste, necessity, and stupidity, compel almost all of us to live in?

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris treats haste as one contributor to poor surroundings and asks about patient improvement. The article likewise distinguishes necessary duration from tolerating an avoidable obstruction.

Every man’s progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson describes development through successive teachers. An influence can be genuinely important without providing instant or final mastery.

In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought and its adequacy to support the belief examined.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey distinguishes a belief whose support is deliberately examined. Deliberation has a task; the article asks when that task has supplied adequate grounds for a bounded choice.

He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source

Emerson connects even peaceful action with resolution. The miniature doors keep the work before this ordinary commitment rather than protect a meaningful freedom to proceed.

The worth of such actions is not a thing to be decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous commonsense.

Robert Louis Stevenson · An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays · Read the source

Stevenson resists deciding the worth of an action through a passing emotional reaction. This supports a real boundary: settling a choice should follow fitting judgment rather than merely end the discomfort of hesitation.

The sketch promised well; and I set to work to finish it, determined to spare no time nor pains.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt recalls moving from a promising sketch into sustained work. The quoted intention illustrates the transition from the attraction of a beginning to the effort needed for development.

I suppose considerate observers, looking at the masses of men in their blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, Second Series · Read the source

Emerson finds fidelity among ordinary human purposes. The article gives that purpose a particular form while retaining the possibility of justified departure.

Nevertheless, great as the change may be, Architecture has no prospects in civilisation unless the change be brought about: and ’tis my business to-day, I will not say to convince you of this, but to send some of you away uneasy lest perhaps it may be true; if I can manage that I shall have spoken to some purpose.

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris invites an unsettling reconsideration in pursuit of architecture’s future. Sustaining a worthwhile purpose can require changing an earlier arrangement rather than preserving every method unchanged.

There comes a time when children must extend and make more exact their acquaintance with existing things; must conceive ends and consequences with sufficient definiteness to guide their actions by them, and must acquire some technical skill in selecting and arranging means to realize these ends.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey joins a definite account of consequences to the selection of means. A creative experiment needs an intelligible question and some account of what its arrangement may do.

That careful and laborious and circumspect state of mind, ever watchful and ever attentive to the most distant consequences of every action, could not be a thing pleasant or agreeable for its own sake, but upon account of its tendency to procure the greatest goods and to keep off the greatest evils.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith describes foresight through the goods it secures and the evils it avoids. Consequence-sensitive judgment is not merely an unattractive temperament opposed to artistic daring.

Morality only teaches us our duty by showing us the natural consequences of our actions; and the poet does the same while he continues to give us faithful and affecting pictures of human life—rewarding the good and punishing the bad.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt relates moral understanding and poetry through pictures of consequences. His claim that art rewards and punishes is a perspective, not a rule for fiction; the relevant question is what a faithful portrayal lets us see.