Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 603 pages of information about Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books.

Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 603 pages of information about Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books.
with impulsions or tranquil and surrounded with calmness, so are all the operations and the whole running-gear of the human machine entirely transformed.  In like manner, again, according as the ulterior development of the representation varies, so does the whole development of the man vary.  If the general conception in which this ends is merely a dry notation in Chinese fashion, language becomes a kind of algebra, religion and poetry are reduced to a minimum, philosophy is brought down to a sort of moral and practical common sense, science to a collection of recipes, classifications, and utilitarian mnemonics, the mind itself taking a whole positive turn.  If, on the contrary, the general conception in which the representation culminates is a poetic and figurative creation, a living symbol, as with the Aryan races, language becomes a sort of shaded and tinted epic in which each word stands as a personage, poesy and religion assume magnificent and inexhaustible richness, and metaphysics develops with breadth and subtlety without any consideration of positive bearings; the whole intellect, notwithstanding the deviation and inevitable weaknesses of the effort, is captivated by the beautiful and sublime, thus conceiving an ideal type which, through its nobleness and harmony, gathers to itself all the affections and enthusiasms of humanity.  If, on the other hand, the general conception in which the representation culminates is poetic but abrupt, is reached not gradually but by sudden intuition, if the original operation is not a regular development but a violent explosion—­then, as with the semitic races, metaphysical power is wanting; the religious conception becomes that of a royal God, consuming and solitary; science cannot take shape, the intellect grows rigid and too headstrong to reproduce the delicate ordering of nature; poetry cannot give birth to aught but a series of vehement, grandiose exclamations, while language no longer renders the concatenation of reasoning and eloquence, man being reduced to lyric enthusiasm, to ungovernable passion, and to narrow and fanatical action.  It is in this interval between the particular representation and the universal conception that the germs of the greatest human differences are found.  Some races, like the classic, for example, pass from the former to the latter by a graduated scale of ideas regularly classified and more and more general; others, like the Germanic, traverse the interval in leaps, with uniformity and after prolonged and uncertain groping.  Others, like the Romans and the English, stop at the lowest stages; others, like the Hindoos and Germans, mount to the uppermost.

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Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.