ARTHUR BALFOUR QUOTES
British statesman (1848-1930)
When the impassioned lover has sunk into a good husband, and the worshipper of beauty has cooled into a judicious critic, they may look back on their early raptures with intelligent disdain. In that event there are for them no values to be maintained. They were young, they were foolish, they made a mistake, and there is no more to be said. But there is a higher wisdom. Without ignoring what experience has to teach, they may still believe that through these emotions they have obtained an authentic glimpse of a world more resplendent and not less real than that in which they tramp their daily round.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
If you ask me what I have in mind when I say that agnostic empiricism never faces facts, I reply that it never really takes account of that natural history of knowledge, of that complex of causes, rational and non-rational, which have brought our accepted stock of beliefs into being. And if you ask me what I have in mind when I say that though it reasons, it rarely reasons home, I reply that, when it is resolved not to part with a conclusion, anything will serve it for an argument; only when it is incredulous does it know how to be critical.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Neither do I greatly hope to influence the trained man of speculation, who has already found a theory of things which satisfies his reason.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR
London Observer, Jan. 30, 1927
There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
If by some unimaginable process works of beauty could be produced by machinery, as a symmetrical color pattern is produced by a kaleidoscope, we might think them beautiful till we knew their origin, after which we should be rather disposed to describe them as ingenious.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
On questions of taste there is notoriously the widest divergence of opinion.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Whatever philosophers may say after the event the conviction that we live in an external world of things and persons, where events are more or less regularly repeated, has never been treated as a speculative conjecture about which doubt was a duty till truth was proved. Beliefs like these are not scientific hypotheses, but scientific presuppositions, and all criticism of their validity is a speculative after-thought.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
science proceeds to build up a theory of nature by which the foundation itself is shattered. It saws off the branch on which it is supported. It kicks down the ladder by which it has climbed. It dissolves the thing perceived into a remote reality which is neither perceived nor perceivable. It turns the world of common sense into an illusion, and on this illusion it calmly rests its case.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish.
ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR
The Foundations of Belief
The physical course of nature does not merely fail to indicate design, it seems loudly to proclaim its absence.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Imagine an external intelligence studying the methods by which earth-born creatures of various types adjust themselves to future circumstances. The most primitive method is, I suppose, no more than simple nervous reaction. The most developed method involves reasoned expectation. And between these two extremes our supposed observer would see a long series of intermediate forms melting into one another by insensible gradation.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
But this difficulty is greatly mitigated if we hold that our belief in an independent world of material objects, however it may be caused, is neither a conclusion drawn from this or that particular experience nor from all our experiences put together, but an irresistible assumption. Grant the existence of external things, and it becomes possible and legitimate to attempt explanations of their appearance, to regard our perceptions of them as a psychical and physiological product of material realities which do not themselves appear and cannot be perceived. Refuse, on the other hand, to grant this assumption, and no inductive legerdemain will enable us to erect our scientific theories about an enduring world of material things upon the frail foundation of successive personal perceptions.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
When science has supplied us with a description of external things as they "really are," and we proceed to ask how the physical reality reveals itself to us in experience, a new difficulty arises, or, if you like, the old difficulty with a new face. For science requires us to admit that experience, from this point of view, is equivalent to perception; and that perception is a remote psychological effect of a long train of causes, physical and physiological, originally set in motion by the external thing, but in no way resembling it.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
The source of morality must be moral.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Specialists are a necessity. And it may well be that those who have successfully pressed forward the conquering forces of discovery along some narrow front, careless how the struggle towards enlightenment fared elsewhere, may be deemed by the historian to have been not only the happiest, but the most useful thinkers of their generation. Their achievements are definite. Their contributions to knowledge can be named and catalogued. The memory of them will remain when contemporary efforts to reach some general point of view will seem to posterity strangely ill-directed, worthless to all but the antiquarian explorers of half-forgotten speculation.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Our pleasure in a landscape is qualified if we discover ourselves to have been the victims of an optical delusion. If, for example, purple peaks are seen on a far horizon, the traveler may exclaim, "What beautiful mountains!" Something thereupon convinces him that the mountains are but clouds, and his delight suffers an immediate chill. But why? The mountains, it is true, proved unreal; but they had as much reality as mountains in a picture. Where lies the essential difference between a representation accidentally produced by condensed vapor and a representation deliberately embodied in paint and canvas? It is not to be found, as might be at first supposed, in the fact that the one deceives us and the other does not. Were we familiar with this particular landscape, did we know that nothing but a level plain stretched before us to the limits of our vision, we might still feel that, if the clouds on the horizon were what they seemed to be, the view would gain greatly in magnificence. Here there is no deception and no shock of disillusionment. If, therefore, we remain dissatisfied, it is because in this case verisimilitude does not suffice us; we insist on facts.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Now science, as it gladly acknowledges, is but an extension of common sense. It accepts, among other matters, the common-sense view of perception. Like common sense, it distinguishes the thing as it is from the thing as it appears. Like common sense, it regards the things which are experienced as being themselves unaffected by experience. But, unlike common sense, it devotes great attention to the way in which experience is produced by things. Its business is with the causal series. This, to be sure, is a subject which common sense does not wholly ignore. It would acknowledge that we perceive a lamp through the light which it sheds, and recognize a trumpet through the sound which it emits; but the nature of light or sound, and the manner in which they produce our experience of bright or sonorous objects, it hands over to science for further investigation.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
We are, perhaps, more sensitive about the pedigree of our intellectual creed than we are about the pedigree of our tastes or our sentiments. We like to think that beliefs which claim to be rational are the product of a purely rational process; and though, where others are concerned, we complacently admit the intrusion of non-rational links in the causal chain, we have higher ambitions for ourselves.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism