The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

by Amanda Kennedy

“Liberal education accomplishes two objects. It produces a liberal frame of mind, and it makes the studious and reflective recipient acquainted with the stream of the world’s thought and feeling, and with the infinitely varied products of the human imagination.

A lot like Socratic, ritualized reflection

“but I think I like a speckled ax best.” And I believe this may have been the case with many, who, having, for want of some such means as I employ’d, found the difficulty of obtaining good and breaking bad habits in other points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle, and concluded that “a speckled ax was best”;

Trinity?

You can easily see what a natural feeling it is, when men who would not have had the resolution to act thus themselves, shewed how right they thought it in another.

and do not regard an act of kindness as an investment,

be more inclined to do a good service than to ask a return,

For, seeing that a belief in a man’s virtue is the original cause of friendship, friendship can hardly remain if virtue be abandoned. But if we decide it to be right to grant our friends whatever they wish, and to ask them for whatever we wish, perfect wisdom must be assumed on both sides if no mischief is to happen.

We may then lay down this rule of friendship—neither ask nor consent to do what is wrong.

Bad men must have the fear of punishment before their eyes: a punishment not less severe for those who follow than for those who lead others to crime.

We conclude, then, not only that no such confederation of evilly disposed men must be allowed to shelter itself under the plea of friendship, but that, on the contrary, it must be visited with the severest punishment, lest the idea should prevail that fidelity to a friend justifies even making war upon one’s country.

Let this, then, be laid down as the first law of friendship, that we should ask from friends, and do for friends, only what is good.

Let us have the courage to give advice with candour.

We conclude then that mental pain which we must often encounter on a friend’s account is not of sufficient consequence to banish friendship from our life, any more than it is true that the cardinal virtues are to be dispensed with because they involve certain anxieties and distresses.

Our earthly life is one phase of the eternal aspiration of the soul towards progress, which is our law; ascending in increasing power and purity from the finite towards the infinite; from the real towards the ideal; from that which is, towards that which is to come.

It changes with the times, for it is their expression; it is transformed with society, for—consciously or unconsciously—it sings the lay of Humanity; although, according to the individual bias or circumstances of the singer, it assumes the hues of the present, or of the future in course of elaboration, and foreseen by the inspiration of genius.

Each of them says: “I have faith in myself”; never, “I have faith in ourselves.”

Pride...they need humility. They are focused only on themselves—God has given them great gifts so why should they continue on like they gained wisdom in some other way; more than others, no doubt but still, they were given a gift.

They have never realized the conception of Humanity in the multitudes that have preceded, surround, and will follow after them; never thought on their own place between the past and future; on the continuity of labor that unites all the generations into one whole; on the common end and aim, only to be realized by the common effort; on the spiritual post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual, through the thoughts he transmits to his fellows; and, it may be—when he lives devoted and dies in faith—through the guardian agency he is allowed to exercise over the loved ones left on earth.

Gifted with a liberty

The emptiness of the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron.

Social, belonging—what we need more than anything else; food, water, shelter—yes—but even with those, without social belonging, we are doomed.

beautiful expression of Herder’s “every creature is a numerator of the grand denominator, Nature.”

The absolute concentration of every faculty of observation on each of the objects to be represented, without relation to the ensemble; the entire avoidance of every influence likely to modify the view taken of that object, became in his hands one of the most effective means of art.

Such were Byron and Goethe in their general characteristics; both great poets; very different, and yet, complete as is the contrast between them, and widely apart as are the paths they pursue, arriving at the same point. Life and death, character and poetry, everything is unlike in the two, and yet the one is the complement of the other. Both are the children of fatality—for it is especially at the close of epochs that the providential law which directs the generations assumes towards individuals the semblance of fatality—and compelled by it unconsciously to work out a great mission.

Goethe contemplates the world in parts, and delivers the impressions they make upon him, one by one, as occasion presents them.

Byron looks upon the world from a single comprehensive point of view; from the height of which he modifies in his own soul the impressions produced by ...

Goethe successively absorbs his own individuality in each of the objects he reproduces. Byron stamps every object he portrays with his own individuality. To Goethe, natu...

Goethe better expresses lives; Byron life.

And yet, notwithstanding all the contrast, which I have only hinted at, but which might be far more elaborately displayed by extracts from their works; they arrived—Goethe, the poet of individuality in its objective life—at the egotism of indifference; Byron—the poet of individuality in its subjective life—at the egotism (I say it with regret, but it, too, it egotism) of despair: a double sentence upon the epoch which it was their mission to represent and to close!

And now farewell to Goethe; farewell to Byron! farewell to the sorrows that crush but sanctify not—to the poetic flame that illumines but warms not—to the ironical philosophy that dissects without reconstructing—to all poetry which, in an age where there is so much to do, teaches us inactive contemplation; or which, in a world where there is so much need of devotedness, would instill despair.

Byron is isolated man, representing only the internal aspect of life; Goethe isolated man, representing only the external.

Certain travellers of the eleventh century relate that they saw at Teneriffe a prodigiously lofty tree, which, from its immense extent of foliage, collected all the vapors of the atmosphere; to discharge them, when its branches were shaken, in a shower of pure and refreshing water. Genius is like this tree, and the mission of criticism should be to shake the branches.

The eternal synthesis that, from the heights of the Capitol and St. Peter, is gradually unfolded in ever-widening circles, embracing first a nation and then Europe, as it will ultimately embrace humanity, remained unrevealed to him; he saw only the inner circle of paganism; the least prolific, as well as least indigenous.

At Rome Byron forgot passions, sorrows, his own individuality, all, in the presence of a great idea; witness this utterance of a soul born for devotedness:—

Remount the hollow horse, and pant in secret there.

Candor will oblige us to admit,

that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions, of

nothing could be more ill—judged than that intolerant spirit, which has, at all times, characterized political parties.

The consciousness of good intentions disdains ambiguity.

whose ambition aimed at objects which did not correspond with the public good,

to find whether there are any principles, on which the imagination is affected, so common to all, so grounded and certain, as to supply the means of reasoning satisfactorily about them.

And such principles of taste I fancy there are; however paradoxical it may seem to those, who on a superficial view imagine, that there is so great a diversity of tastes, both in kind and degree, that nothing can be more indeterminate.

All the natural powers in man, which I know, that are conversant about external objects, are the senses; th...

The effect of the drug has made us use it frequently; and frequent use, combined with the agreeable effect, has made the taste itself at last agreeable.

There is in all men sufficient remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure, to enable them to bring all things offered to their senses to that standard, and to regulate their feelings and opinions by it.

a pleasure is perceived from the resemblance which the imitation has to the original: the imagination, I conceive, can have no pleasure but what results from one or other of these causes.

The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences: because by making resemblances we produce new images; we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative and indirect nature.

Hence it is that men are much more naturally inclined to belief than to incredulity.

Homer and the Oriental writers, though very fond of similitudes, and though they often strike out such as are truly admirable, seldom take care to have them exact; that is, they are taken with the general resemblance, they paint it strongly, and they take no notice of the difference which may be found between the things compared.

A man to whom sculp ture is new, sees a barber’s block, or some ordinary piece of statuary, he is immediately struck and pleased, because he sees something like a human figure; and, entirely taken up with this likeness, he does not at all attend to its defects. No person, I believe, at the first time of seeing a piece of imitation ever did.

Here is indeed the great difference between tastes, when men come to compare the excess or diminution of things which are judged by degree and not by measure.