Human Nature and History Quotes

“Nevertheless, we can face the deeper problem, which Mill formulates as follows: 'What really are the intellectual characteristics of this age; whether our mental light - let us account for the fact as we may - has not lost in its intensity, at least a part of what it has gained in diffusion?' Mill is formulating the problem as a question. But the article to which he is responding was a plea 'for the moderns against those who placed the ancients above them,' so that Mill's signature would seem to imply an answer to his question which would place the ancients above the moderns. The phrasing of the question is, in any case, an endorsement of a reflexive criterion that Mill's father would repudiate: 'The intense was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation.' In fact Mill is pitting the Romantic and poetic criterion of inner 'intensity' against his father's utilitarian and journalistic criterion of public diffusion.''' That Mill has lost his youthful confidence in the progress attendant upon the diffusion of knowledge is even more evident form his next question: 'Whether our 'march of intellect' be not rather a march towards doing without intellect and supplying our deficiency of giants by the united efforts of a constantly increasing multitude of dwarfs?”
― Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought

“Though Bentham's Panopticon was never constructed, the Westminster Review institutionalized the same democratic and scientific principle of public exposure:
'It were to be wished that no such thing as secrecy existed - that every man's house were made of glass. There would be the less reason to desire windows to his breast ... The more men live in public, the more amenable they are to the moral sanction. The greater dependence men are in to the public, ... the clearer the evidence comes out, the more it has of certainty in its results. The liberty of the press throws all men into the public presence ... Under such influence, it were strange if men grew not every day more virtuous ... A whole kingdom, the great globe itself, will become a gymnasium, in which every man exercises himself before the eyes of every other man. Every gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible influence on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down. The constitution of the human mind being opened by degrees, the labyrinth is explored, a clue is found out for it. That clue is the influence of interest ... It is put into the hands of every man. The design by which short-sighted iniquity would mask its projects are every day laid open. There will be no moral enigmas by and by.'
This vision of journalistic exposure provided the youthful propagandist with the prospect of becoming 'a reformer of the world.'
However, the moment arrived when the propagandist could no longer look forward to this prospect. He found he was a moral enigma to himself. In the course of struggling with this moral enigma, he became a liberal.”
― Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought

“The simple idea is the location of an observer at the center and the observed at the circumference, whether the construction is a prison, workhouse, factory, or school. We can thereby, Bentham assures us, 'see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society - morals reformed, health preserved, industry reinvigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock.'
Bentham's pantopticon was never constructed, unfortunately for the future of mankind. who had to wait over a century and a half for television.”
― Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought

“What we have found out by consulting Mill's Autobiography is that Mill is equipped for the uphill race with the same moral and educational criteria with which he had initially become sensitive to the weight of the incubus on his soul menacing his own liberty. To this extent democracy in America is the same kind of authoritarian moral threat as the education which had been imposed on Mill by his father. The soul of the American is threatened with enslavement because it too receives the impress of opinions which it can only reproduce; the American can no longer address questions directly to himself as an individual.”
― Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought