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John Stuart Blackie
Published by Good Press, 2022
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“The proper study of mankind is man,”
and that no kind of knowledge ever can surpass either in interest or importance the knowledge of man as a social being, as the member of a Family, of a Church, and of a State. The depreciation of moral science which we have lately heard from Mr. Buckle and other members of that school is a transitional phenomenon arising out of the one-sided culture of the understanding, and a defective emotional, volitional, and imaginative organization. If new discoveries are not every day trumpeted in the domain of moral philosophy, it is just because this science, like Euclid, is too certain, too fundamental, and too indispensable to have been left to the happy chance of being found out after the lapse of long centuries. Morals are as necessary to the acting man as the sun’s light to the growing plant; they are not discovered, because they always have been and always must be; and the only great result that we have to look for then in them is that they shall be more universally recognised, more scientifically handled, and more practically applied. Socrates therefore was right, not only for Greece in the fifth century before Christ, but for England at the present moment, and for all times and places, when he proclaimed on the house-tops that the first and most necessary wisdom for all men is not to measure the stars, or to weigh the dust, or to analyse the air, but, according to the old Delphic sentence, to know themselves, and to realize in all the breadth and depth of its significance what it is to be a man, and not a pig or a god. And in attaining this knowledge, while he would certainly find that, though a stable physical platform to stand on and a healthy physical atmosphere to breathe are necessary for the production of a normal humanity, yet in general the measure of a man’s manhood is to be taken not so much from what he attaches to himself from without as from what he brings with him from within.
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