A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
Wordsworth (The Prelude, Bk. I).
The Quakers have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I can not help smiling at the conceit, that, if the taste of a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason).
This quotation reminds me of an interesting passage in Professor Bateson’s Presidential Address to the British Association at Melbourne in 1914. Although it has not a very close connection with the quotation the reader will not object to my giving it a place here:—
“Everyone must have a preliminary sympathy with the aims of eugenists both abroad and at home. Their efforts at the least are doing something to discover and spread truth as to the physiological structure of society. The spread of such organizations, however, almost of necessity suffers from a bias towards the accepted and the ordinary, and if they had power it would go hard with many ingredients of society that could be ill-spared. I notice an ominous passage in which even Galton, the founder of eugenics, feeling perhaps some twinge of his Quaker ancestry, remarks that ‘as the Bohemianism in the nature of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind.’ It is not the eugenists who will give us what Plato has called ‘divine releases from the common ways.’ If some fancier with the catholicity of Shakespeare would take us in hand, well and good; but I would not trust Shakespeares, meeting as a committee. Let us remember that Beethoven’s father was an habitual drunkard and that his mother died of consumption. From the genealogy of the patriarchs also we learn—what may very well be the truth—that the fathers of such as dwell in tents, and of all such as handle the harp or organ, and the instructor of every artificer in brass or iron—the founders, that is to say, of the arts and the sciences—came in direct descent from Cain, and not in the posterity of the irreproachable Seth, who is to us, as he probably was also in the narrow circle of his own contemporaries, what naturalists call a nomen nudum.”
Nomen nudum is a bare name without further particulars, but Donne, no doubt on the authority of Josephus (I. 2.3), attributes Astronomy to Seth (“The Progresse of the Soule”):—
Wonder with mee