British statesman (1848-1930)
Literary immortality is an unsubstantial fiction devised by literary artists for their own especial consolation. It means, at the best, an existence prolonged through an infinitesimal fraction of that infinitesimal fraction of the world's history during which man has played his part upon it.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
The constant pressure of custom; the effects of imitation, of education, and of habit; the incalculable influence of man on man, produce a working uniformity of conviction more effectually than the gallows and the stake, though without the cruelty, and with far more than the wisdom that have usually been vouchsafed to official persecutors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
speech, May 7, 1926
It must, I think, be admitted that most men approach the difficulties of a scientific exposition far more hopefully than the difficulties of a metaphysical argument. They will take more trouble because they expect more result.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
introduction, The English Constitution
It may well be that if mankind could draw up a hedonistic balance-sheet, the pleasures of mundane existence would turn out to be greater than its sufferings.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
It is absurd to ascribe corrupt motives to large bodies of men, merely because the economic theories they adopt are in accordance with their own interests.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Morals, as I conceive them, are concerned with ends of action: and principally with ultimate ends of action. An end of action, in so far as it is ultimate, is one which is pursued for itself alone, and not as a means to some other end. Of course an end may be, and constantly is, both ultimate and contributory. It is sought for on its own account, and also as an instrument for procuring something else. It is mainly in the first of these capacities, however, that it concerns morality.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
We perceive some object—let us say the sun. We perceive it directly and not symbolically. What we see is not a mental image of the sun, nor a complex of sensations caused by the sun; but the sun itself. Moreover, this material external object retains its identity while it varies in appearance. It is red in the morning; it is white at midday; it is red once more in the evening; it may be obscured by clouds or hidden in eclipse; it vanishes and reappears once in every twenty-four hours; yet, amid all these changes and vanishings, its identity is unquestioned. Though we perceive it differently at different times, and though there are times when we do not perceive it at all, we know it to be the same; nor do we for a moment believe (with Heraclitus) that when it is lost to view it has, on that account, either altered its character or ceased to exist.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
The oratorio, then, stands pre-eminent, at least in the infancy of orchestration, among all the modes in which music may be wedded to dramatic poetry. It, and it alone, gives the musician the utmost latitude in the choice of his subject, and in the employment of his resources. It is Handel's glory to have perceived its capabilities, and to have developed them in a manner undreamed of by his predecessors, and unsurpassed by even the greatest of his successors.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surface lessons of history.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
A Fragment on Progress
Political economy is somewhat at a discount. Those who preach its doctrines scarcely speak with their old assurance, neither do they who listen, listen with the old respect. Ancient heresies, long thought to have been dead and buried, are beginning to revive. New heresies are daily springing into life. Every sign seems to portend that at a time when, of all others, problems are pressing for solution, in dealing with which we must be largely guided by economic science, the guide itself is in public estimation becoming seriously discredited.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Growth in Knowledge, like productiveness in Art, can hardly, so far as its direct consequences are concerned, do otherwise than subserve the cause of progress.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
How, then, are we to class this strange amalgam of criticism and credulity? What purpose can it serve? To whom will it appeal? Whose beliefs will it alter even by a hair's breadth?
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
Consider the commonplace life of a commonplace man as it develops in the untroubled prosperity of a steady business and a quiet home. Such a career seems as orderly and uniform as the flood I have been describing is terrible and strange. Surely no supernatural calculator is required to cast the horoscope of its hero: for he does, and leaves undone, the same actions, he thinks and leaves unthought the same ideas, as thousands of his contemporaries; and, so far as outward appearance goes, he is an indistinguishable member of an undistinguished crowd.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
There is, even from my point of view, a great difference between beauty in art and beauty in nature. For, in the case of nature, there is no artist; while, as I observed just now, "a work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of natural causation, but in the order of aesthetic necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient unless it be understood by the sender.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
It seems at first sight strange that any man of genius should have patiently submitted to rules which, from the point of view of art, were perfectly arbitrary.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
Now it is quite true that when we examine our own system of beliefs we cannot imitate this attitude of complete detachment, since in the very act of examination some of these beliefs are assumed. But we can examine the beliefs of other people, and we do, as a matter of common-sense practice, rate low the value of the beliefs whose sources we perceive to be non-rational. How, then, can we refuse to apply to ourselves a principle of judgment which we thus apply without scruple to our neighbors?
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Theism and Humanism
We are all of us prone to regard a political institution, for instance, a representative chamber, as a machine whose character can be adequately expressed by defining its legal constitution. When we have mastered this, when we know the qualification of its electors, its legislative powers, its relation to other bodies in the State, and so forth, we conceive ourselves to have mastered its theory, and to be qualified to pronounce an opinion on the way it will work in practice. But, in truth, we have only mastered a certain modicum of constitutional law; and Constitutional law may (as I have said), be in some respects, an obstacle rather than an aid, to the construction of Political Science. The second is concerned with the reality of things, the first with their form. The subject-matter of one is Natural law, of the other Statute law. The assumed line between the theory of the political machine and its practical working, either cannot be drawn at all, or cannot be drawn at the place where legal definition and enactment end. No statute, for example, provides or could provide that a popular assembly shall work through a few large and well-disciplined parties, rather than through a number of small and independent groups. Yet its habits in this respect are incomparably more important than anything in its formal constitution. No statute provides or could provide that the representatives composing it shall, on the whole, be elected from among those who do not regard politics as a means of making money. Yet the habits of the electorate in this respect are incomparably more important than any mere question of the franchise. On the other hand, the constitution of most representative assemblies does assume that the units who elect and the units who are elected shall, as among themselves, possess equal fractions of political power: and, accordingly, the law is careful to draw no distinction between them. But here, again, Law is no guide to fact. Legal equality has no necessary connection with political equivalence, and the most cursory observations, not of constitutional forms, but of the realities of life, show that organization is the inevitable accompaniment of electoral institutions, and that organization, from the very nature of the case, is absolutely incompatible with uniformity.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses