Scottish scholar (1809-1895)
That which makes the ebullition and overflow of religious zeal so fatal in its effects, is not merely the excess of the zeal itself, which like all excess is bad, but the tendency of all religions to subordinate the moral element which they contain to the religious: to make religion a separate business instead of an ethical instrument; to hang it as an amulet round the neck, not to breathe it as an atmosphere of social health, to nurse it as a sacred fire in the heart, and to feel it as a power which purifies every passion, ennobles every motive, and braces the nerve to the robustness of all manly achievement.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Though the masses may stare at the man who does violence to all his natural instincts, under the name of piety, and rends his flesh to prove the strength of his will, they will never be induced to follow his example.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Mammoth, Mammoth! mighty old Mammoth!
Strike with your hatchet and cut a good slice;
The bones you will find, and the hide of the mammoth,
Packed in stiff cakes of Siberian ice.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
"A Song of Geology", Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece
It is needless to say that a religion which declares war against the fundamental instincts of human nature must always fail, equally on the one side in regulating the passions of the thoughtless many, and on the other in commanding the suffrages of the thoughtful few.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Love is born among groves and singing-birds.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Altavona: Fact and Fiction From My Life in the Highlands
We do not discover the sun; we only recognise it when the clouds are blown and the rain has exhausted itself. So it is in morals—in the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. We do not discover moral principles by a fingering induction, or in any other way; we merely remove obstructions; we can apply the bellows also and blow the small spark into a mighty flame.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
Man is an inventive animal, and he does not invent from a compulsion of nature, as bees make cells or as swallows build nests. These are all prescribed operations which the animal must perform; but the inventive faculty in man is free, in such a manner that the course of its action cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in variety, and, above all things, shuns that uniformity which is the servile province of brute activity.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
What Does History Teach?
A growth is a growth, and a manufacture is a manufacture; the one possesses inherent divine vitality, the other no vitality at all.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals
No consideration is so powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of fashion among grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of popular error.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Four Phases of Morals