Walter Bagehot

Every sort of philosophy has been systematised, and yet as these philosophies utterly contradict one another, most of them cannot be true.

Unproved abstract principles without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and then carefully spun out into books and theories, which were to explain the whole world.

But the world goes clear against these abstractions, and it must do so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions.

No doubt the deductions may be right; in most writers they are so; but where did the premises come from?

Who is sure that they are the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of the matter in hand?

Who is not almost sure beforehand that they will contain a strange mixture of truth and error, and therefore that it will not be worth while to spend life in reasoning over their consequences?

In a word, the superfluous energy of mankind has flowed over into philosophy, and has worked into big systems what should have been left as little suggestions.

And if the old systems of thought are not true as systems, neither is the new revolt from them to be trusted in its whole vigour.

The passion for action is quite as ready to pull down as to build up; probably it is more ready, for the task is easier.

If you want to stop instant and immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it, and have agreed on it.

Each kind of persons will have their spokesman; each spokesman will have his characteristic objection, and each his characteristic counter-proposition, and so in the end nothing will probably be done, or at least only the minimum which is…

A campaign, as Macaulay well says, cannot be directed by a 'debating society;' and many other kinds of action also require a single and absolute general.

But for the purpose now in hand--that of preventing hasty action, and ensuring elaborate consideration--there is no device like a polity of discussion.

They are for ever explaining that the present is 'an age of committees,' that the committees do nothing, that all evaporates in talk.

How many spoiled lives, how many broken hearts, how many wasted bodies, how many ruined minds, how much misery pretending to be gay, how much gaiety feeling itself to be miserable, how much after mental pain, how much eating and…

And how many Irelands have there been in the world where men would have been contented and happy if they had only been fewer; how many more Irelands would there have been if the intrusive numbers had not been kept down by infanticide and…

How painful is the conclusion that it is dubious whether all the machines and inventions of mankind 'have yet lightened the day's labour of a human being.' They have enabled more people to exist, but these people work just as hard and are…

Granted that it is in excess, how can you say, how on earth can anyone say, that government by discussion can in any way cure or diminish, it?

The peaceful struggle for existence in societies ever growing more crowded and more complicated, must have for its concomitant an increase of the great nervous centres in mass, in complexity, in activity.

The larger body of emotion needed as a fountain of energy for men who have to hold their places and rear their families under the intensifying competition of social life, is, other things equal, the correlative of larger brain.

Already the brain of the civilised man is larger by nearly thirty percent, than the brain of the savage.

Whether it be in greater growth of the organs which subserve self-maintenance, whether it be in their added complexity of structure, or whether it be in their higher activity, the abstraction of the required materials implies a diminished…

And we have seen reason to believe that this antagonism between Individuation and Genesis becomes unusually marked where the nervous system is concerned, because of the costliness of nervous structure and function.

This means that men who have to live an intellectual life, or who can be induced to lead one, will be likely not to have so many children as they would otherwise have had.

But they will not have their maximum of posterity--will not have so many as they would have had if they had been careless or thoughtless men; and so, upon an average, the issue of such intellectualised men will be less numerous than those…