Book Description

Excerpt from Enigmas of Life Nine years have now elapsed since the author of the Enigmas of Life ceased to be among us, and eighteen years since he published this book and in republishing it, a few words about him and the work that he did may therefore have become necessary. That it should now be offered to the public in a more accessible form than the one in which it originally appeared, is due to the steady interest it continues to excite in the circle which it has already reached, and the desire of those who have at heart the recognition of its merits that that circle should be more widely extended. The Enigmas of Life was one of Mr Greg's latest works, but it contains the scattered thoughts of a lifetime, which he brought together from the jottings of his note-book when he had reason to believe that they might have value and interest for others. He did not put them forth with any pretensions to a systematic scheme of thought, or a serious contribution to established conclusions, but, as he himself says, rather as suggested thoughts that may fructify in other minds than distinct propositions which it is sought argumentatively to prove. They have charmed and stimulated other minds to a degree which he did not anticipate. As an eminent writer says: The chapters on Malthus and on the non-survival of the Fittest make a very genuine and original contribution to modern thought. But it is the later essays in the little volume that touched most readers, and will for long continue to touch them. They are as far as possible from being vague, or misty, or aimless. Yet they have, what is so curiously rare in English literature, the charm of reverie. They have the ever seductive note of meditation and inwardness, which, when it sounds true, as it assuredly did here, moves the spirit like a divine music. There is none of the thunder of Carlyle (which, for that matter, one may easily come in time to find prodigiously useless and unedifying), there is not the piercing concentrated ring of Emerson: but the complaints, the misgivings, the aspirations of our generation find in certain pages of Mr Greg's book a voice of mingled fervour and a union of contemplative reason with spiritual sensibility, which makes them one of the best expressions of one of the highest moods of this bewildered age. They are in the true key for religious or spiritual composition, as Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar is; thought and emotion are fused without the decorations of misplaced rhetoric. That meditations so stamped with sincerity, and so honestly directed to the actual perplexities of thoughtful people, should have met with wide and grateful acceptance, is no more than might have been expected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.