Book Description

Excerpt from The Relation Between Thought and Action: From the German and From the Classical Point of View; The Herbert Spencer Lecture Delivered at Oxford, October 20, 1917 Then, instead of exploiting the authority of the great man for your own benefit, you modestly take him as your master, and strive to develop and progress by following his teaching. You earnestly endeavour to become inspired with his spirit, and to perpetuate, not his memory only, but his very action, his inward and spiritual life. Need I say that the latter form of worship it is, not the former, that we should like to pay to Herbert Spencer's memory. By evoking it, we do not exhume a dead man, but we unite in spirit with an ever living spirit. Let me quote, in this connexion, a sentence which runs through the whole work of Herbert Spencer, and which I would like to take as a leading idea for the present inquiry. Given, says Herbert Spencer, the antagonism of two terms, 'if both have bases in the reality of things, then between them there must be a fundamental harmony.' How many difficulties, both in theoretical and practical matters, would be solved or lessened if we might learn, by applying Herbert Spencer's maxim, how to conciliate opposing claims and give each its due, instead of striving to oppress or to annihilate what we deem irreconcilable with our own trend of mind? 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.