{"product_id":"2940015988406","title":"Gospels of Anarchy and Other Contemporary Studies","description":"An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGOSPELS OF ANARCHY \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIN such of us as not merely live, but think and feel what life is and might be, there is enacted an inner drama full of conflicting emotions, long drawn out through the years, and, in many cases, never brought to a conclusion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt begins with the gradual suspicion, as we pass out of childish tutelage, that the world is not at all the definite, arranged, mechanical thing which the doctrine convenient to our elders and our own optimistic egoism have led us to expect; that the causes and results of actions are by no means so simple as we imagined, and that good and evil are not so distinctly opposed as black and white. We guess, we slowly recognise with difficulty and astonishment, that this well-regulated structure called the universe or life is a sham constructed by human hands; that the reality is a seething whirlpool of forces seemingly blind, mainly disorderly and cruel, and, at the best, utterly indifferent; a chaos of which we recognise, with humiliation turning into cynicism, that our poor self is but a part and a sample.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus we feel. But if we feel long enough, and do not get blunted in the process, we are brought gradually, by additional seeing and feeling, to a totally new view of things. The chaos becomes ordered, the void a firmament; and we recognise with joy and pride that the universe has made us, and that we, perceiving it, have made the universe in our turn; and that therefore \"in la sua volontade è nostra pace.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe following notes display this process of destruction and reconstruction in one particular type of mind; embody, for the benefit of those who constitutionally tend to think alike, and still more of those who are constitutionally bound to think otherwise, the silent discussions on anarchy and law which have arisen in me as a result of other folks' opinions and my own experience of life's complexities and deadlocks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe intellectual rebellion and lawlessness of our contemporaries have been summed up by Mr. Henry Brewster, in a book too subtle and too cosmopolitan ever to receive adequate appreciation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"On the one hand, a revolt against any philosophical system of unity, which many would call a revolt against all philosophy, genuine scepticism. Then the denial that the feeling of obligation can be brought to bear on any fixed point.... Morally, we must content ourselves with the various injunctions of wisdom and with distinct, independent ideals. Something beyond them is, indeed, recognised; but, whereas we were accustomed to place it in the obligatory character of certain prescriptions, we are now told to understand it as a perpetual warning against all dogmatism.\"1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1. \"Theories of Anarchy and Law,\" p. 113.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is, as I have said, the modern formula of scepticism and revolt. But similar doubts must have arisen, most certainly, in all kinds of men at all times, producing worldly wise cynicism in some and religious distress in others. Such doubts as these have lurked, one suspects, at the bottom of all transcendentalism. They are summed up in Emerson's disquieting remark that saints are sad where philosophers are merely interested, because the first see sin where the second see only cause and effect. They are implied in a great deal of religious mysticism, habitually lurking in esoteric depths of speculation, but penetrating occasionally, mysterious subtle gases, to life's surface, and there igniting at contact with the active impulses of men; whence the ambiguous ethics, the questionable ways of many sects originally ascetic. Nay, it is quite conceivable that, if there really existed the thing called the Secret of the Church which Villiers de l'Isle Adam's gambling abbé staked at cards against twenty louis-d'or, it would be found to be, not that there is no purgatory, but rather that there is no heaven and hell, no law and no sin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBe this as it may, all dogmatic religions have forcibly repressed such speculations, transcendental or practical, upon the ways of the universe and of man. And it is only in our own day, with the habit of each individual striking out his practice for himself, and with the scientific recognition that the various religiously sanctioned codes embody a very rough-and-ready practicability—it is only in our own day that people are beginning to question the perfection of established rules of conduct, to discuss the drawbacks of duty and self-sacrifice, and to speculate upon the possible futility of all ethical systems, nay, upon the possible vanity of all ideals and formulas whatever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the champions of moral anarchy and intellectual nihilism have made up for lost time, and the books I intend discussing in the following notes contain, systematically or by implication, what one might call the ethics, the psychology, and the metaphysics of...","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47147931697392,"sku":"2940015988406","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940015988406_p0.jpg?v=1763627012","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940015988406","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}