Without Lifting A Finger

     John had discovered that men in general were automata. All thought the same; all judged in the same fashion; and the more learned they were, the less independence of mind they displayed. This made him doubt the whole value of book education. The graduates who came from Upsala had, one and all, the same opinions on Rafael and Schiller, though the differences in their characters would have led one to expect a corresponding difference in their judgments. Therefore these men did not think, although they called themselves freethinkers, but merely talked and were merely parrots.

"Don't be angry because men are stupid and bad, or you will have to be angry because a stone falls; both are subject to the same laws; one must be stupid and the other fall."

Buckle's History of Civilization in England was written in 1857, but did not reach Sweden till 1871 - 1872. Even then the soil was not ready for the seed. The learned critics were unfavourable to Buckle, and the seed took root only in some young minds who had no authoritative voice.      "No literature," says Buckle himself, "can be useful to a people, if they are not prepared to receive it." Thus it was with Buckle and his work, which preceded that of Darwin (1858) and contained all its inferences -- a proof that evolution in the world of thought is  not so strictly conditioned as has been believed. Buckle did not know Mill or Spencer, whose thoughts rule the world, but he said most of what they said subsequently. 

Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821 – 29 May 1862) was an English historian , author of an unfinished History of Civilization and a very strong amateur chess player. Early Life and Education Buckle was born the son of Thomas Henry Buckle, a wealthy London merchant and shipowner, he was born at Lee in Kent . His delicate health prevented him obtaining much formal education; he never attended university and was little at school. However, he received a high degree of education privately, and the love of reading he felt as a child was given many outlets. He first gained distinction as a chess player, being known, before he was twenty, as one of the best in the world. In matchplay he defeated Kieseritsky and Loewenthal [ 1 ] and was named Chessgames.com player of the day on 11 November 2012. After his father's death in January 1840, he inherited an ample fortune and a large library, and travelled with his mother on the continent (1840–1844). He had by then resolved to di...

     John had an old grudge against this poet. Once as a child, he had been ill for a whole summer, and had by chance taken Bellmann's Fredman's Epistles out of his father's bookcase. The book seemed to him silly, but he was too young to form a well-grounded opinion on it. **    Bellmann's idylls are careless, extemporized compositions with forced rhymes, and as disconnected as the thoughts in the brain of a drunkard. One does not know whether it is day or night, the thunder rolls in the sunshine, and the waves beat while the boat is floating calmly on the waters. They simply provide a text for music, and for that purpose one might use a book of addresses. The meaning of the words does not matter, as long as they sound well.   

On teaching: The pupil thinks his work hard, but he is only the carriage while the teacher is the horse. Teaching is decidedly harder than standing by a screw or the crane of a machine, and equally monotonous.

Another of the "autos." He's gone off to college and is also teaching elementary school. *** Re his teaching experience: What it is that makes the competent teacher is not clear. Some produced an effect by their quiet manner, others by their nervousness; some seemed to magnetise the children, others beat them; some imposed on them by their age or their manly appearance, etc. The women worked as women, i.e. through a half-forgotten tradition of a past matriarchate. John was not competent. He looked too young and was only just nineteen; he was skeptical about the methods employed and everything else; with all his seriousness he was playful and boyish. The whole matter to him was only an employment by the way, for he was ambitious and wished to advance, but did not know in which direction. Re writing and talent: John was seized with a craze for writing verse but could not. The gift must be born with one, he thought, and inspiration descend all of a sudden, as i...