Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (6 August 1862 – 3 August 1932) was a British political scientist and philosopher. He was a fellow at Cambridge from 1887 to 1932 and a lecturer at the London School of Economics from 1911 to 1920.

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Quotes[edit]

Some of my readers may have heard of a club known as the Seekers. It is now extinct; but in its day it was famous, and included a number of men prominent in politics or in the professions. We used to meet once a fortnight, on the Saturday night, in London during the winter, but in the summer usually at the country house of one or other of the members, where we would spend the week end together.
- A Modern Symposium. Doubleday. 1905. p. 3.

History may be used to support any conclusion, according to the emphasis of our conscious or unconscious principle of selection.
- Religion: A Criticism and a Forecast. 1906. p. 10.

The scientific denial of immortality is based upon the admitted fact of the connection between mind and brain; whence it is assumed that the death of the brain must involve the death of that, whatever it be, which has been called the soul. This may indeed be true; but it is not necessarily or obviously true; it does not follow logically from the fact of the connection.
- Is Immortality Desirable?. 1909. pp. 3–4. ISBN 9780790599199.

What we commonly have in our mind when we speak of religion is a definite set of doctrines, of a more or less metaphysical character, formulated in a creed and supported by an organization distinct from the state. And the first thing we have to learn about the religion of the Greeks is that it included nothing of the kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were no articles. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials, appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction between cleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; and whatever the religion of the Greeks may have been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was something very different from all that we are in the habit of associating with the world.
- The Greek View of Life. Doubleday. 1911. p. 1.

In ages of Faith religion is not only sublime; it is intimate, humorous, domestic; it sits at the hearth and plays in the nursery.
- Appearances: Being Notes of Travel. 1914. p. 22.

The real antithesis is not between East and West, but between India and the rest of the world." Only India is different; only India un spools some other possibility fantastically. India is the odd man out of the global citizenry... Thus India stands for something, which distinguishes it from all other peoples...Standing on the Ghats at Benares or by any village well we are transported into the beautiful antique world.
- Woodroffe, John George, Sir Is India civilized? Essays on Indian culture Madras, Ganesh& co., 1922 p. 136-137 , as quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture

... I doubt whether there is one book of his by which, in the field of his teaching, he is likely to be permanently significant.
But if ever I have met wisdom incarnate, Lowes Dickinson was its embodiment. There is not one book of his that does not suggest vistas; nor one that does not make the claim of reason seem more worthy of reverence. He wrote nothing that did not possess beauty of form, delicacy of insight, the call of a supremely generous nature to the life upon the heights.
- Harold J. Laski, (October 1932)"Lowes Dickinson and Graham Wallas". The Political Quarterly 3 (4): 461–466. DOI:10.1111/j.1467-923X.1932.tb01132.x.

... Dickinson published a wide range of books, plays and dialogues throughout his career, including Revolution and Reaction in Modern France (1892), Letters from a Chinese Official (1901), Goethe and Faust (1928), and Plato and His Dialogues (1932). As the breadth of these texts suggests, Dickinson's career stands as testament to an intellectual life led before the concretion of academic specialization. He has been variously described as a classicist, a historian, and a political scientist, and his work on international relations was deeply influenced by an overall critical humanist perspective on intellectual inquiry that embraced a variety of historical, philosophical, literary and political perspectives.
- Jeanne Morefield, in Bliddal, Henrik; Sylvest, Caspar; Wilson, Peter, eds. (24 July 2013). "Chapter 3. A democratic critique of the state: G. Lowes Dickinson's The European Anarchy" by Jeanne Morefield". Classics of International Relations: Essays in Criticism and Appreciation. Routledge. pp. 24–35. ISBN 9781135018665. (quote from pp. 24–25)

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