Leslie Stephen

Faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.

Sir Leslie Stephen KCB (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English writer on philosophy and literary history. He was also one of the leading British mountaineers of his generation, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Thackeray's son-in-law and Virginia Woolf's father.

Quotes

• He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.
  • The Playground of Europe (1871; London: Longmans, Green, 1899) p. 131

• The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.
  • Fraser's Magazine, New Series, vol. 5 (1872) p. 160

• Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.
  • The Cornhill Magazine, vol. 26 (1872) p. 729

• Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?
  • The Fortnightly Review, vol. 25 (1876) p. 859

• Philistine – a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.
  • The Cornhill Magazine, vol. 33 (1876) p. 574

• A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance.
  • Samuel Johnson (1878), repr. In John Morley (ed.) English Men of Letters (New York: Harper, 1894) vol. 6, p. 60

• If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.
  • The Fortnightly Review, vol. 34 (1880) p. 177

• The doctrine of toleration requires a positive as well as a negative statement. It is not only wrong to burn a man on account of his creed, but it is right to encourage the open avowal and defence of every opinion sincerely maintained. Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.
  • The Nineteenth Century, vol. 13 (1883) p. 665

• Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.
  • Studies of a Biographer: Second Series (London: Duckworth, 1902) vol. 3, p. 261

• If you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable now-a-days, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.
  • Sketches from Cambridge (1865)

• The fool who does not know his own folly may be doing nothing, and the philosopher who is trying to darken knowledge may be doing worse than nothing; but every sincere attempt to grapple with real difficulties made by a man not utterly incompetent has its value.
  • The Science of Ethics (1882), Preface

• We can no longer be content with refuting our opponents; we are also bound to explain them. The vitality of any doctrine supposed to be erroneous proves that it cannot be entirely erroneous.
  • The Science of Ethics (1882), p. 2

Attributed

• The poet should touch our heart by showing his own
  • Quote by Thomas Hardy from The life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 by Florence Emily Hardy ASIN: B0027MJJSI Macmillan (1 Jan 1962)

Quotes about Leslie Stephen

• He called individuals the tissue of society and stated that they are only relatively independent of the social body. Morality is distorted by social pressure and does not consider, first of all, the interests of the individual. Stephen claimed that pleasure must be accounted for by the conditions which make acts pleasant in specific cases. Survival in the evolutionary process, Stephen wrote, is more ultimate than pleasure, though men do not consciously realize this fact.
  • Albert Edwin Avey, Handbook in the History of Philosophy. New York: Barnes & Noble. 1954. p. 214. 

• Stephen's domestic life after his wife's death, the savage, self-pitying emotional blackmail that he inflicted on his daughters, was something of which they spoke but which they never made public. Virginia Woolf gives no more than a hint of it when she writes of the "arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again demanding sympathy." It is of course possible that she was guilty of exaggeration, and it is the opinion of at least one qualified observer that she was. On the other hand her sister undoubtedly held the same view, while her younger brother felt that Virginia Woolf was altogether too indulgent to their father. Stephen's ruthless self-pity was, at all events, believed in by his children. That he was by his own lights an excellent, indeed an indulgent parent, that he "lived and died like a gentleman", was something that they would also have concluded. This indeed was the horror of the situation. The boredom, the restriction, the oppression of family life was not the product of individual cruelty but of social habit.
  • Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury (1968), p. 27

• I shall always remember the surprise Leslie Stephen's appearance gave me; the long, thin, bright-red beard, radiating in a fan-shape; the wrinkled forehead; the curious flatness of the top of the head, accentuated by the fulness of the auburn hair on either side; the long cold hands; the distraught and melancholy eyes.
  • Edmund Gosse, quoted in Frederic William Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), p. 268

• Stephen himself was often more impressive than his ideas. There is a constant hint about him of unused capacity, reserve power. Thomas Hardy sensed it when he wrote the sonnet comparing him to the "spare and desolate" Schreckhorn which he had been the first to climb. Meredith sensed it when he put him into The Egoist as the laconic tutor Vernon Whitford, with his "sunken brilliancy". To such men he was potentially a hero. But the hints remained hints, the reserve was never to be lowered.
  • John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), pp. 91-92

• As Leslie Stephen has demonstrated, to suppress one truth is to suppress all truth, for truth is a coherent whole.
  • Gertrude Kelly, "State Aid to Science" (1887)

• Although Stephen was apt to be too apologetic for intruding his opinions upon readers who were anxious to hear them, it is proper that every man should apologise for writing about Shakespeare. ... But it would have been a great loss to all lovers of good literature if Stephen had not, at the close of his life, overcome his diffidence and given us his forty-four pages on 'Shakespeare as a Man.'
  • "Leslie Stephens and his Works". The Quarterly Review 199: 468–498. April 1904, quote on p. 493

• Stephen's work, alike in literary criticism and philosophy, was characterised by a frank sincerity which is vivified by a humorous irony. His intellectual clarity bred an impatience of conventional religious beliefs and many strenuous endeavours to prove their hollowness. The champions of the broad church excited his particular disdain, because to his mind they were muddle-headed, and therefore futile. He put no trust in halfway houses. At the same time both in his philosophical and especially in his literary judgments there was an equability of temper which preserved him from excesses of condemnation or eulogy. Reserved and melancholy in manner, he enjoyed the affectionate admiration of his most enlightened contemporaries.
  • Sidney Lee, 'Stephen, Leslie', Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement Vol. III. Neil—Young, ed. Sidney Lee (1912), p. 404