Word: moralizing
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...CORRESPONDENT of the University Magazine, confused by the moral eccentricities of college students, suggests, as morality appears to be dependent on custom, that a convention of delegates be held at Philadelphia, "who shall be empowered to ratify and confirm, for their respective institutions, such code of morals as shall be agreed upon by the Convention...
...apostles of modern progress assert, indeed, that all individual force and manliness have not died out with the decline of some of the old observances which tended to foster these qualities. Civilization, it is said, has changed the form but not the essence of heroism. The moral of the omission of the exercises at the tree, it is claimed, would not be that the free, rollicking, glorious creature we know as the Harvard student has become a cynic, mounted on the hobby horse of "indifference," or a prig prating of "the true, the beautiful, and the good," both too superior...
Most men appear to think that when they have purchased a print or two, the moral character of which is regulated by the reputation which they desire to maintain; when they have been elected to the St. Paul's, the Chess Club, the Institute, or the Athenaeum, etc., ad infinitum, and have encircled their shingles with gray passe-partouts; when they have carelessly slung any medals that they may possess over the shingles aforesaid, and when they have put photographs of a popular actress or two - probably Rosina Vokes, and some loose character in tights - on their mantelpieces, they have...
...Nation closes the eye of reason, thus far is it productive of sloth. Not pessimism, but to be cowed into pessimism or anything else, therefore, is the evil. I question whether pessimism, as such, does not tend to increased activity of mind, whatever blight it may cast upon the moral sense, as involving critical examination into things ordinarily unquestioned, and a constant warfare with the received optimism. I might quote the extraordinary activity of the German Schopenhauer; and as to the general futility of any philosophical theory in stopping the processes of thought, the name of Spinoza is instructive...
...then asserted that culture results from morality; the absurdity of which statement becomes evident in the necessary deduction that George III. and a Chinese bonze would both be men of high culture. If the writer will but allow me to invert his proposition, I can cordially agree; for it will ever be true that high moral character is the most perfect blossom of true culture. It is worthy of notice that the writer, after a peculiarly spiteful attack on Harvard men, defines culture as perfect sympathy "with every mood, passion, and failing in all ages and climes...