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Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931

"English Prose A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice"


"They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me thy fly, I am the wings."
This is what the genuine object of loyalty, the unity of the spiritual
life, always says to us when we examine it in the right spirit. But the
one source of our deepest insight into this unity of the spirit which
underlies all the varieties, and which leads us upward to itself past
all the sunderings and doubts of existence, is the loyal spirit itself.
Loyalty asserts: "My cause is real. I know that my cause liveth." But
the cause, however imperfectly interpreted, is always some sort of unity
of the spiritual life in which we learn to share whenever we begin to be
loyal. The more we grow in loyalty and in insight into the meaning of
our loyalty, the more we learn to think of some vast range of the unity
of spiritual life as the reality to which all the other realities
accessible to us are in one way or another subordinate, so that they
express this unity, and show more or less what it means. I believe that
a sound critical philosophy justifies the view that the loyal, precisely
in so far as they view their cause as real, as a personal, but also as
an over-individual, realm of genuine spiritual life, are comprehending,
as far as they go, the deepest nature of things.


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