J. Howard Moore Quotes

Revision of character will be a much more tangible and scientific thing when the physiology of psychology becomes more than a controverted conjecture. There has been no attempt, no methodical attempt, to amend character thru physiological and neural violence; and about all we know about the possibilities of such a surgery consists of glimpses caught on occasions of casualty. We do know, however, that neural changes appear promptly and invariably in consciousness, and that there is every reason to suspect perfect parallelism between the neural and psychic processes. This unfailing attendance and dependence of mind on physical phenomena, and the superior tangibility of matter over consciousness, assure the prophet that an accomplished and sensitized attention is the all-essential to the achievement of psychical amendment by neural and physiological alteration. In the New Age which we prevision and approach, among the marvels to amaze our clumsy contemplations will be the miracles of cerebral surgery, the physics of the humors, the science of the physiology of consciousness.

Teach a child to love others as it loves itself; let this be the first and most impressive injunction that invades its ears; allow it never to infringe this rule in its conduct toward others, and never to associate with those who do; teach it that the highest virtue is forbearance and helpfulness; inculcate the equal rights of all to the joys of the universe; forbid all competitive indulgence as degrading and ungallant; teach it the propriety of exercising its combativeness against the tendencies of the inanimate, never against a fellow-creature; allow only those amusements which encourage kindness and the rivalry of good-doing;—and when that child grows to manhood or womanhood, and encounters the conditions of more serious life, it will encounter them, not ideally, perhaps, but in a spirit very remote from that in which it would have approached them had it come up thru conditions of incessant egoism.

Who, that has pity, is disposed to censure a child for rebelling against the useless and absurd rumination, thru painful years, of mummified languages and fearful mathematical formulae, which have no more real bearing, and which to the average human being never will have any more real bearing, on the great, living, performing universe around him than the esoteric nonsense of the Five Kings?

All school-room competition should be abolished. The school should be a family, a fraternity, a colony of cooperating, helping, sympathizing brothers and sisters, not a camp of hot combatants bent on mutual discomfiture. Competition is not necessary, and if it were necessary, it would not be justifiable. If it is not possible to produce great intellects without crimes on character, then let us doze forever in the holy haze of mediocrity. A graceful nature is the most essential psychic possession of a living being.

Altruism should be inculcated from the cradle, and savagery should be denounced. Maxims and precepts, proclaiming the equal preciousness of all, should be assiduously dinned into the consciousness. The young should be convinced beyond all chance of deterioration that the only laudable thing in the world is the causing of happiness, and that happiness in others is just as precious and valuable as it is in themselves. They should be taught that only "happiness which comes like the red flowers of the oleander out of the bosom of the all" is true happiness, not that which is gleaned from the pain and discomfiture of others.

Living beings who love themselves no more ardently than they love others are prodigies, and it will never be otherwise so long as beings are born as they are and live in like conditions.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that the young, accustomed to such an environment, grow up to consider life itself a game, in which they are to strive to outwit those about them? Is it any wonder that you and I and men and women everywhere are helplessly selfish, when we were born so, when all that we know of altruism has come thru Sunday-school rumors and straggling precepts, and when we have all our lives been surrounded by selfish people and occupied in selfish pastimes and professions? Nothing could be more natural. Altruism is anomalous on the earth, and it is not astonishing.

From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed egoist.

The twofold function of individual culture is so to develop beings that they shall be able to perceive their proper relations to the rest of the uiniverse, to the inanimate about them, and to other beings in space and time, and realizing their relations to others, to be disposed to assume them.

Parenthood is the gravest of all responsibilities. The act of generation is a momentous act. It should be illuminated. It should be more serious, and deliberate, and conscious. It should be far more frequently neglected. Human beings should know that it is a grave conspiracy, the conspiracy to bring into the universe a living being, an organism with lungs and responsibilities and the faculty for being affected. Would-be parents should ascertain whether or not they are undertaking the dissemination of disease and crime among future generations. For society not to know, nor care to know, and not to determine, nor care to determine, the character of purposed contributions to a new generation, would seem amazing, were we not born looking upon it. Were we accustomed to accomplished and scientific procreation, our indiscriminate somnambulism would scarce wear the aspects of sanity.

The criminal should be considered and pitied, not despised. He simply complies with the nature with which he came into the world, modified by the environment in which he has lived, the same as does every other being who breathes. You or I, with identical heredity and environment, would do identical deeds. Measured by his ability to do otherwise, the villain is not less divine than the humanitarian. Every creature acts out the impulses which arise in his own consciousness, and the will cannot create, but simply registers, those impulses. Punishment is one of the means possessed by society for its self-culture, and its administration should not be made an opportunity for pugilistic cocks to color their spurs.

The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible reformation with the gentlest and most strategic deprivation.

The absolute and only function of punishment is to reform the one receiving the punishment and to deter others of like impulses. No misery should be inflicted upon a criminal because he has done a wrong, but because he and others have dispositions to do other wrongs. The function of punishment is not to "satisfy" in some mysterious sense a past offense, but to provide against and curtail future offenses.

If this ball is ever other than a globule of alloy, if the universe ever experiences the long longed for millennium of prophecy and hope, all must come thru the reformed and glorified gateway of the womb. Individual, or post-natal, reformation is, and must always be, more or less imperfect. It is powerless in determining the nature with which beings come into the world, and it is ineffectual in modifying it after it is determined.

Human beings are bigots and egoists almost to a creature. They are so because their phyletic environment has fancied this disgusting cut of consciousness. And the only possible way to attain, with anything like alacrity, any other pattern is by means of an environment with an enlightened and inextinguishable dislike for the prevailing style of things. Let this truth be distinctly and profoundly realized. It is the essential spark of the illumination. If we would bloom into beings of beauty and light, we must acquire an environment which will insist on beings of beauty and light as the mammas and papas of posterity.