Our supreme business in life--not as we made it, but as it was made for us when the world began--is to carry and to pass on as we received it, or better, the sacred lamp of organic being that we bear within us. Science and morals are subservient to the reproductive activity; that is why they are so imperative. The rest is what we will, play, art, consolation--in one word, religion. If religion is not science or morals, it is the sum of the unfettered expansive impulses of our being. Life has been defined as, even physically and chemically, a tension. All our lives long we are struggling against that tension, but we can truly escape from it only by escaping from life itself. Religion is the stretching forth of our hands toward the illimitable. It is an intuition of the final deliverance, a half-way house on the road to that City which we name mysteriously Death.
THE WALTER SCOTT PRESS, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.
“It is easy to dislike his book, it is possible to dislike it furiously; but the book is so honest, so earnest, so stimulating in its tolerant but convinced unconventionality, that it claims for itself a like sincerity and seriousness in the reader.... Mr. Ellis has produced a book which will be hotly discussed, no doubt, for it is nothing if not initiative, we might almost say revolutionary; but it is not a book to be disregarded.... It has sincerity and it has power; and sincerity and power compel at least attention.”--_Speaker._
“Mr. Havelock Ellis has discovered a ‘New Spirit.’ We have read him with care and patience, and we should be sorry to describe it; we only know that it is not intoxicating.”--_Scots Observer._
“Welcome is warmly due to this fresh, buoyant, and sincere volume of essays by Mr. Havelock Ellis.... There are parts of the study of Heine which are not unworthy to be named--it is high praise--with Matthew Arnold’s inimitable paper upon that writer, a paper almost as classic as Heine himself.... The last word upon so suggestive and finished a piece of work ought to be one of ungrudging praise.”--_Academy._
“Mr. Carlyle described, it seems to us, Mr. Havelock Ellis himself with great exactness in the person of a certain biographer of Voltaire, ‘an inquiring, honest-hearted character, many of whose statements must have begun to astonish even himself.’ Mr. Ellis must be very ‘inquiring,’ for we have seldom met with one who knows so many things that other people do not know.”--_Athenæum._