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The virtue of Paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience.
Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue: and, as it is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or through them, than through any other part of the fence. — Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers
his notion of a fragment book, of a collection of short rhetorical forms which are mutually illuminating, is fully developed in Augustus and Julius Hare's The Guesses at Truth (1827; frequently revised and reprinted over the next six decades). Julius Hare edited Landor's Imaginary Conversations, Sterling's Remains (which occasioned Carlyle's Life of John Sterling) and Dr. Arnold's History of Rome. With Connop Thirlwall — then a fellow Tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge - he translated B. G. Niebuhr's Romische Geschichte, as well as other German works in theology and history. He was considered by many to be the best German scholar in England and the intellectual mentor of the Apostles Club which came into being during his years at Cambridge.
The Guesses at Truth were set out in the form of sentences, ipothegms, parables, epigrams, Baconian essays, and Platonic dialogues. It was, he wrote, "a collection of fragments" — but fragments of a coherent philosophical view. "In the present and disjointed state of the intellectual world truth splits into bits." It was his hope that "the very sharpness and abruptness with which truths must be asserted, when they arc to stand singly, is not ill-fitted to startle and arouse sluggish and drowsy minds" (p. 296). Hare and his friend Coleridge were among the first Englishmen who possessed the necessary intelligence and knowledge to comprehend the way in which German aesthetics and philosophy offered a startling justification for the fragment as a pre-eminent literary form. They saw, to begin with, that a certain poetic activity of mind might be conceived as a necessary precondition to discursive thought, as a reaction to immediate experience and integral objects, or, to put it another way, a bringing further into consciousness, a making available of the raw material from which thinkers then go on to abstract qualities for purposes of classification and generalization.
Related Material
Bibliography
Preyer, Robert. “Victorian Wisdom Literature: Fragments and Maxims.” Victorian Studies 6 (1962-63): 245-62.
Last modified 30 June 2014