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Updated: June 28, 2025
Quietism was his literary religion, and the sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence.
She knew nothing of doctrines and systems, of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
To be free to think as one pleases cannot but mean to think as truly as possible, and so to approach as closely as possible to what others also tend to think. But a larger importance attaches to that mild variety of anarchism which is commonly called laissez-faire, and which Matthew Arnold calls British Atheism or Quietism.
Upon an impressionable child the effect of this continual and pretty accompaniment to life was deep. The woman's quietism and piety passed on to his different nature undiminished; but whereas in her it was a native sentiment, in him it was only an implanted dogma. Nature and the child's pugnacity at times revolted.
While his plays carry one into the rushing currents of life, and while his ballads are poems of action, it was possible to extract from his 'Letters on Aesthetic Education' and from some of his poems, notably 'The Ideal and Life', what seemed to be a message of aesthetic quietism; a message which appeared to say that the attainment of inward peace, freedom and harmony was the highest goal of human effort.
The brown faces raised imploringly to the presiding deity, a leering demon with green face and yellow body, inspire the hope that the grotesque monster may prove his own unreality by vanishing from the hearts of his devotees into the limbo of nightmares from which he has emerged, for the philosophic quietism of Buddhist creed offers no disguise to the horrors of a hell far surpassing the terrific literalism of Dante's Inferno.
Some doctrine akin to that of the quietists seems to underlie the mysterious old phrases in which the Buddha's two teachers tried to explain their trances, and he left them for much the same reasons as led the Church to condemn Quietism. He did not say that the trances are bad; indeed he represented them as productive of happiness in a sense which Europeans can hardly follow.
The great promoters of these philosophical theories are our newspapers, which, no less than our parliamentary representatives, may be said to act the part of guides and governors to us; and these favourite doctrines of theirs I call, or should call, if the doctrines were not preached by authorities I so much respect, the first, a peculiarly British form of Atheism, the second, a peculiarly British form of Quietism.
The fundamental Quaker idea of "quietism," as it was called, or peaceful, silent contemplation as a spiritual form of worship and as a development of moral consciousness, was very widespread at the close of the Reformation and even began to be practiced in the Roman Catholic Church until it was stopped by the Jesuits.
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