The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by George Herbert Palmer
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
A Herbert Bibliography: Being a Catalogue of a Collection of Books Relating to George Herbert (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from A Herbert Bibliography: Being a Catalogue of...)
Excerpt from A Herbert Bibliography: Being a Catalogue of a Collection of Books Relating to George Herbert
In Group I are placed the biographies of Herbert, the exquisite one by Walton appearing in both its forms and in copies of much beauty and associational interest.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
(Excerpt from The Ideal Teacher
Teaching will be a profe...)
Excerpt from The Ideal Teacher
Teaching will be a profession when we have learned the need of thorough scholarly equipment, and single minded devotion to our daily and hourly duties in the school-room, under the guidance of those larger ideals which the world has set up for the protection of its cherished values. Nothing less than expert knowledge, tempered by a spirit of reverent ministry to those placed under our tuition, will ever make us professional teachers.
Teaching will be a fine art when the situations of schoolroom life are made to call for the best in teacher and pupil. In such a soil of noble motivation the highest powers of human beings thrive. The teacher who drives or is driven, who forces himself or his children through stated tasks, without any sense of their significance, will not find teaching congenial. He will never know that absorption which is the essence of art. Half-heartedly he will teach, his other, more imperious impulses beckoning him away to another life. And while he stays, he will know only that pain of conflict which destroys the possibility of happy work. To achieve real success, teaching must be kept an interesting business, where the free impulses of children and teachers are so used as to accomplish useful things happily.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
George Herbert Palmer was an American litterateur, philosopher, teacher, and man of letters. He was a professor at Harvard University.
Background
George Herbert Palmer was born on March 19, 1842 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and was named for the English poet. His father, Julius Auboyneau Palmer, a merchant of modest means, came of an English family which settled at Little Compton, Rhode Island, in 1636. His mother, Lucy Manning Peabody, was descended from John Peabody, who became a freeman of Boxford, Massachusetts, in 1674. His farm became George Herbert Palmer's summer home.
Education
George Herbert Palmer had a long struggle with ill health, which affected all his student years, he attributed his longevity, since it compelled him to learn and observe the regimen under which alone he could maintain his working power. In spite of frequently interrupted schooling, he entered Phillips Andover Academy at twelve, spending two years there, and after an interval of travel and of experiment in the wholesale dry goods trade, entered Harvard in 1860, graduating in regular course in 1864. He offered a commencement part on Mill's Utilitarianism Mill having captured his early enthusiasm as none of the regular teachers in the Harvard of his day had been able to do. Graduate study in philosophy was not available in America at that time, except in schools of theology. Palmer accordingly, after a year of teaching at the Salem High School, entered Andover Theological Seminary in 1865. In 1867, he left Andover to go abroad, spent in Germany fragments of two years, visited France and Italy, and returned to Andover to receive tthe degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1870. Later, during a series of summers (in 1878 and following years), he pursued studies in Hegel under the personal guidance of Edward Caird, whom he sought out in Glasgow.
Career
In 1870 President Charles William Eliot, then in the second year of his administration, offered Palmer a tutorship in Greek. Entering thus upon his service of forty-three years in Harvard, Palmer at once showed his power as a teacher by inaugurating a series of voluntary readings in the Odyssey, out of which came his remarkable English version, The Odyssey of Homer, published in 1884. In 1872 an opening appeared in philosophy, as instructor and assistant to Prof. Francis Bowen.
After one year in this post Palmer was made assistant professor of philosophy, he became full professor in 1883. Though at first he offered introductory courses, and indeed continued throughout his career to teach the introductory history of philosophy to fascinated groups of students, his interest turned decisively toward the theory of ethics: in 1889, "Philosophy 4" became the staple course in that subject, and with it his name as a teacher was peculiarly associated until his retirement in 1913. From 1889, he held the Alford Professorship of "natural religion, moral philosophy and civil polity". Becoming professor emeritus in 1913, Palmer relinquished this chair to Josiah Royce, but he served the University as overseer until 1919, and continued to reside within the Harvard Yard until his death at the advanced age of ninety-one.
In Harvard he was the first to break away from textbook and recitation in philosophy and to work out his own system of ideas in lectures. The content of his course on ethics was never completely published. Parts of it have appeared in The Field of Ethics (1901), The Nature of Goodness (1903), The Problem of Freedom (1911), Altruism; Its Nature and Varieties (1919). These works preserve much of the lucidity and compactness of Palmer's lectures.
His most memorable and effective works, however, were those in which his philosophic thought gave itself to the interpretation of personality and art. In his own estimate, three of his books are likely to live a half century: The Odyssey (1884 and following), The English Works of George Herbert (3 vols. , 1905), The Life of Alice Freeman Palmer (1908). These he calls his "books of affection and gratitude"; in them his powers of characterization reach their height. With them should be associated a series of contributions to letters: The Antigone of Sophocles (1899); Intimations of Immortality in the Sonnets of Shakspere (1912); introduction to T. C. Williams' translation, The Georgics and Eclogues of Virgil (1915); Formative Types in English Poetry (1918).
He gave to Wellesley College a remarkable collection of first editions of English classics; and in 1930 he added to this gift 900 letters of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. To Harvard he gave a library of the philosophical classics and a collection of editions and papers of George Herbert. Where he felt an obligation of honor or gratitude he interpreted it in a large way, as in his monumental edition of Herbert's writings. Externally his life was decorous, dominated by a passion for order, but although order versus oddity meant for him frequently a lack of interest in novelties of discussion, inwardly he inhabited a wide place; his touch with the classics lent steadiness to his outlook, his judgment was rapid, contemporary, pertinent, wise.
In addition to the writings previously mentioned he published The New Education (1885), Self-cultivation in English (1897), A Study of Self-Sacrifice (1902), and many others. It was fitting that the last of his published works should be a notable achievement in self-portrayal, The Autobiography of a Philosopher (1930), which remains the chief original source for his life.
George Herbert Palmer belonged by inheritance to the Puritan tradition, and by training to the line of idealism, but he was a keen critic of Puritanism, its "extreme individualism and lack of a community sense". He was equally dissatisfied with Hegel, on the ground that Hegel had a defective sense of the meaning of moral contrasts, and submerged the individual in the institution. The Puritan in him corrected the defects of Hegel; and the collectivist in him corrected the Puritan.
Views
Palmer was inclined to disown for himself originality in philosophical thought; he considered himself a critic and expositor rather than a creator of new concepts. There was however a depth and vigor in his thought to which this estimate does less than justice. While he prized true judgment above novelty, there was an element of genuine creation both in his masterly interpretations of the history of thought, and in his systematic expositions of ethical theory. The clarity for which he incessantly labored, his luminous and fluent prose, gave both hearer and reader an illusion of ease and simplicity which concealed not alone the effort, but also the force of the thinker.
The ethics of self-realization, characteristic of the English idealism of his day, he could not accept unless it were understood that the self in question is not the solitary or "abstract self, " but the "conjunct self, " the self as related to and tied in with others, through personal and institutional ties. Without these institutions, individual life is thin, unsatisfactory, ineffective. "Ally your labor with an institution" was his precept and his example. But within the institution, individual conscience must remain alert, correcting the institution and keeping it from the rigidity of death. The most perfect pre-arranged casuistry he considered inadequate to personal moral experience, which is infinite and changing; hence he took the Protestant rather than the Catholic view of authority, and aligned himself with Kant rather than with Hegel in his view of duty. Duty, he was accustomed to say, "is the call of the whole to the part, " and duty has its one absolute law, a rule which is so final as to admit no deviation and yet so transparent in its texture as to admit every pulse of moral individuality: it is simply "the law that there shall be law, " that conduct shall never be capricious.
Personality
At the childhood, George Herbert Palmer was physically feeble, hardly expected to live through infancy. Though as a young man Palmer was painfully shy and hesitant both in speech and in writing, there was in him a personal force which made its impression on observant men. He was short in stature, quiet in manner and movement, but his voice was firm, capable of wide dramatic range, and his person impressive. He had a bushy brows over deep-set eyes lent a suggestion of concentrated will, which seemed perpetually on duty.
Palmer's greatness as a teacher was due in no small degree to the artist in him, which compelled him to orderliness of thought and presentation, and made shoddy, unclear expression repugnant to him. His speech abounded in expressions so perfect that "they continued to glow in the dark of the mind. " But it was due as well to a discerning and persistent interest in persons. This interest was not indiscriminate: the friendship he offered was never genial, easy, intimate, profuse, but, with warm and enduring affection, held its own dignity and reserve. Few have been so gifted in the capacity for reaching objective estimates of personal ability. It was a part of his rigorous self-discipline to maintain an element of realism in these judgments, and in view of his belief that the imperfect has its own peculiar glories (The Glory of the Imperfect, 1891) he had no disposition to ignore the defects and paradoxes of the character with which he dealt.
As a result, he was widely sought as a counselor in the placing of men, and left an indelible impress on the personnel of his department at Harvard, which included James, Royce, Münsterberg, and Santayana. This department was in no small measure of Palmer's building. Though he was not a lover of debate, he appreciated diversities of judgment, both in the composition of the department and in the minds of his own students. Toward himself his judgment was equally objective and rigorous: that he knew and respected his limitations is in no small degree a secret of his success. He had early discovered the principle that limitation is a necessary element in achievement, a principle allied in his mind with the doctrine of the Incarnation, and he studied each defect as a possible source of power. Deficient in physical energy, he husbanded it and spent it with the maximum of effect.
Connections
George Herbert Palmer was twice married: first, June 15, 1871, to Ellen Margaret Wellman of Brookline, a Swedenborgian, somewhat his senior, a woman of marked social and intellectual gifts. The eight years of their marriage, until her death in 1879, did much to facilitate his intercourse with his students: to her he dedicated his Odyssey. Some eight years after her death, December 23, 1887, Palmer married Alice Freeman, then president of Wellesley. Both marriages were childless.