Iota

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“Know what you have to do and do it”

Not only as regarded the branch of art to which it is temporarily applied, but as expressing the great principle of success in every direction of human effort: for i believe that failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done; and therefore while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any kind, which reason, temporarily consulted , might have shown to be impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgement of goodness and perfection in themselves. And this is the more cautiously to be remembered; because, while a mans sense and conscience, aided by revelation, are always enough, if earnestly directed, to enable him to discover what is right, neither his sense, nor conscience, nor feeling, is ever enough, because they aren’t intended, to determine for him what is possible. He knows neither his own strength nor that of his fellows, neither the exact dependence to be placed on his allies nor resistance to be expected from his opponents. These are questions respecting which passion may warp his conclusions and ignorance must limit them: but it is his own fault if either interfere with the apprehension of duty, or the acknowledgement of right, and , as far as I have taken cognizance of the causes of the many failures to which the efforts of intelligent men are liable, more especially in matters political, they seem to be more largely to spring from aal others, that the inquiry into the doubtful, and in some sort inexplicable, relations of capability, chance, resistance and inconvenience, invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supercede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just. Nor is it any wonder that sometimes the too cold calculation of our powers should reconcile us to easily to our shortcomings, and even lead us into the fatal error of supposing that our conjecture utmost is in itself well, or, in other words, that the necessity of offences renders them inoffensive. 

What is true of human polity not less so of the distinctively political art of Architecture.

Uniting the technical and imaginative elements as essentially as humanity does soul and body, it shows the same infirmly balanced liability to the prevalence of the lower part over the higher, to the interference of the constructive, with the purity and simplicity of the reflective, element. This tendency, like every other form of materialism, is increasing with the advance of the age; and the only laws which resist it, based upon partial precedents, and already regarded with disrespect as decrepit, if not with defiance as tyrannical, are evidently inapplicable to the new forms and functions of the art, which the necessities of the day demand. How many these necessities may become, cannot be conjectured; they rise, strange and impatient, out of every modern shadow of change. How far it maybe possible to meet them without sacrifice of the essential characters of architectural art, cannot be determined by specific calculation or observance. There is no law, no principle, based on past practice, which may not be overthrown in a moment, by the arising of a new condition, or the invention of a new material; and the most rational, if not the only, mode of averting the danger of an utter dissolution of all that is systematic and consistent in ur practice, or of ancient authority in our judgement, is to cease, for a little while, the endeavours to deal with the multiplying host of particular abuses, restraints, or requirements; and endeavour to determine, as the guides of every effort, some constant, general an irrefragable laws of right

Laws, which based upon his knowledge, may possess so far the unchangeableness of the one, as that neither the increase nor imperfection of the other may be able to assault or invalidate them. There are, perhaps, no such laws peculiar to any one art. Their range necessarily includes the entire horizon of mans action. But they have modified forms and operations belonging to each of his pursuits, and the extent of their authority cannot surely be considered as a diminution of its weight.