The New Spirit

by Havelock Ellis

Overview

The New Spirit has been regarded as significant work throughout human history, and in order to ensure that this work is never lost, we have taken steps to ensure its preservation by republishing this book in a contemporary format for both current and future generations. This entire book has been retyped, redesigned, and reformatted. Since these books are not made from scanned copies, the text is readable and clear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789356785373
Publisher:	Alpha Edition
Publication date:	12/25/2022
Pages:	134
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Born in Surrey, England, in 1859, Havelock Ellis was considered by the overwhelming majority of critics as the best translator of "Germinal," Émile Zolàs masterpiece. Ellis was a social activist, a physician and a psychologist, whose best-known works concern sexuality and criminology. In 1890 he published "The Criminal," a remarkable work on criminal anthropology; in the same year he wrote "The New Spirit," and in 1898 he wrote "Affirmations," which contains essays on Nietzsche, Casanova, Zola, Huysmans, and St. Francis. In 1897, he published "Sexual Inversion," the first medical text in English about homosexuality, which he had co-authored with John Addington Symonds in an earlier edition, and which became a part of Ellis's six-volume "Studies in the Psychology of Sex." Havelock Ellis died in Suffolk, England, in 1939.

Read an Excerpt

WHITMAN. I. If we put aside imaginative writers Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain America has produced three men of world-wide significance.1 These three belong to the same corner of the continent; they form a culminating series, and at the same time they complement each other. It is difficult ot consider one of them without throwing a glance at the others. Enjerson comes first. In Emerson, after two hundred years, Puritanism seems, for the first time, to have found voice. The men of Banbury and Amsterdam were too much distracted by the outer world to succeed in finding adequate artistic expression for the joys that satisfied them and the spirit that so powerfully moved them. They have been the sport of their enemies, and have come down to us in literature as a set of sour fanatics. It was not until the seed was carried over sea, to germinate slowly and peace- 1 The significance of Lowell, a great writer unquestionably, seems to be chiefly national. fully in New England, that at length it broke into flower, and that we know clearly that union of robust freedom and mystic exaltation which lies at the heart of Puritanism. In his calm and aus- tere manner born of the blood that had passed through the veins of six generations of Puritan ministers Emerson overturned the whole of tradition. " A world in the hand," he said, with (/ cheery, genial scepticism, " is worth two in the ' bush." With gentle composure, with serene hilarity, perhaps with an allusion to the roses that " make no mention of former roses," he posited the absolute right of the individual to adjudicate in religion, in marriage, in the State. Even he himself, while able, like Spinoza and Goethe, to live byself-regulating laws that are death to men of less sanity, could not always in his peaceful h...