The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, ...and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not so many years ago there there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel--movement thr...ough space--provided the universal metaphor for change.... One of the subtle confusions--perhaps one of the secret terrors--of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am told that Duclos' book is not in vogue in Paris, and that it is being violently criticized, apparently because readers unders...tand it; and being intelligible is no longer the fashion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great practical difference between the word, written or spoken, and the visual image is that we cannot read the former unless ...we have been initiated into the mystery of language, whereas visual images can be made intelligible to all men who have eyes.... The spiritual difference between the written word and the visual image is equally great. Precise though a word is, evocative though it be, the actual machinery of visual perception is not engaged. All that takes place, takes place now within the mind; the retina and the neurons sleep; we are in a world which has been created by old, long-stored stimuli; the accidents of energy exterior to ourselves have been totally excluded from it. Even the spoken word is further from this spiritual purity than the word upon the page, for sounds have at least a sensual immediacy of a sort, but the written word is only the ghost of a sound. We have entered now into a realm not of images but of substitutes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God... Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from ...objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand, a symbol is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all though the translucense of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independentl...y of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and... therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »