The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Loc...ke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realiti...es; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates--but pages Might be filled up, as vainly as before,... With the sad usage of all sorts of sages, Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have give...n, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a N...ewton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Without a sense of the shame or guilt of his or her action, the child will only be hardened in rebellion by physical punishment. S...hame (and praise) help the child to internalize the parent's judgment. It impresses upon the child that the parent is not only more powerful but also right. Like the Puritans, Locke (in 1690), wanted the child to adopt the parent's moral position, rather than simply bow to superior strength or social pressure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities--otherwise it would not be ...able to learn--but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of i...nfancy even into the era of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »