When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full- blown liberty, there is nothing like it in... its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth or by strength of character, education, or philosophy that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Plato's was essentially a dualistic theory. To him, the divine ideas, the universals, the general qualities, the genera, were the ...only real beings, that, like the deities, had an absolute, independent existence. God himself was the supreme idea. The man, the animal, the beautiful, the good, the brave, and so on, represented realities, the archetypes of life of which the individuals, the earthly forms of those general qualities, as they appeared in daily life, were mere shadows and faint replicas.... Aristotle connected the two spheres by seeing the spiritual soul and the intrinsic idea as the formative principle of the body, and, at the same time, as an "entelechy," an innate, ideal goal of the individual that effects evolution. The individuals, then, participate in the essential reality of ideas. This participation becomes effective when man comprehends the ideas and their connections, when he gathers and abstracts the ideas from their multifold, individual manifestation, in short, when he thinks logically. This procedure implied the legitimacy of empirical observation, and of inductive conclusion from observed facts to abstract generalities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a struggle between the Oriental and the Occidental in every nation; some who would be forever contemplating the sun, and ...some who are hastening toward the sunset. The former class says to the latter, When you have reached the sunset, you will be no nearer to the sun. To which the latter replies, But we so prolong the day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the last fifteen years or so, the women's novel has turned into the Amtrak of American literature; crashing through the gates a...t Aristotle, jumping the tracks at Horace, ignoring the flashing red lights at Boileau, and scooping up Alexander Pope in the cowcatcher. The rules are down and it's every stylist for herself in this best of all Tupperware parties, where plot and characterization have been replaced by the kind of non-stop chatter that enabled the French Foreign Legion to meet its enlistment quota for a hundred and fifty years. In the unlikely event that future scholars will bother to give our era a cultural tag, it will be called the Age of Women's Litter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who live...s without tobacco lives a life not worth living.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A lifeless planet. And yet, yet still serving a useful purpose, I hope. Yes, a sun. Warming the surface of some other world. Givin...g light to those who may need it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »