The general doctrine about knowledge which I sketched at the beginning of this section, which is the real bugbear underlying doctr...ines of the kind we have been discussing, is radically and in principle misconceived. [It] would be a mistake in principle to suppose that the same thing could be done for knowledge in general. And this is because there could be no general answer to the questions what is evidence for what, what is certain, what is doubtful, what needs or does not need evidence, can or can't be verified. If the Theory of Knowledge consists in finding grounds for such an answer, there is no such thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Atheism..., that bugbear of women and fools, is the very top and perfection of free-thinking. It is the grand arcanum to which a t...rue genius naturally riseth, by a certain climax or gradation of thought, and without which he can never possess his soul in absolute liberty and repose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not beli...eve in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such tricks hath strong imagination That, if it would but apprehend some joy,... It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »