We must bear in mind the distinction between fame and honor. A virtuous person is an honorable person, a person who ought to be ho...nored by the community in which he or she lives. But the virtuous person does not seek honor, being secure in his or her own self-respect. Lack of honor does not in any way detract from the efficacy of moral virtue as an indispensable operative means in the pursuit of happiness.... Those totally lacking in virtue may achieve fame as readily as, perhaps even more easily than those who are virtuous. Fame belongs to the great, the outstanding, the exceptional, without regard to virtue or vice. Infamy is fame no less than good repute. The great scoundrel can be as famous as the great hero; there can be famous villains as well as famous saints. Existing in the reputation a person has regardless of his or her accomplishments, fame does not tarnish as honor does when it is unmerited.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It goes without saying that religion thus conceived is the opposite of magic. The latter is essentially selfish, the former admits... of and often even demands disinterestedness. The one claims to force the compliance of nature, the other implores the favor of a god. Above all, magic works in an environment which is semi-physical and semi-moral--the magician, at all events is not dealing with a person; whereas on the contrary it is from the god's personality that religion draws its greatest efficacy. Granted that primitive intelligence thinks it perceives around it, in phenomena and in events, elements of personality rather than complete personalities, religion, as we have just understood it, will ultimately reinforce these elements to the extent of completely personifying them; whereas magic looks upon them as debased, dissolved, as it were, in a material world in which their efficacy can be tapped.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble acti...ons and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny ...they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has ...some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the present state we are in, we find such a strong sympathy and union between our souls and bodies, that the one cannot be touc...hed or sensibly affected, without producing some corresponding emotion in the other.... We are not angels, but men cloathed with bodies, and, in some measure governed by our imaginations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »