Nearly a million species of animals are already known. Of these, only a few thousand are endowed with anything which can be called... intelligence, only a few tens with high intelligence, and only one with conceptual thought. In the same way, there are hundreds of known religions; it had better be left to more orthodox writers than myself to enumerate those which can be called high religions. Animal evolution witnesses to a central upward trend of biological progress; it also shows us the retention of low types along with high, the throwing out of blind-alley side branches of specialisation at every level, and sometimes even degeneration. Religious evolution also shows a central progress--but equally the production of bizarre side-branches, the permanent confining of the religious spirit in low-level embodiments, its projection into every conceivable cul-de-sac, its too frequent bending over from upward to downward growth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man ... differs from all other animals in having a brain which can and largely does bring all the various elements of experience i...nto contact, instead of keeping them in a series of wholly or largely separate compartments or channels. This not only provides the basis for conceptual thought, and so for all man's ideas and philosophic systems, ideals and works of art and creative imagination, but also for his battery of complex sentiments unknown in animals, such as reverence and religious awe, moral feelings (including hate and contempt arising from moral abhorrence), and love in its developed form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He rememb...ered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was asked to-night why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won't. 1. I am not an int...ellectual. Two minutes' talk with Aldous Huxley, William Glock, or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat, drink, smoke, and relax. 4. I don't know very much, but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men of extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, "Not unto us, not unto us." According to the faith of the...ir times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to their eye their deed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »