The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crime...s of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger....... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year ... for cheating on my metaphysics final. You know, I looked within the soul of the bo...y sitting next to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than... the metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of t...he spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To anyone who still feels that there must be an identity of logical form between language and reality, I can only plead that the c...onception of language as a mirror of reality is radically mistaken. We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut knows that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience. But in order to do so, it is enough that it should be apt for the expression of everything that is or might be the case. To be content with less would be to be satisfied to be inarticulate; to ask for more is to desire the impossible. No roads lead from grammar to metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But like a hawk encumber'd with his hood,--... Explaining Metaphysics to the nation-- I wish he would explain his Explanation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »