The double nature of the comic hero is symbolized in these two: Falstaff and Socrates. They are of opposite disposition, yet not s...o unlike as we might think. The essential character of the eiron is incarnate in Socrates, who was "ignorant" and who also had the disposition of the "buffoon" or "fool," the features of the comic spirit itself, the coarse, ugly mask of the satyr or clown. The Socratic method is a tactic of winning victory by professing ignorance, by merely asking questions of the "imposters," the so-called "wise" men of Athens.... We must remember that Falstaff the buffoon and imposter used the same sort of interrogation Socrates the ironist used. He asks the same sort of question: What is honor? Socrates asked: What is justice? Socrates, like Falstaff, is both ironist and buffoon; he is the questioner using a philosophic buffoonery to seek the truth.... He has a double or triple character, for he is, as Falstaff was, both victor and victim--a victim, eventually, of the unthinking Athenians who refused to have their creed unsettled. He was finally condemned to drink the hemlock because he asked too many impious questions. And Falstaff is rejected by King Hal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to s...ay, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing huma...n, but by some external permanency, by something upon which our thinking has no effect.... It must be something which affects, or might affect, every man. And though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same, or would be the same if inquiry were persisted in. Such is the method of science.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too mu...ch left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and tur...n him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is pract...icable; and to make this custom the more significant, practise it first upon yourself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth ma...rking, in the lifetimes of many generations; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchairs of an afternoon--the most favored alternative method.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »