Skip to main content
2 months 2 days ago

To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of 'chance'.It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 3, "The Message from the Mountain" (p. 77)
2 months 3 weeks ago

In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes "nature" to them.

0
0
Source
source
p. 12
4 months 6 days ago

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

0
0
Source
source
Circles

Arms observe no bounds; nor can the wrath of the sword, once drawn, be easily checked or stayed; war delights in blood.

0
0
Source
source
lines 403-405; (Lycus).
4 months 5 days ago

Put in a nut-shell, my thesis amounts to this. The repeated attempts made by Rudolf Carnap to show that the demarcation between science and metaphysics coincides with that between sense and nonsense have failed. The reason is that the positivistic concept of 'meaning' or 'sense' (or of verifiability, or of inductive confirmability, etc.) is inappropriate for achieving this demarcation - simply because metaphysics need not be meaningless even though it is not science. In all its variations demarcation by meaninglessness has tended to be at the same time too narrow and too wide: as against all intentions and all claims, it has tended to exclude scientific theories as meaningless, while failing to exclude even that part of metaphysics which is known as 'rational theology'.

0
0
Source
source
Ch 11. "The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics." (Summary, p. 253)
4 months 1 week ago

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

0
0
Source
source
Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19
4 months 2 weeks ago

Neither did the dispensation of God vary in the times after our Saviour came into the world; for our Saviour himself did first show His power to subdue ignorance, by His conference with the priests and doctors of the law, before He showed His power to subdue nature by His miracles. And the coming of this Holy Spirit was chiefly figured and expressed in the similitude and gift of tongues, which are but vehicula scientiæ.

0
0
3 months 3 days ago

I am using the word "perceive". I am using it here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word. If there is thought to be a difficulty here, it is perhaps because there is also a correct and familiar usage of the word "perceive", in which to say of an object that it is perceived does carry the implication that it exists.

0
0
Source
source
The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940).
4 weeks 1 day ago

In 1903 there appeared Problems of Idealism, a collection of essays many of whose authors had recently been Marxists, but which condemned Marxism and materialism for their moral nihilism, contempt of personality, determinism, and fanatical pursuit of social values regardless of the individuals who made up society; they also attacked Marxism for its uncritical worship of progress and sacrifice of the present to the future.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 420-1)
4 months 1 week ago

There ought to be some regulation with respect to the spirit of denunciation that now prevails. If every individual is to indulge his private malignancy or his private ambition, to denounce at random and without any kind of proof, all confidence will be undermined and all authority be destroyed. Calumny is a species of treachery that ought to be punished as well as any other kind of treachery. It is a private vice productive of public evils; because it is possible to irritate men into disaffection by continual calumny who never intended to be disaffected. It is therefore equally as necessary to guard against the evils of unfounded or malignant suspicion as against the evils of blind confidence. It is equally as necessary to protect the characters of public officers from calumny as it is to punish them for treachery or misconduct.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to George Jacques Danton

Her green eyes fluttered swiftly twice or thrice, then glazed,her mouth gaped open, bleating, then her jaws hung looseand retched up all her soul in lumps of clotting blood.

0
0
Source
source
Death of Phida, Book VIII, line 410
4 months 1 week ago

Acquisitiveness - the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods - is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries.

0
0
3 months 6 days ago

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

0
0
2 months 2 weeks ago

The original Golden Dawn was not always as serious as it should have been. Mathers was a clown, and Yeats was just a romantic trying to deceive himself. Most of them were interested in personal power, and it ended up by destroying them. The aim of our group is the scientific exploration of the hidden powers of the human mind.

0
0
Source
source
p. 113

I have stated that the constitutions of our several States vary more or less in some particulars. But there are certain principles in which all agree, and which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of the life, liberty, property, and safety of the citizen:

0
0
3 months 1 week ago

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

0
0
Source
source
Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians (11 May 1792), volume vii, p. 50

Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.

0
0
Source
source
Friedrich Hegel .source: Contesting the Master Narrative, Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013).
4 months 1 day ago

Sometimes, because my position has not been made clear enough, people think I'm a sort of radical anarchist who has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I am trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent attitude. Prudent in my analysis, in the moral and theoretical postulates I use: I try to figure out what's at stake. But to question the relations of power in the most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that's not the same thing as constructing a mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse.

0
0
Source
source
"Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual", interview in History of the Present 4
3 months 2 days ago

A finite interval of time generally contains an innumerable series of feelings; and when these become welded together in association the result is a general idea.

0
0
3 months 2 days ago

That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...

0
0

Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it never may be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, Government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.

0
0
Source
source
Thomas Jefferson's First State of the Union Address
4 months 1 week ago

I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times - you more than I, because you have no children.

0
0
Source
source
Letter to Lucy Donnelly, 6/23/1946
4 months 2 weeks ago

The thing I fear most is fear.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 18. That Men are not to judge of our Happiness till after Death (tr. Donald M. Frame)

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

0
0
Source
source
Part of an endorsement statement for The Dying of the Trees (1997) by Charles E. Little
2 months 2 weeks ago

Among most Christians the Old Testament is little read in comparison to the New Testament. Furthermore, much of what is read is often distorted by prejudice. Frequently the Old Testament is believed to express exclusively the principles of justice and revenge, in contrast to the New Testament, which represents those of love and mercy; even the sentence, "Love your neighbor as yourself," is thought by many to derive from the New, not the Old Testament. Or the Old Testament is believed to have been written exclusively in the spirit of narrow nationalism and to contain nothing of supranational universalism so characteristic of the New Testament.

0
0
Source
source
You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition (1966) "Introduction"
3 months 6 days ago

There is something beautiful about virtue, Captain. But I am just a poor guy.

0
0
Source
source
Scene VI.
2 months 4 weeks ago

Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.

0
0
Source
source
p. 126
3 months 3 weeks ago

Hearken with your ears to these best counsels,Reflect upon them with illumined judgment.Let each one choose his creed with that freedom of choice each must have at great events.

0
0
Source
source
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 30, 2.
4 months 1 week ago

[My father] impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me?" cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, "Who made God?"

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 42-43)
1 month 1 week ago

It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 325
4 months 1 week ago

China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter VIII, p. 86.
3 months 1 week ago

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

0
0
Source
source
Salon of 1767 (1798), Oeuvres esthétiques
3 months 4 days ago

Nature is an Æolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.

0
0
3 weeks 1 day ago

Permanent mass unemployment destroys the moral foundations of the social order. The young people, who, having finished their training for work, are forced to remain idle, are the ferment out of which the most radical political movements are formed. In their ranks the soldiers of the coming revolutions are recruited.

0
0
Source
source
Part V : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § V : Destructionism, Ch. 33 : The Motive Powers of Destructionism, p. 440
2 months 2 weeks ago

Logos is powerless without the force of eros.

0
0
4 months 3 weeks ago

This happy state can only be obtained by a prudent care of the body, and a steady government of the mind. The diseases of the body are to be prevented by temperance, or cured by medicine, or rendered tolerable by patience.

0
0
4 months 5 days ago

The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter I, Section 2, pg. 10
4 months 1 week ago

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves.

0
0
Source
source
August 30, 1856
4 months 6 days ago

There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.

0
0
Source
source
"One and Many," p. 16
4 months 2 days ago

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

0
0
Source
source
Pt II, p. 189
4 months 2 weeks ago

Careful thought about this will reveal how few there are who are truly converted from evil habits, especially among those who have prolonged their lives of sin right up to the end. The path down to evil is quick, slippery, and easy. But to turn and "to go forth to the upper air . . . this is effort, this is toil." Think of Aesop's goat before you descend and remember that climbing out is not easy.

0
0
Source
source
p. 147
3 months 1 week ago

Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter XVIII.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Any plea ... for institutionalized risk-assessment, beefed-up bioethics panels, academic review bodies, worse-case scenario planning, more intensive computer simulations, systematic long-term planning and the institutionalized study of existential risks is admirable. But so is urgent action to combat the global pandemic of suffering. "The easiest pain to bear is someone else's"

0
0
Source
source
Objections, No 34
3 months 2 days ago

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

0
0
3 months 3 weeks ago

"Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young."

0
0
Source
source
Cæsar Augustus

Final causes or intentions are the torment of modern philosophy, which neglects nothing to get rid of them. From this, among other things, comes its great axiom: nature creates only individuals. Indeed, since all classification supposes order, this philosophy has denied classes to deny order. In order to establish this marvellous reasoning, it fixes its suspicious eyes on the differences between beings to dispense itself from turning them to their similarities. It does not want to recognize that nuances between classes and individuals constitute another order, and that diversity in resemblance supposes intention more visibly than mere resemblance.

0
0

People try to get away from it all-to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful-more free of interruptions-than your own soul.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) IV, 4

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia