hemeis de, tines de hemeis; And we, who are we anyhow? Plotinus, Enn. VI,4 ,14
In every danger there is a choice. Does it not depend on whether the choice is prompted by a noble feeling or a base one whether it should be called courage or cowardice? What was this --- firmness, habituation to danger, or carelessness and indifference to life? Or was it all these things put together as well as others I did not know, forming a complex but powerful moral motive of human nature termed esprit de corps --- a subtle code of embracing within itself a general expression of all virtues and vices of men banded together in any permanent condition, a code each new member involuntarily submits to unmurmuringly and which does not change with the individuals, since whoever they may be the sum total of human tendencies everywhere and always remains the same? War! What an incomprehensible phenomenum! When one's reason asks: `is it just, is it necessary?' an inner voice always replies `No'. Only the persistence of this unnatural occurence makes it seem natural, and a feeling of self-preservation makes it seem just. . . . even if a great saying had in any circumstance stirred in the soul of my hero, I am convinced that he would not have uttered it: first because by uttering a great saying he would have feared to spoil a great deed, and secondly because when a man feels within himself the capacity to perform a great deed no talk of any kind is needed. ---Leo Tolstoy, "The Raid", translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude
`An explanation would be possible if it could be said that I have not lived as I ought to. But it is impossible to say that,' and he remembered all the legality, correctitude, and propriety of his life. `That at any rate can certainly not be admitted.' It occurred to him that his scarecely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly place people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately surpressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. ---Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych", translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason. --- T.S Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
But that was it --- you never could think what things would be like if they weren't just what and where they were. You never knew what was coming, either; and yet, when it came, it seemed as if nothing else ever could have come. That was queer--- you could do anything you like until you'd done it, but when you had done it then you knew, of course, that you must always have had to . . . ---John Galsworthy, from The Dark Flower quoted by Schrodinger
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
--- Milton, Paradise Lost
Those who speak with a sound mind must hold fast to what is common to all, just the same as a city holds on to her law, nay much more strongly so, for the laws of men are fed by the one divine law. The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.
--- fragments from Ionian (Greek) philosophers
To sum up, the meaning is, I think, that we form the ideas of a real world around us from the fact that part of out sensations and experiences overlap, as it were; this overlapping part--- that is the real world. --- Erwin Schrodinger, from "Nature and the Greeks"
Intellect (dianoia): `Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, acutally only atoms and the void' Senses (aitheseis): `Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.' --- Democritus
It is therefore necessary to follow the common. But while reason (logos is common, the majority live as though they had a private insight of their own. --- fragment from an Ionian philosopher
It is clearly the peculiar form or shape (German: Gestalt) that raises the identity beyond doubt, not the material content. [This is as opposed to the material sameness of the composite atoms.] --- Erwin Schro\"dinger, from "Science and Humanism"
The pictures are only a mental help, a tool of thought, an intermediary means, from which to deduce, out of the results of experiements that have been made, a reasonable expectation about the results of new experiments we are planning. We plan them for the purpose of seeing whether they confirm the expectations--- thus whether the expectations were reasonable and thus whether the pictures or models are adequate. Notice that we prefer to say adequate, not true. For in order that a description be capable of being true, it must be capable of being compared directly with actual facts. This is usually not the case with our models. They were aware that the desire to have a clear picture necessarily led one to encumber it with unwarranted details.
Without an absolutely precise model thinking itself becomes imprecise, and the consequences to be derived from the model become ambiguous.
Physical dependences can always be approximated by this simple kind of functions (the mathematician calls them `analytical', which means something like `they can be analyzed'). But to assume that physical dependance is of this type is a bold epistemological step, and probably an inadmissable step.
---Erwin Schrodinger, from "Science and Humanism"
Every one who has done any kind of creative work has experiences, in a lesser or greater degree, the state of mind in which, after long labor, truth or beauty, appears or seems to appear, in a sudden glory--- it may be only about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. . . this experience, I believe, is necessary to good creative work, but it is not sufficient; indeed, the subjective certainty that it brings with it may be fatally misleading. William James describea a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immesnse effort, he wrote down the secert before the vision had faded. When completely recovered he rushed to see what he had written. It was: ``the smell of petroleum prevails throughout.'' What seems like sudden insight may be misleading, and must be tested soberly when the divine intoxication has passed.
--- Bertrand Russel, A History of Western Philosophy
Enthusiasm, laying by reason, would set up revelation without it; whereby in effect it takes away both reason and revelation, and sunbstitutes in room of it the ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain.
There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others." John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The skeptic still continues to reason and belive, even though he asserts that he cannot defend his reason by reason; and by the same rule he must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, tho' he cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy to maintain its veracity . . . We may well ask, what causes us to believe in the existence of body? But 'tis vain to ask, whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.
This skeptical boudt, both with respect to reason and to the senses, is a malady, which can never be radically cured, but must return upon us at every moment, however we may chase it away, and somtimes may seem entirely free from it . . . Carelessness and inattention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely upon them . . .
---David Hume, Of Knowledge and Probablitiy
What [Hume's} arguments prove--- and I do not think the proof can be controverted--- is that induction is an independant logical principle, incapable of being inferred either from experience or from other logical principles, and that without this principle science is impossible
--- Bertrand Russel, A History of Western Philosophy
Scepticism alone is a cheap and barren affair. Scepticism in a man who has come nearer to the truth than anyone before, and yet clearly recognizes the narrow limits of his own mental construction, is great and fruitful, and does not reduce but doubles the value of the discoveries. ---Erwin Schrodinger, from "Nature and the Greeks"
Logical errors are, I think, of greater practical importance than many people believe; they enable their perpetrators to hold the comfortable opinion on every subject in turn.
Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independance that makes cooperation impossible.
Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments.
--- Bertrand Russel, A History of Western Philosophy
What proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?
---William James
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