Saturday, June 19, 2010

Some quotes from Abolition of Man

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. (27)

ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. (28-29)

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. (29, Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1104B)

The heart never takes the place of the head, but it can, and should, obey it.

In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism ... about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. (35)

Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values: about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough. (43)

I will not insist on the point that Instinct is a name for we know not what (to say that migratory birds find their way by instinct is only to say that we do not know how migratory birds find their way), for I think it is here being used in a fairly definite sense, to mean an unreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt by the members of a given species. (46-47)

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. (55)

if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all. (55)

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. (81)

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious - such as digging up and mutilating the dead. (83-84)

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