Barzun, A Stroll with William JamesAnyone brought up in the Alps and taking trips among them knows that “a mountain” is never twice the same — in shape, color, and “character.” It is “one thing” by a fiat helped by a name.
Bagehot, “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration”
Human character is a most comple… waisberg.micro.blog
“Where the development of talent is concerned we are still in the food-gathering stage. We do not know how to grow it. Up to now in this country when one of the masses starts to write, paint, etc., it is because he happens to bump into the right accident. In my case the right accident happened in the 1930s... waisberg.micro.blog
Some of the authors at IWP Books:
- Walter Bagehot
- John Jay Chapman
- Erwin Chargaff
- G. Lowes Dickinson
- E. M. Forster
- Aldous Huxley
- Desmond MacCarthy
- Albert Jay Nock
- José Ortega y Gasset
- Agnes Repplier
- Alfred Sidgwick
- Anne Goodwin Winslow
Aldous Huxley, on “the error of speaking about certain categories of persons as though they were mere embodied abstractions” (Words and Behavior):The stupidity of politicians who talk about a world of persons as though it were not a world of persons is due in the main to self-interest. In a fictitious world of symbols and personified abstractions, rulers find that they can rule more effectively, and the ruled, that they can gratify instincts which the conventions of good manners and the imperatives of morality demand that they should repress. To think correctly is the condition of behaving well. It is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly must resist considerable temptations.
“Foreigners and those who disagree with us are not thought of as men and women like ourselves and our fellow-countrymen; they are thought of as representatives and, so to say, symbols of a class. In so far as they have any personality at all, it is the personality we mistakenly attribute to their class — a personality that is, by definition, intrinsically evil. We know that the harming or killing of men and women is wrong, and we are reluctant consciously… waisberg.micro.blog