In Aristotle to Zoos (1985, p. 199) the Medawars report J. B. S. Haldane's remark that a chemical compound with the properties of DNA was "inconceivable". Perhaps there is a tinge of a sneer, a little delight in the great man's embarrassment. But perhaps he was right enough, at the time. There almost certainly is a limit to what may be conceived by an age, a period. Rationalists should be more tolerant of empiricists, for it is evidence which the material out of which even Rationalism makes it web. – Nothing comes of nothing. What is rationally inconceivable at one moment may, with the advent of further data, become instantly obvious to all who consider the matter.

One might define vanity and pride as, respectively, abhorrent self-regard preceding action and sometimes leading to achievement; and abhorrent self-regard consequent upon achievement. Thus, vanity and pride are often found together, the former becoming the latter. Nevertheless, in spite of this close relation, there are distinctions. We can say, for example, that vanity is the patron vice of the arts, which live upon promise even in their achievements, and pride that of the sciences, for without delivery they are quite simply nothing.

The indicating finger and the tail of the scorpion are remarkably similar.

Nearly all the world's political and religious systems atempt to convince their supporters that there is or would be less human waste under their rule than any other. The rhetoric of salvation, of saving this person or that country makes the point plain enough. Further, they attempt to mask the fact of waste, which is of course abundantly present on every hand in the natural world, and all its component parts, including the human world. This attempt routinely fails, so intense is the human conviction of loss, of waste, so it has proved necessary for all such systems to contain a category of the "Lost", into which believers can project all others. Hence Hell. This realistic touch makes the grand fictions of mankind more plausible, and is perhaps the only reason that they have any enduring power at all.

The status of an art object with regard to its audience is perhaps the most important of all, at least that part of it which deals with the end user. There are many theories of value, of excellence, which insist on an absolute value, that is to say they assert the value to be inherent in the work, and independent of any person's experience of that work. Such accounts only have been dreamed up by artists themselves, since they alone are likely to mistake the flush of satisfaction following a successful creation for evidence of a value independent of a perceiver. It seems to me that all absolute theories of this kind spring from this error, for it is an error. The affective theories, on the other hand, are generated by readers and connoisseurs. In one important respect they are superior to absolute theories, namely they encompass them. An absolute theory is unable to make a place for an affective theory, but an absolute theory may be readily explained in terms of an affective account, and since the affective account is consistent with the rest of our natural science, it shows that the absolute account is suspect, except as an honest but mistaken affective report.

 

The person who gives is first taken for rich; but when the truth appears, the recipients, who ought to be doubly grateful, believe that their benefactor set out with the sole object of deceiving them. 

A misanthrope reading a work of history is a contented man.

One could almost wish the religious to be right, since a just God will surely punish those who take such odious pride in their faith.

Female madness is so much more terrifying than male, to men (and perhaps to women?). Why?

If the world seems empty after the satisfaction of your sexual desires, and post coitum omne animal triste,  then you may reasonably infer what it is you see in the environment when at other times it seems overflowing with fascinating objects and experiences.

Writing is talking in front of a mirror.

To be vain an animal must remember a thousand faces with which to compare its own. My memory is failing, but my hopes of being virtuous grow.

The city is the most perfect symbol of human narcissism, for shop front reflects shop front. For what other purpose do we go to the city, except to to admire ourselves in its huge reflecting expanses.

Everyone should be made to read a little philosophy at school and university. It would be a shame for anyone to go through life in awe of such a thing.

What women admire in men, men hate. Or is it that they hate men who have these qualities?

Trahisons des clercs is so easy to understand if you have lived amongst clercs.

The strongest indictment of the New Criticis, that they were evaluating each other not the poems, has never been made by their rivals and enemies. Perhaps those opponents fear that this argument is a little too powerful, gtiven the narrow dimensions of the battlefied.

Has the computer age brought with it a renewed vitalist philosophy? The machine age, the late nineteenth century, thought of all organisms as analagous, and perhaps more than analagous, with mechanical devices like the typewriter, or the lift (the elevator). Full of moving parts, these were nevertheless conceivable as static objects capable of dynamic movement, and most importantly they were conceivable only as visualized objects. When you visualize a machine it must be stable, arrested though it may be in some stage of its process. Moreover, you cannot attribute a subjectivity to such things without considerable dishonesty.

Now, the modern computer contains almost no moving parts, yet it is conceivable only in terms of its inner processes, the currents in its channels, and what is more these processes are of the utmost abstraction,  so its essence is not something that can be visualized, but only entertained as conceptual models, as signs constituting chains of logical operations which we contemplate in time during processing, rather than taking the whole synchronic scene in at one gulp.

In other words, when considering computers we are engaged in a task not at all unlike that of considering the subjectivity of other minds. Thus it is with difficulty that we avoid attributing subjectivity to the computer. The consequence may be that we are on the verge, not of a further reductionist step towards physicalist disillusion, but of a peculiarly strong eruption in transcendental dualism.

Page 12 of 35