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The Most Ancient Parts Of Truth . . . Also Once Were Plastic. They Also Were Called True For Human Reasons. They Also Mediated Between Still Earlier Truths And What In Those Days Were Novel Observations. Purely Objective Truth, Truth In Whose Establishment The Function Of Giving Human Satisfaction In Marrying Previous Parts Of Experience With Newer Parts Played No Role Whatsoever, Is Nowhere To Be Found. The Reasons Why We Call Things True Is The Reason Why They Are True, For To Be True Means Only To Perform This Marriage-function.

-William James

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The Most Ancient Parts

William James

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The Most Ancient Parts Of Truth . . . Also Once Were Plastic. They Also Were Called True For Human Reasons. They Also Mediated Between Still Earlier Truths And What In Those Days Were Novel Observations. Purely Objective Truth, Truth In Whose Establishment The Function Of Giving Human Satisfaction In Marrying Previous Parts Of Experience With Newer Parts Played No Role Whatsoever, Is Nowhere To Be Found. The Reasons Why We Call Things True Is The Reason Why They Are True, For To Be True Means Only To Perform This Marriage-function.

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A New Opinion Counts As True Just In Proportion As It Gratifies The Individual's Desire To Assimilate The Novel In His Experience To His Beliefs In Stock

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

We Must Be Careful Not To Confuse Data With The Abstractions We Use To Analyse Them.

A Good Hypothesis In Science Must Have Other Properties Than Those Of The Phenomenon It Is Immediately Invoked To Explain, Otherwise It Is Not Prolific Enough.

All The Higher, More Penetrating Ideals Are Revolutionary. They Present Themselves Far Less In The Guise Of Effects Of Past Experience Than In That Of Probable Causes Of Future Experience, Factors To Which The Environment And The Lessons It Has So Far Taught Us Must Learn To Bend.

Most People Never Run Far Enough On Their First Wind To Find Out They've Got A Second.

Inspirational Sports

Metaphysics Means Nothing But An Unusually Obstinate Effort To Think Clearly.

A Difference Which Makes No Difference Is No Difference At All.

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness, And Their Companionship In The Saintly Life Need In No Way Occasion Surprise.

Religion . . . Shall Mean For Us The Feelings, Acts And Experiences Of Individual Men In Their Solitude.

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

My First Act Of Free Will Shall Be To Believe In Free Will.

To Be Radical, An Empiricism Must Neither Admit Into Its Constructions Any Element That Is Not Directly Experienced, Nor Exclude From Them Any Element That Is Directly Experienced.

We Are Spinning Our Own Fates, Good Or Evil, And Never To Be Undone. Every Smallest Stroke Of Virtue Or Of Vice Leaves Its Never So Little Scar. ...nothing We Ever Do Is, In Strict Scientific Literalness, Wiped Out.

There Must Always Be A Discrepncy Between Concepts And Reality, Because The Former Are Static And Discontinuous While The Latter Is Dynamic And Flowing

How Can The Moribund Old Man Reason Back To Himself The Romance, The Mystery, The Imminence Of Great Things With Which Our Old Earth Tingled For Him In The Days When He Was Young And Well?

First... A New Theory Is Attacked As Absurd; Then It Is Admitted To Be True, But Obvious And Insignificant; Finally It Is Seen To Be So Important That Its Adversaries Claim That They Themselves Discovered It.

To Give The Theory Plenty Of 'rope' And See If It Hangs Itself Eventually Is Better Tactics Than To Choke It Off At The Outset B Abstract Accusations Of Self-contradiction

The War For Our Union, With All The Constitutional Issues Which It Settled, And All The Military Lessons Which It Gathered In, Has Throughout Its Dilatory Length But One Meaning In The Eyes Of History. It Freed The Country From The Social Plague Which Until Then Had Made Political Development Impossible In The United States. More And More, As The Years Pass, Does The Meaning Stand Forth As The Sole Meaning.

New Habits Can Be Launched.

It Is Only By Risking Our Persons From One Hour To Another That We Live At All. And Often Enough Our Faith Beforehand In An Uncertified Result Is The Only Thing That Makes The Result Come True.

Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. Our Fires Are Damped, Our Drafts Are Checked. We Are Making Use Of Only A Small Part Of Our Possible Mental And Physical Resources.

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

There Is An Organic Affinity Between Joyousness And Tenderness.

Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

The More Rational Statement Is That We Feel Sorry Because We Strike, Afraid Because We Tremble, And Not That We Cry, Strike, Or Tremble Because We Are Sorry, Angry, Or Fearful As The Case May Be.

...by Far The Most Usual Way Of Handling Phenomena So Novel That They Would Make For A Serious Rearrangement Of Our Preconceptions Is To Ignore Them Altogether, Or To Abuse Those Who Bear Witness For Them.

Man Alone Of All The Creatures Of Earth Can Change His Own Pattern. Man Alone Is The Architect Of His Own Destiny.

Our Volitional Habits Depend, Then, First, On What The Stock Of Ideas Is Which We Have; And, Second, On The Habitual Coupling Of The Several Ideas With Action Or Inaction Respectively.

Truth Happens To An Idea. It Becomes True, Is Made True By Events. Its Verity Is In Fact An Event, A Process: The Process Namely Of Its Verifying Itself, Its Veri-fication. Its Validity Is The Process Of Its Valid-ation.

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

Ninety-nine Hundredths Or, Possibly, Nine Hundred And Ninety-nine Thousandths Of Our Activity Is Purely Automatic And Habitual, From Our Rising In The Morning To Our Lying Down Each Night.

I Am Done With Great Things And Big Things, Great Institutions And Big Success, And I Am For Those Tiny, Invisible Molecular Moral Forces That Work From Individual To Individual, Creeping Through The Crannies Of The World Like So Many Rootlets, Or Like The Capillary Oozing Of Water, Yet Which If You Give Them Time, Will Rend The Hardest Monuments Of Man's Pride.

My Thinking Is First And Last And Always For The Sake Of My Doing, And I Can Only Do One Thing At A Time.

To Kill Time Is Not Murder, It's Suicide.

A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense Dancing.

Seek Out That Particular Mental Attribute Which Makes You Feel Most Deeply And Vitally Alive.

Acceptance Of What Has Happened Is The First Step To Overcoming The Consequences Of Any Misfortune.

Since You Make Evil Or Good By Your Own Thoughts, It Is Your Ruling Of Your Thoughts Which Proves To Be Your Principal Concern.

Ideas Are So Much Flat Psychological Surface Unless Some Mirrored Matter Gives Them Cognitive Lustre. This Is Why As A Pragmatisti Have So Carefully Posited 'reality' Ab Initio, And Why Throughout My Whole Discussion, I Remain An Epistemologist Realist.

The Same Is True Of Love, And The Instinctive Desire To Please Those Whom We Love. The Teacher Who Succeeds In Getting Herself Loved By The Pupils Will Obtain Results Which One Of A More Forbidding Temperament Finds It Impossible To Secure.

To Plead The Organic Causation Of A Religious State Of Mind, Then, In Refutation Of Its Claim To Possess Superior Spiritual Value, Is Quite Illogical And Arbitrary, Unless One Have Already Worked Out In Advance Some Psycho-physical Theory Connecting Spiritual Values In General With Determinate Sorts Of Physiological Change. Otherwise None Of Our Thoughts And Feelings, Not Even Our Scientific Doctrines, Not Even Our Dis -beliefs, Could Retain Any Value As Revelations Of The Truth, For Every One Of Them Without Exception Flows From The State Of Their Possessor's Body At The Time.

The First Thing The Intellect Does With An Object Is To Class It Along With Something Else. But Any Object That Is Infinitely Important To Us And Awakens Our Devotion Feels To Us Also As If It Must Be Sui Generis And Unique. Probably A Crab Would Be Filled With A Sense Of Personal Outrage If It Could Hear Us Class It Without Ado Or Apology As A Crustacean, And Thus Dispose Of It. 'i Am No Such Thing,' It Would Say; 'i Am Myself, Myself Alone.

To Neglect The Wise Sayings Of Great Thinkers Is To Deny Ourselves The Truest Education.

In The Deepest Heart Of All Of Us There Is A Corner In Which The Ultimate Mystery Of Things Works Sadly.

If The Grace Of God Miraculously Operates, It Probably Operates Through The Subliminal Door.

In Youth We May Have An Absolutely New Experience, Subjective Or Objective, Every Hour Of The Day. Apprehension Is Vivid, Retentiveness Strong, And Our Recollections Of That Time, Like Those In A Time Spent In Rapid And Interesting Travel, Are Of Something Intricate, Multitudinous, And Long-drawn-out. But As Each Passing Year Converts Some Of This Experience Into Automatic Routine Which We Hardly Note At All, The Days And The Weeks Smooth Themselves Out In Recollection To A Contentless Unit, And The Years Grow Hollow And Collapse.

New Experiences

True Ideas Are Those That We Can Assimilate, Validate, Corroborate, And Verify. False Ideas Are Those That We Cannot. That Is The Practical Difference It Makes To Us To Have True Ideas; That Therefore Is The Meaning Of Truth, For It Is All That Truth Is Known As.

Where Is It, This Present? It Has Melted In Our Grasp, Fled Ere We Could Touch It, Gone In The Instant Of Becoming.

The True Is The Name Of Whatever Proves Itself To Be Good In The Way Of Belief, And Good, Too, For Definite, Assignable Reasons.

In Order To Disprove The Assertion That All Crows Are Black, One White Crow Is Sufficient.

If, Then, You Wish To Insure The Interest Of Your Pupils, There Is Only One Way To Do It; And That Is To Make Certain That They Have Something In Their Minds To Attend With, When You Begin To Talk. That Something Can Consist In Nothing But A Previous Lot Of Ideas Already Interesting In Themselves, And Of Such A Nature That The Incoming Novel Objects Which You Present Can Dovetail Into Them And Form With Them Some Kind Of A Logically Associated Or Systematic Whole.

Focus On Increasing Service. Becoming Great Where You Are. Pile In The Wood. The Heat Will Follow.

As A Rule Reading Fiction Is As Hard To Me As Trying To Hit A Target By Hurling Feathers At It. I Need Resistance To Celebrate!

We Forget That Every Good That Is Worth Possessing Must Be Paid For In Strokes Of Daily Effort. We Postpone And Postpone Until Those Smiling Possibilities Are Dead... By Neglecting The Necessary Concrete Labor, By Sparing Ourselves The Little Daily Tax, We Are Positively Digging The Graves Of Our Higher Possibilities.

There Is A Stream, A Succession Of States, Or Waves, Or Fields (or Whatever You Please To Call Them), Of Knowledge, Of Feeling, Of Desire, Of Deliberation, Etc., That Constantly Pass And Repass, And That Constitute Our Inner Life.

Man Lives For Science As Well As Bread.

The God Of Many Men Is Little More Than Their Court Of Appeal Against The Damnatory Judgment Passed On Their Failures By The Opinion Of The World.

I Will Act As If I Do Make A Difference.

Making A Difference

What Holds Attention Determines Action.

Religion Is A Monumental Chapter In The History Of Human Egotism.

What A Magnificent Land And Race Is This Britain! Everything About Them Is Of Better Quality Than The Corresponding Thing In The U.s.... Yet I Believe (or Suspect) That Ours Is Eventually The Bigger Destiny, If We Can Only Succeed In Living Up To It.

Time Itself Comes In Drops.

Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life. Each Lapse Is Like The Letting Fall Of A Ball Of String Which One Is Carefully Winding Up; A Single Slip Undoes More Than A Great Many Turns Will Wind Again.

The Difference Between Objective And Subjective Extension Is One Of Relation To A Context Solely.

Failure, Then, Failure! So The World Stamps Us At Every Turn. We Strew It With Our Blunders, Our Misdeeds, Our Lost Opportunities, With All The Memorials Of Our Inadequacy To Our Vocation. And With What A Damning Emphasis Does It Then Blot Us Out! No Easy Fine, No Mere Apology Or Formal Expiation, Will Satisfy The World's Demands, But Every Pound Of Flesh Exacted Is Soaked With All Its Blood. The Subtlest Forms Of Suffering Known To Man Are Connected With The Poisonous Humiliations Incidental To These Results.

We Are All Potentially Such Sick Men. The Sanest And Best Of Us Are Of One Clay With Lunatics And Prison-inmates. And Whenever We Feel This, Such A Sense Of The Vanity Of Our Voluntary Career Comes Over Us, That All Our Morality Appears But As A Plaster Hiding A Sore It Can Never Cure, And All Our Well-doing As The Hollowest Substitute For That Well-being That Our Lives Ought To Be Grounded In, But Alas! Are Not.

Modern Transcendental Idealism, Emersonianism, For Instance, Also Seems To Let God Evaporate Into Abstract Ideality. Not A Deity In Concreto, Not A Superhuman Person, But The Immanent Divinity In Things, The Essentially Spiritual Structure Of The Universe, Is The Object Of The Transcendentalist Cult. In That Address Of The Graduating Class At Divinity College In 1838 Which Made Emerson Famous, The Frank Expression Of This Worship Of Mere Abstract Laws Was What Made The Scandal Of The Performance.

A Remarkable Parallel, Which I Think Has Never Been Noticed, Obtains Between The Facts Of Social Evolution On The One Hand, And Of Zological Evolution As Expounded By Mr. Darwin On The Other.

Common Sense And A Sense Of Humor Are The Same Thing, Moving At Different Speeds. A Sense Of Humor Is Just Common Sense, Dancing.

Geniuses Are Commonly Believed To Excel Other Men In Their Power Of Sustained Attention . . . But It Is Their Genius Making Them Attentive, Not Their Attention Making Geniuses Of Them.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

A Man Does Not Cry Because He Is Sad, He Is Sad Because He Cries

The Truth Remains That, After Adolescence Has Begun, "words, Words, Words," Must Constitute A Large Part, And An Always Larger Part As Life Advances, Of What The Human Being Has To Learn.

We Are Not Only Gregarious Animals, Liking To Be In Sight Of Our Fellows, But We Have An Innate Propensity To Get Ourselves Noticed, And Noticed Favorably, By Our Kind.

Man, Whatever Else He May Be, Is Primarily A Practical Being, Whose Mind Is Given Him To Aid In Adapting Him To This World's Life

We Hear The Words We Have Spoken, Feel Our Own Blow As We Give It, Or Read In The Bystander's Eyes The Success Or Failure Of Our Conduct.

I Am Well Aware How Odd It Must Seem To Some Of You To Hear Me Say That An Idea Is True So Long As To Believe It Is Profitable To Our Lives

If I Should Throw Down A Thousand Beans At Random Upon A Table, I Could Doubtless, By Eliminating A Sufficient Number Of Them, Leave The Rest In Almost Any Geometrical Pattern You Might Propose To Me, And You Might Then Say That That Pattern Was The Thing Prefigured Beforehand, And That The Other Beans Were Mere Irrelevance And Packing Material. Our Dealings With Nature Are Just Like This.

All Our Scientific And Philosophic Ideals Are Altars To Unknown Gods.

Our Theories Are Wedged And Controlled As Nothing Else Is. Yet Sometimes Alternative Theoretic Formulas Are Equally Compatible With All The Truths We Know, And Then We Choose Between Them For Subjective Reasons. We Choose The Kind Of Theory To Which We Are Already Partial: We Follow 'elegenace' Or 'economy'

It Is Only In The Lonely Emergencies Of Life That Our Creed Is Tested: Then Routine Maxims Fail, And We Fall Back On Our Gods.

'what Would Be Better For Us To Believe!' This Sounds Very Like A Definition Of Truth

Lay Plans As If We Were To Be Immortal.

Any Object Not Interesting In Itself May Become Interesting Through Becoming Associated With An Object In Which An Interest Already Exists.

In All This Process Of Acquiring Conceptions, A Certain Instinctive Order Is Followed. There Is A Native Tendency To Assimilate Certain Kinds Of Conception At One Age, And Other Kinds Of Conception At A Later Age.

You Can't Out-perform Your Self-image.

Men Are Now Proud Of Belonging To A Conquering Nation, And Without A Murmur They Lay Down Their Persons And Their Wealth, If By So Doing They May Fend Off Subjection.

The Whole Drift Of My Education Goes To Persuade Me That The World Of Our Present Consciousness Is Only One Out Of Many Worlds Of Consciousness That Exist.

Habit Simplifies Our Movements, Makes Them Accurate, And Diminishes Fatigue.

Consciousness... Does Not Appear To Itself Chopped Up In Bits. Such Words As 'chain' Or 'train' Do Not Describe It Fitly As It Presents Itself In The First Instance. It Is Nothing Jointed; It Flows. A 'river' Or A 'stream' Are The Metaphors By Which It Is Most Naturally Described. In Talking Of It Hereafter, Let Us Call It The Stream Of Thought, Of Consciousness, Or Of Subjective Life. Source Of The Expression 'stream Of Consciousness'.

Anything You May Hold Firmly In Your Imagination Can Be Yours.

The Highest Flights Of Charity, Devotion, Trust, Patience, Bravery To Which The Wings Of Human Nature Have Spread Themselves, Have Been Flown For Religious Ideals.

So To Feel Brave, Act As If We Were Brave, Use All Our Will To That End...and A Courage-fit Will Very Likely Replace The Fit Of Fear.

It Is Not Probable That The Reader Will Be Satisfied With Any Of These Solutions, And Contemporary Philosophers, Even Rationalistically Minded Ones, Have On The Whole Agreed That No One Has Intelligibly Banished The Mystery Of Fact.

Positive Images Of The Future Are A Powerful And Magnetic Force... They Draw Us On And Energize Us, Give Us Courage And Will To Take On Important Initiatives. Negative Images Of The Future Also Have A Magnetism. They Pull The Spirit Downward In The Path Of Despair.

The Desire To Gain Wealth And The Fear To Lose It Are Our Chief Breeders Of Cowardice And Propagators Of Corruption.

We Have Lost The Power Even Of Imagining What The Ancient Idealization Of Poverty Could Have Meant: The Liberation From Material Attachments, The Unbribed Soul, The Manlier Indifference, The Paying Our Way By What We Are And Not By What We Have, The Right To Fling Away Our Life At Any Moment Irresponsibly - The More Athletic Trim, In Short, The Moral Fighting Shape.

The Impulse To Take Life Strivingly Is Indestructible In The Race.

There Are No Differences But Differences Of Degree Between Different Degrees Of Difference And No Difference.

Modern War Is So Expensive That We Feel Trade To Be A Better Avenue To Plunder; But Modern Man Inherits All The Innate Pugnacity And All The Love Of Glory Of His Ancestors.

The World We See That Seems So Insane Is The Result Of A Belief System That Is Not Working. To Perceive The World Differently, We Must Be Willing To Change Our Belief System, Let The Past Slip Away, Expand Our Sense Of Now, And Dissolve The Fear In Our Minds.

The Deepest Human Need Is The Need To Be Appreciated.

Feed The Growing Human Being, Feed Him With The Sort Of Experience For Which From Year To Year He Shows A Natural Craving, And He Will Develop In Adult Life A Sounder Sort Of Mental Tissue, Even Though He May Seem To Be 'wasting' A Great Deal Of His Growing Time, In The Eyes Of Those For Whom The Only Channels Of Learning Are Books And Verbally Communicated Information.

I Take It That No Man Is Educated Who Has Never Dallied With The Thought Of Suicide.

We Do Not Sing Because We Are Happy, We Are Happy Because We Sing.

When We Of The So-called Better Classes Are Scared As Men Were Never Scared In History At Material Ugliness And Hardship; When We Put Off Marriage Until Our House Can Be Artistic, And Quake At The Thought Of Having A Child Without A Bank-account And Doomed To Manual Labor, It Is Time For Thinking Men To Protest Against So Unmanly And Irreligious A State Of Opinion.

There Can Be No Difference Anywhere That Does Not Make A Difference Somewhere.

Making A Difference

Begin To Be Now What You Will Be Hereafter.

Man Can Change His Life Simply By Changing His Attitude.

Our View Of The World Is Truly Shaped By What We Decide To Hear.

Truth Is Something That Happens To An Idea.

The Whole Drift Of My Education Goes To Persuade Me That The World Of Our Present Consciousness Is Only One Out Of Many Worlds Of Consciousness That Exist, And That Those Other Worlds Must Contain Experiences Which Have A Meaning For Our Life Also; And That Although In The Main Their Experiences And Those Of This World Keep Discrete, Yet The Two Become Continuous At Certain Points, And Higher Energies Filter In.

Equality Is Attainable As Long As You Are Part Of The Majority.

That Reality Is 'independent' Means That There Is Something In Every Experience That Escapes Our Arbitrary Control. If It Be A Sensible Experience It Coerces Our Attention; If A Sequence, We Cannot Invert It; If We Compare Two Terms We Can Come To Only One Result. There Is A Push, An Urgency, Within Our Very Experience, Against Which We Are On The Whole Powerless, And Which Drives Us In A Direction That Is The Destiny Of Our Belief.

The World Is All The Richer For Having A Devil In It, So Long As We Keep Our Foot Upon His Neck.

As The Brain-changes Are Continuous, So Do All These Consciousnesses Melt Into Each Other Like Dissolving Views. Properly They Are But One Protracted Consciousness, One Unbroken Stream.

Truth, As Any Dictionary Will Tell You, Is A Property Of Certain Of Our Ideas. It Means Their Agreement, As Falsity Means Their Disagreement, With Reality.

The Education Of Attention Would Be An Education Par Excellence

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

A Paradise Of Inward Tranquility Seems To Be Faith's Usual Result.

It Is Only By Risking Our Persons From One Hour To Another That We Live At All.

A Chain Is No Stronger Than Its Weakest Link, And Life Is After All A Chain.

I Don't See How An Epigram, Being A Bolt From The Blue, With No Introduction Or Cue, Ever Gets Itself Writ.

Any Object Not Interesting In Itself May Become Interesting Through Becoming Associated With An Object In Which An Interest Already Exists. The Two Associated Objects Grow, As It Were, Together; The Interesting Portion Sheds Its Quality Over The Whole; And Thus Things Not Interesting In Their Own Right Borrow An Interest Which Becomes As Real And As Strong As That Of Any Natively Interesting Thing.

Compared With Men, It Is Probable That Brutes Neither Attend To Abstract Characters, Nor Have Associations By Similarity. Their Thoughts Probably Pass From One Concrete Object To Its Habitual Concrete Successor Far More Uniformly Than Is The Case With Us. In Other Words, Their Associations Of Ideas Are Almost Exclusively By Contiguity. So Far, However, As Any Brute Might Think By Abstract Characters Instead Of By Association Of Con Cretes, He Would Have To Be Admitted To Be A Reasoner In The True Human Sense. How Far This May Take Place Is Quite Uncertain.

As We Take, In Fact, A General View Of The Wonderful Stream Of Our Consciousness, What Strikes Us First Is This Different Pace Of Its Parts. Like A Bird 's Life, It Seems To Be Made Of An Alternation Of Flights And Perchings.

The Difference Between An Interesting And A Tedious Teacher Consists In Little More Than The Inventiveness By Which The One Is Able To Mediate These Associations And Connections, And In The Dullness In Discovering Such Transitions Which The Other Shows.

Faith Is One Of The Forces By Which Men Live, And The Total Absence Of It Means Collapse

Effort Is The One Strictly Undervalued And Original Contribution We Make To This World.

The Attitude Of Unhappiness Is Not Only Painful, It Is Mean And Ugly. What Can Be More Base And Unworthy Than The Pining, Puling, Mumping Mood, No Matter By What Outward Ills It May Have Been Engendered? What Is More Injurious To Others? What Less Helpful As A Way Out Of The Difficulty? It But Fastens And Perpetuates The Trouble Which Occasioned It, And Increases The Total Evil Of The Situation. At All Costs, Then, We Ought To Reduce The Sway Of That Mood; We Ought To Scout It In Ourselves And Others, And Never Show It Tolerance.

Sobriety Diminishes, Discriminates, And Says No; Drunkenness Expands, Unites, And Says Yes. Not Through Mere Perversity Do Men Run After It.

O My Bergson, You Are A Magician, And Your Book Is A Marvel, A Real Wonder In The History Of Philosophy . . . In Finishing It I Found . . . Such A Flavor Of Persistent Euphony, As Of A Rich River That Never Foamed Or Ran Thin, But Steadily And Firmly Proceeded With Its Banks Full To The Brim.

Few People Have Definitely Articulated Philosophies Of Their Own. But Almost Everyone Has His Own Peculiar Sense Of A Certain Total Character In The Universe, And Of The Inadequacy Of Fully To Match It [to] The Peculiar Systems That He Knows.

Great Emergencies And Crises Show Us How Much Greater Our Vital Resources Are Than We Had Supposed.

Our Belief At The Beginning Of A Doubtful Undertaking Is The One Thing That Assures The Successful Outcome Of Any Venture.

This Life Is Worth Living, We Can Say, Since It Is What We Make It.

The Absolute Things, The Last Things, The Overlapping Things, Are The Truly Philosophic Concerns; All Superior Minds Feel Seriously About Them, And The Mind With The Shortest Views Is Simply The Mind Of The More Shallow Man.

Those Thoughts Are Truth Which Guide Us To Beneficial Interaction With Sensible Particulars As They Occur, Whether They Copy These In Advance Or Not.

Pluralism Lets Things Really Exist In The Each-form Or Distributively. Monism Thinks That The All-form Or Collective-unit Form Is The Only Form That Is Rational.

We Must Frankly Confess, Then, Using Our Empirical Common Sense And Ordinary Practical Prejudices, That In The World That Actually Is, The Virtues Of Sympathy, Charity, And Non-resistance May Be, And Often Have Been, Manifested In Excess. ... You Will Agree To This In General, For In Spite Of The Gospel, In Spite Of Quakerism, In Spite Of Tolstoi, You Believe In Fighting Fire With Fire, In Shooting Down Usurpers, Locking Up Thieves, And Freezing Out Vagabonds And Swindlers.

You Make A Great, Very Great Mistake, If You Think That Psychology, Being The Science Of The Mind's Laws, Is Something From Which You Can Deduce Definite Programmes And Schemes And Methods Of Instruction For Immediate Schoolroom Use.

Pretend What We May, The Whole Man Within Us Is At Work When We Form Our Philosophical Opinions. Intellect, Will, Taste, And Passion Co-operate Just As They Do In Practical Affairs; And Lucky It Is If The Passion Be Not Something As Petty As A Love Of Personal Conquest Over The Philosopher Across The Way.

Fatalism, Whose Solving Word In All Crises Of Behavior Is All Striving Is Vain, Will Never Reign Supreme, For The Impulse To Take Life Strivingly Is Indestructible In The Race. Moral Creeds Which Speak To That Impulse Will Be Widely Successful In Spite Of Inconsistency, Vagueness, And Shadowy Determination Of Expectancy. Man Needs A Rule For His Will, And Will Invent One If One Be Not Given Him.

With No Attempt There Can Be No Failure; With No Failure No Humiliation.

I Do Indeed Disbelieve That We Or Any Other Mortal Men Can Attain On A Given Day To Absolutely Incorrigible And Unimprovable Truth About Such Matters Of Fact As Those With Which Religions Deal. But I Reject This Dogmatic Ideal Not Out Of A Perverse Delight In Intellectual Instability. I Am No Lover Of Disorder And Doubt As Such. Rather Do I Fear To Lose Truth By This Pretension To Possess It Already Wholly.

We Are Spinning Our Own Fates, Good Or Evil, Never To Be Undone.

Where Quality Is The Thing Sought After, The Thing Of Supreme Quality Is Cheap, Whatever The Price One Has To Pay For It.

Truth In Our Ideas Means Their Power To Work.

Touch Is The Alpha And Omega Of Affection.

Alpha And Omega

One Of The Greatest Discoveries Of Our Time Is That A Man Can Alter The State Of Their Life By Altering The State Of Their Mind.

Knowledge About Life Is One Thing; Effective Occupation Of A Place In Life, With Its Dynamic Currents Passing Through Your Being, Is Another.

There Are 3 Rules To Follow If You Want To Change; (1) Start Immediately, (2) Do It Flamboyantly, (3) No Exceptions.

Act As If What You Do Makes A Difference. It Does.

Theory Must Mediate Between All Previous Truths And Certain New Experiences

New Experiences

An Idea Will Infect Another With Its Own Emotional Interest When They Have Become Both Associated Together Into Any Sort Of A Mental Total.

Our Life Is Always Deeper Than We Know, Is Always More Divine Than It Seems, And Hence We Are Able To Survive Degradations And Despairs Which Otherwise Must Engulf Us.

The Sovereign Cure For Worry Is Prayer.

One Hears Of The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat. What We Now Need To Discover In The Social Realm Is The Moral Equivalent Of War: Something Heroic That Will Speak To Men As Universally As War Does, And Yet Will Be As Compatible With Their Spiritual Selves As War Has Proved Itself To Be Incompatible.

An Act Has No Ethical Quality Whatever Unless It Be Chosen Out Of Several All Equally Possible.

So Our Self-feeling In This World Depends Entirely On What We Back Ourselves To Be And Do.

Modern Man . . . Has Not Ceased To Be Credulous . . . The Need To Believe Haunts Him.

Lets Take Full Advantage Of This Discovery

The Old Question Of Whether There Is Design Is Idle. The Real Question Is What Is The World, Whether Or Not It Have A Designer--and That Can Be Revealed Only By The Study Of All Nature's Particulars.

The Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Good Teacher Is To Get A Bad Conscience About Her Profession Because She Feels Herself Hopeless As A Psychologist.

Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitement's Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

The Belief In Free-will Is Not In The Least Incompatible With The Belief In Providence, Provided You Do Not Restrict The Providence To Fulminating Nothing But Fatal Decrees.

It Is So Human A Book That I Don't See How Belief In Its Divine Authority Can Survive The Reading Of It.

Everything Which Is Demanded Is By That Fact A Good.

The Pragmatist Turns Away From Abstraction And Insufficiency, From Verbal Solutions, From Bad A Priori Reasons, From Fixed Principles, Closed Systems, And Pretended Absolutes And Origins. He Turns Toward Concreteness And Adequacy, Towards Facts, Towards Action, And Towards Power.

The Great Thing, Then, In All Education, Is To Make Our Nervous System Our Ally Instead Of Our Enemy.

An Educated Memory Depends On An Organized System Of Associations; And Its Goodness Depends On Two Of Their Peculiarities: First, On The Persistency Of The Associations; And, Second, On Their Number.

What Do Believers In The Absolute Mean By Saving That Their Belief Affords Them Comfort? They Mean That Since In The Absolute Finite Evil Is ‘overruled’ Already, We May, Therefore, Whenever We Wish, Treat The Temporal As If It Were Potentially The Eternal, Be Sure That We Can Trust Its Outcome, And, Without Sin, Dismiss Our Fear And Drop The Worry Of Our Finite Responsibility. In Short, They Mean That We Have A Right Ever And Anon To Take A Moral Holiday, To Let The World Wag In Its Own Way, Feeling That Its Issues Are In Better Hands Than Ours And Are None Of Our Business.

Most People Live, Whether Physically, Intellectually Or Morally, In A Very Restricted Circle Of Their Potential Being. They Make Very Small Use Of Their Possible Consciousness, And Of Their Soul's Resources In General, Much Like A Man Who, Out Of His Whole Bodily Organism, Should Get Into A Habit Of Using And Moving Only His Little Finger.

I Am, Myself, A Very Poor Visualizer And Find That I Can Seldom Call To Mind Even A Single Letter Of The Alphabet In Purely Retinal Terms. I Must Trace The Letter By Running My Mental Eye Over Its Contour In Order That The Image Of It Shall Leave Any Distinctness At All.

Our Normal Waking Consciousness, Rational Consciousness As We Call It, Is But One Special Type Of Consciousness, Whilst All About It, Parted From It By The Filmiest Of Screens, There Lie Potential Forms Of Consciousness Entirely Different.

Asceticism May Be A Mere Expression Of Organic Hardihood, Disgusted With Too Much Ease.

Take The Happiest Man, The One Most Envied By The World, And In Nine Cases Out Of Ten His Inmost Consciousness Is One Of Failure. Either His Ideals In The Line Of His Achievements Are Pitched Far Higher Than The Achievements Themselves, Or Else He Has Secret Ideals Of Which The World Knows Nothing, And In Regard To Which He Inwardly Knows Himself To Be Found Wanting.

Ingenuity In Meeting And Pursuing The Pupil, That Tact For The Concrete Situation, Though They Are The Alpha And Omega Of The Teacher's Art, Are Things To Which Psychology Cannot Help Us In The Least.

Religions Have Approved Themselves; They Have Ministered To Sundry Vital Needs Which They Found Reigning. When They Violated Other Needs Too Strongly, Or When Other Faiths Came Which Served The Same Needs Better, The First Religions Were Supplanted.

Science As Such Assuredly Has No Authority, For She Can Only Say What Is, Not What Is Not.

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

The Most Violent Revolutions In An Individuals Beliefs Leave Most Of His Old Order Standing. Time And Space, Cause And Effect, Nature And History, And Ones Own Biography Remain Untouched. New Truth Is Always A Go-between, A Smoother-over Of Transitions. It Marries Old Opinion To New Fact So As Ever To Show A Minimum Of Jolt, A Maximum Of Continuity.

Hardly Ever Can A Youth Transferred To The Society Of His Betters Unlearn The Nasality And Other Vices Of Speech Bred In Him By The Associations Of His Growing Years. Hardly Ever, Indeed, No Matter How Much Money There Be In His Pocket, Can He Ever Learn To Dress Like A Gentleman-born. The Merchants Offer Their Wares As Eagerly To Him As To The Veriest Swell, But He Simply Cannot Buy The Right Things.

Faith Branches Off The Highroad Before Reason Begins

Mankind's Common Instinct For Reality Has Always Held The World To Be Essentially A Theatre For Heroism.

If You Give Appreciation To People, You Win Their Goodwill.

Let Sanguine Healthy-mindedness Do Its Best With Its Strange Power Of Living In The Moment And Ignoring And Forgetting, Still The Evil Background Is Really There To Be Thought Of, And The Skull Will Grin In At The Banquet.

There Is But One Indefectibly Certain Truth , And That Is The Truth That Pyrrhonistic Scepticism Itself Leaves Standing, The Truth That The Present Phenomenon Of Consciousness Exists.

I Myself Believe That The Evidence For God Lies Primarily In Inner Personal Experiences.

We Need Only In Cold Blood To Act As If The Thing In Question Were Real And It Will Infallibly End By Growing Into Such A Connection With Our Life That It Will Become Real.

Let No Youth Have Any Anxiety About The Upshot Of His Education, Whatever The Line Of It May Be. If He Keep Faithfully Busy Each Hour Of The Working-day, He May Safely Leave The Result To Itself. He Can With Perfect Certainty Count On Waking Up Some Fine Morning To Find Himself One Of The Competent Ones Of His Generation.

If You Believe That Feeling Bad Or Worrying Long Enough Will Change A Past Or Future Event, Then You Are Residing On Another Planet With A Different Reality System.

The Teacher's Prime Concern Should Be To Ingrain Into The Pupil That Assortment Of Habits That Shall Be Most Useful To Him Throughout Life. Education Is For Behavior, And Habits Are The Stuff Of Which Behavior Consists.

Serious Development Of The Personality Begins At The Closet Door.

A Little Cooling Down Of Animal Excitability And Instinct, A Little Loss Of Animal Toughness, A Little Irritable Weakness And Descent Of The Pain-threshold, Will Bring The Worm At The Core Of All Our Usual Springs Of Delight Into Full View, And Turn Us Into Melancholy Metaphysicians.

In The Acquisition Of A New Habit, Or The Leaving Off Of An Old One, We Must Take Care To Launch Ourselves With As Strong And Decided An Initiative As Possible.

...as I Apprehend The Buddhist Doctrine Of Karma, I Agree In Principle With That.

The Prescription Is That The Subject Must Be Made To Show New Aspects Of Itself; To Prompt New Questions; In A Word, To Change. From An Unchanging Subject The Attention Inevitably Wanders Away.

However Inadequate Our Ideas Of Causal Efficacy May Be, We Are Less Wide Of The Mark When We Say That Our Ideas And Feelings Have It, Than The Automatists Are When They Say They Haven't It. As In The Night All Cats Are Gray, So In The Darkness Of Metaphysical Criticism All Causes Are Obscure. But One Has No Right To Pull The Pall Over The Psychic Half Of The Subject Only . . . Whilst In The Same Breath One Dogmatizes About Material Causation As If Hume, Kant, And Lotze Had Never Been Born.

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