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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.

-William James

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The Old Question Of

William James

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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.

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Events Are Influenced By Our Very Great Desires.

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.

The Transition From Tenseness, Self-responsibility, And Worry, To Equanimity, Receptivity, And Peace, Is The Most Wonderful Of All Those Shiftings Of Inner Equilibrium, Those Changes Of Personal Centre Of Energy, Which I Have Analyzed So Often; And The Chief Wonder Of It Is That It So Often Comes About, Not By Doing, But By Simply Relaxing And Throwing The Burden Down.

Materialism Means Simply The Denial That The Moral Order Is Eternal, And The Cutting Off Of Ultimate Hopes; Spiritualism Means Theaffirmation Of An Eternal Moral Order And The Letting Loose Of Hope.

Men Habitually Use Only A Small Part Of The Power Which They Actually Possess.

To Begin With, Our Knowledge Grows In Spots. The Spots May Be Large Or Small, But The Knowledge Ever Grows All Over... What You First Gain From Them Is Probably A Small Amount Of New Information, A Few New Definitions, Or Distinctions, Or Points Of View. But While These Special Ideas Are Being Added, The Rest Of Your Knowledge Stands Still, And Only Gradually Will You 'line Up' Your Previous Opinions With The Novelties I Am Trying To Instil, And Modify To Some Slight Degree Their Mass.

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.

Smitten As We Are With The Vision Of Social Righteousness, A God Indifferent To Everything But Adulation, And Full Of Partiality For His Individual Favorites, Lacks An Essential Element Of Largeness.

All That We Need Explicitly To Note Is That, The More The Passive Attention Is Relied On, By Keeping The Material Interesting; And The Less The Kind Of Attention Requiring Effort Is Appealed To; The More Smoothly And Pleasantly The Classroom Work Goes On.

What Excites And Interests The Looker-on At Life, What The Romances And The Statues Celebrate, And The Grim Civic Monuments Remind Us Of, Is The Everlasting Battle Of The Powers Of Light With Those Of Darkness; With Heroism Reduced To Its Bare Chance, Yet Ever And Anon Snatching Victory From The Jaws Of Death.

Man Lives For Science As Well As Bread.

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.

The Essence Of Genius Is To Know What To Overlook.

Do Every Day Or Two Something For No Other Reason Than Its Difficulty.

What The Whole Community Comes To Believe In Grasps The Individual As In A Vise.

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.

Even If Matter Could Do Every Outward Thing That God Does, The Idea Of It Would Not Work As Satisfactorily, Because The Chief Callfor A God On Modern Men's Part Is For A Being Who Will Inwardly Recognize Them And Judge Them Sympathetically. Matter Disappoints This Craving Of Our Ego, So God Remains For Most Men The Truer Hypothesis, And Indeed Remains So For Definite Pragmatic Reasons.

To Change One's Life: A. Start Immediately B. B. Do It Flamboyantly C. No Exceptions Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted.

We Are Mere Bundles Of Habits.

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can...in The Acquisition Of A New Habit, We Must Take Car To Launch Ourselves With As Strong And Decided Initiative As Possible. Never Suffer An Exception To Occur Till The New Habit Is Securely Rooted In Your Life.

As The Art Of Reading (after A Certain Stage In One's Education) Isthe Art Of Skipping, So The Art Of Being Wise Is The Art Of Knowing What To Overlook.

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.

Essential Truth, The Truth Of The Intellectualists, The Truth With No One Thinking It, Is Like The Coat That Fits Tho No One Has Ever Tried It On, Like The Music That No Ear Has Listened To. It Is Less Real, Not More Real, Than The Verified Article; And To Attribute A Superior Degree Of Glory To It Seems Little More Than A Piece Of Perverse Abstraction-worship.

Most Of Us Can Learn To Live In Perfect Comfort On Higher Levels Of Power. Everyone Knows That On Any Given Day There Are Energies Slumbering In Him Which The Incitements Of That Day Do Not Call Forth. Compared With What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. It Is Evident That Our Organism Has Stored-up Reserves Of Energy That Are Ordinarily Not Called Upon - Deeper And Deeper Strata Of Explosible Material, Ready For Use By Anyone Who Probes So Deep. The Human Individual Usually Lives Far Within His Limits.

If Evolution And The Survival Of The Fittest Be True At All, The Destruction Of Prey And Of Human Rivals Must Have Been Among The Most Important. . . . It Is Just Because Human Bloodthirstiness Is Such A Primitive Part Of Us That It Is So Hard To Eradicate, Especially When A Fight Or A Hunt Is Promised As Part Of The Fun.

Strength Is A Facade For The Proud, Weakness Is A Mask For The Lazy.

Truth Is One Species Of Good, And Not, As Is Usually Supposed, A Category Distinct From Good, And Co-ordinate With It

The Aim Of Science Is Always To Reduce Complexity To Simplicity.

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

Man Is Essentially The Imitative Animal. His Whole Educabilityand In Fact The Whole History Of Civilization Depend On This Trait, Which His Strong Tendencies To Rivalry, Jealousy, And Acquisitiveness Reinforce.

Old-fashioned Determinism Was What We May Call Hard Determinism. It Did Not Shrink From Such Words As Fatality, Bondage Of The Will, Necessitation, And The Like. Nowadays, We Have A Soft Determinism Which Abhors Harsh Words, And, Repudiating Fatality, Necessity, And Even Predetermination, Says That Its Real Name Is Freedom; For Freedom Is Only Necessity Understood, And Bondage To The Highest Is Identical With True Freedom.

We Are All Ready To Be Savage In Some Cause. The Difference Between A Good Man And A Bad One Is The Choice Of The Cause.

Good-humor Is A Philosophic State Of Mind; It Seems To Say To Nature That We Take Her No More Seriously Than She Takes Us. I Maintain That One Should Always Talk Of Philosophy With A Smile.

From The Vedas We Learn A Practical Art Of Surgery, Medicine, Music, House Building Under Which Mechanized Art Is Included. They Are Encyclopedia Of Every Aspect Of Life, Culture, Religion, Science, Ethics, Law, Cosmology And Meteorology.

Culture Religion

Science, Like Life, Feeds On Its Own Decay. New Facts Burst Old Rules; Then Newly Divined Conceptions Bind Old And New Together Into A Reconciling Law.

The Word 'cause' Is An Altar To An Unknown God.

The Exercise Of Prayer, In Those Who Habitually Exert It, Must Be Regarded By Us Doctors As The Most Adequate And Normal Of All The Pacifiers Of The Mind And Calmers Of The Nerves.

An Unlearned Carpenter Of My Acquaintance Once Said In My Hearing: "there Is Very Little Difference Between One Man And Another; But What Little There Is, Is Very Important." This Distinction Seems To Me To Go To The Root Of The Matter.

The Difference Between The First And Second-best Things In Art Absolutely Seems To Escape Verbal Definition -- It Is A Matter Of A Hair, A Shade, An Inward Quiver Of Some Kind -- Yet What Miles Away In The Point Of Preciousness!

...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.

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.

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.

Great Indeed Is Fear; But It Is Not, As Our Military Enthusiasts Believe And Try To Make Us Believe, The Only Stimulus Known For Awakening The Higher Ranges Of Men's Spiritual Energy.

It Is Astonishing How Many Mental Operations We Can Explain When We Have Once Grasped The Principles Of Association

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

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

Nature In Her Unfathomable Designs Had Mixed Us Of Clay And Flame, Of Brain And Mind, That The Two Things Hang Indubitably Together And Determine Each Other's Being But How Or Why, No Mortal May Ever Know.

In All Primary School Work The Principle Of Multiple Impressions Is Well Recognized.

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

There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision.

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

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity.

Science Herself Consults Her Heart When She Lays It Down That The Infinite Ascertainment Of Fact And Correction Of False Belief Are The Supreme Goods For Man.

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

We Are Stereotyped Creatures, Imitators And Copiers Of Our Past Selves.

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.

We Are Doomed To Cling To A Life Even While We Find It Unendurable.

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.

If The Topic Be Highly Abstract, Show Its Nature By Concrete Examples. If It Be Unfamiliar, Trace Some Point Of Analogy In It With The Known. If It Be Inhuman, Make It Figure As Part Of A Story. If It Be Difficult, Couple Its Acquisition With Some Prospect Of Personal Gain. Above All Things, Make Sure That It Shall Run Through Certain Inner Changes, Since No Unvarying Object Can Possibly Hold The Mental Field For Long.

As Charles Lamb Says, There Is Nothing So Nice As Doing Good By Stealth And Being Found Out By Accident, So I Now Say It Is Even Nicer To Make Heroic Decisions And To Be Prevented By 'circumstances Beyond Your Control' From Ever Trying To Execute Them.

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

The Man Whose Acquisitions Stick Is The Man Who Is Always Achieving And Advancing Whilst His Neighbors, Spending Most Of Their Time In Relearning What They Once Knew But Have Forgotten, Simply Hold Their Own.

Divinity Lies All Around Us, But Society Remains Too Hidebound To Accept That Fact...the Mother Sea And The Fountain-head Of All Religions Lies In The Mystical Experiences Of The Individual.

Mystical Experiences

Whatever Universe A Professor Believes In Must At Any Rate Be A Universe That Lends Itself To Lengthy Discourse. A Universe Definable In Two Sentences Is Something For Which The Professorial Intellect Has No Use. No Faith In Anything Of That Cheap Kind!

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.

Truth Is What Will Be Steadily Borne Out By Subsequent Experience

Fear Of Life In One Form Or Another Is The Great Thing To Exorcise.

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

Democracy Is Still Upon Its Trial. The Civic Genius Of Our People Is Its Only Bulwark.

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

The Perfection Of Rottenness.

... If We Take The Universe Of 'fitting,' Countless Coats 'fit' Backs, And Countless Boots 'fit' Feet, On Which They Are Not Practically Fitted; Countless Stones 'fit' Gaps In Walls Into Which No One Seeks To Fit Them Actually. In The Same Way Countless Opinions 'fit' Realities, And Countless Truths Are Valid, Tho No Thinker Ever Thinks Them.

The Gist Of The Matter Is This: Every Impression That Comes In From Without, Be It A Sentence Which We Hear, An Object Of Vision, Or An Effluvium Which Assails Our Nose, No Sooner Enters Our Consciousness Than It Is Drafted Off In Some Determinate Direction Or Other, Making Connection With The Other Materials Already There, And Finally Producing What We Call Our Reaction. The Particular Connections It Strikes Into Are Determined By Our Past Experiences And The 'associations' Of The Present Sort Of Impression With Them.

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

If You Can Change Your Mind, You Can Change Your Life.

We Hear In These Days Of Scientific Enlightenment A Great Deal Of Discussion About The Efficacy Of Prayer. Many Reasons Are Given Why We Should Not Pray. Others Give Reasons Why We Should Pray. Very Little Is Said Of The Reason We Do Pray. The Reason Is Simple: We Pray Because We Cannot Help Praying.

The First Thing To Learn In Intercourse With Others Is Non-interference With Their Own Particular Ways Of Being Happy, Provided Those Ways Do Not Assume To Interfere By Violence With Ours.

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.

The Sovereign Voluntary Path To Cheerfulness, If Our Spontaneous Cheerfulness Be Lost, Is To Sit Up Cheerfully, To Look Round Cheerfully, And To Act And Speak As If Cheerfulness Were Already There. If Such Conduct Does Not Make You Soon Feel Cheerful, Nothing Else On That Occasion Can. 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.

Psychology Ought Certainly To Give The Teacher Radical Help.

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.

If Theological Ideas Prove To Have A Value For Concrete Life, They Will Be True, For Pragmatism, In The Sense Of Being Good For So Much. How Much More They Are True, Will Depend Entirely On Their Relations To The Other Truths That Also Have To Be Acknowledged.

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.

The Education Of Attention Would Be An Education Par Excellence

Spiritual Energy Flows In And Produces Effects, Psychological Or Material, Within The Phenomenal World.

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.

Habit Is The Enormous Flywheel Of Society, Its Most Precious Conservative Agent. There Is No More Miserable Human Being Than One In Whom Nothing Is Habitual But Indecision. Full Half The Time Of Such A Man Goes To The Deciding, Or Regretting, Of Matters Which Ought To Be So Ingrained In Him As Practically Not To Exist For His Consciousness At All.

[pragmatism's] Only Test Of Probable Truth Is What Works Best In The Way Of Leading Us, What Fits Every Part Of Life Best And Combines With The Collectivity Of Experience's Demands, Nothing Being Omitted.

Lay Plans As If We Were To Be Immortal.

The Most Peculiar Social Self Which One Is Apt To Have Is In The Mind Of The Person One Is In Love With.

There Is No Being Capable Of A Spiritual Life Who Does Not Have Within Him A Jungle. Where The Wolf Constantly Howls And The Obscene Bird Of Night Chatters Endlessly.

The Baby, Assailed By Eyes, Ears, Nose, Skin, And Entrails At Once, Feels It All As One Great Blooming, Buzzing Confusion.

No Matter How Full A Reservoir Of Maxims One May Possess, And No Matter How Good One's Sentiments May Be, If One Has Not Taken Advantage Of Every Concrete Opportunity To Act, One's Character May Remain Entirely Unaffected For The Better.

Begin To Be Now What You Will Be Hereafter.

When Happiness Is Actually In Possession, The Thought Of Evil Can No More Acquire The Feeling Of Reality Than The Thought Of Good Can Gain Reality When Melancholy Rules. To The Man Actively Happy, From Whatever Cause, Evil Simply Cannot Then And There Be Believed In.

To Give Up Pretensions Is As Blessed A Relief As To Get Them Ratified.

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.

The Mind, In Short, Works On The Data It Receives Very Much As A Sculptor Works On His Block Of Stone. In A Sense The Statue Stoodthere From Eternity. But There Were A Thousand Different Ones Beside It, And The Sculptor Alone Is To Thank For Having Extricated This One From The Rest.

The Question Of Free Will Is Insoluble On Strictly Psychological Grounds.

Compared To What We Ought To Be, We Are Only Half Awake. We Are Making Use Of Only A Small Part Of Our Physical And Mental Resources. Stating The Thing Broadly, The Human Individual Thus Lives Far Within His Limits. He Possesses Power Of Various Sorts Which He Habitually Fails To Use.

In This Real World Of Sweat And Dirt, It Seems To Me That When A View Of Things Is 'noble,' That Ought To Count As Presumption Against Its Truth, And As A Philosophic Disqualification. The Prince Of Darkness May Be A Gentleman, As We Are Told He Is, But Whatever The God Of Earth And Heaven Is, He Can Surely Be No Gentleman.

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 Union Of The Mathematician With The Poet, Fervor With Measure, Passion With Correctness, This Surely Is The Ideal.

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.

Let Anyone Try, I Will Not Say To Arrest, But To Notice Or To Attend To, The Present Moment Of Time. One Of The Most Baffling Experiences Occurs. Where Is It, This Present? It Has Melted In Our Grasp, Fled Ere We Could Touch It, Gone In The Instant Of Becoming.

When You Have Broken The Reality Into Concepts You Never Can Reconstruct It In Its Wholeness.

Neither Moral Relations Nor The Moral Law Can Swing In Vacuo. Their Only Habitat Can Be A Mind Which Feels Them; And No World Composed Of Merely Physical Facts Can Possibly Be A World To Which Ethical Propositions Apply.

Every Time A Resolve Or A Fine Glow Of Feeling Evaporates Without Bearing Practical Fruit Is Worse Than A Chance Lost; It Works So As Positively To Hinder Future Resolutions And Emotions From Taking The Normal Path Of Discharge.

Faith Means Belief In Something Concerning Which Doubt Is Still Theoretically Possible ... Faith Is The Readiness To Act In A Cause The Prosperous Issue Of Which Is Not Certified To Us In Advance.

If Merely 'feeling Good' Could Decide, Drunkenness Would Be The Supremely Valid Human Experience.

New Habits Can Be Launched.

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?

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.

Philosophy Is At Once The Most Sublime And The Most Trivial Of Human Pursuits.

The Faculty Of Voluntarily Bringing Back A Wandering Attention, Over And Over Again, Is The Very Root Of Judgment, Character, And Will... An Education Which Should Improve This Faculty Would Be The Education Par Excellence.

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!

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

It Seems The Natural Thing For Us To Listen Whilst The Europeans Talk.

True Is The Name For Whatever Idea Starts The Verification Process, Useful Is The Name For Its Completed Function In Experience

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.

There Can Be No Final Truth In Ethics Any More Than In Physics, Until The Last Man Has Had His Experience And Said His Say.

Effort Is A Measure Of A Man.

So It Is With Children Who Learn To Read Fluently And Well: They Begin To Take Flight Into Whole New Worlds As Effortlessly As Young Birds Take To The Sky.

In The Matter Of Belief, We Are All Extreme Conservatives.

The Function Of Ignoring, Of Inattention, Is As Vital A Factor In Mental Progress As The Function Of Attention Itself.

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

If There Is Aught Of Good In The Style, It Is The Result Of Ceaseless Toil In Rewriting. Everything Comes Out Wrong With Me At First; But When Once Objectified In A Crude Shape, I Can Torture And Poke And Scrape And Pat It Till It Offends Me No More.

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.

The Only Function That One Experience Can Perform Is To Lead Into Another Experience; And The Only Fulfillment We Can Speak Of Isthe Reaching Of A Certain Experienced End. When One Experience Leads To (or Can Lead To) The Same End As Another, They Agree In Function.

So With The Man Who Has Daily Inured Himself To Habits Of Concentrated Attention, Energetic Volition, And Self-denial In Unnecessary Things. He Will Stand Like A Tower When Everything Rocks Around Him, And When His Softer Fellow-mortals Are Winnowed Like Chaff In The Blast.

Belief Creates The Actual Fact.

(five) Thinkers Since Galileo, Each Informing His Successor Of What Discoveries His Own Lifetime Had Seen Achieved, Might Have Passed The Torch Of Science Into Our Hands As We Sit Here In This Room. Indeed, For The Matter Of That, An Audience Much Smaller Than The Present One, An Audience Of Some 5 Or 6 Score People, If Each Person In It Could Speak For His Own Generation, Would Carry Us Away To The Black Unknown Of The Human Species, To Days Without A Document Or Monument To Tell Their Tale.

The "through-and-through" Universe Seems To Suffocate Me With Its Infallible Impeccable All-pervasiveness. Its Necessity , With No Possibilities; Its Relations, With No Subjects, Make Me Feel As If I Had Entered Into A Contract With No Reserved Rights ... It Seems Too Buttoned-up And White-chokered And Clean-shaven A Thing To Speak For The Vast Slow-breathing Unconscious Kosmos With Its Dread Abysses And Its Unknown Tides.

A Man Has As Many Social Selves As There Are Individuals Who Recognize Him.

A Purely Disembodied Human Emotion Is A Nonentity.

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.

The Study A Posteriori Of The Distribution Of Consciousness Shows It To Be Exactly Such As We Might Expect In An Organ Added For The Sake Of Steering A Nervous System Grown Too Complex To Regulate Itself.

Our Faith Is Faith In Someone Else's Faith, And In The Greatest Matters This Is Most The Case.

The True'to Put It Very Briefly, Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Thinking, Just As 'the Right' Is Only The Expedient In The Way Of Our Behaving.

This Overcoming Of All The Usual Barriers Between The Individual And The Absolute Is The Great Mystic Achievement. In Mystic States We Both Become One With The Absolute And We Become Aware Of Our Oneness. This Is The Everlasting And Triumphant Mystical Tradition, Hardly Altered By Differences Of Clime Or Creed.

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.

Human Beings Can Alter Their Lives By Altering Their Attitudes Of Mind.

Both Thought And Feeling Are Determinants Of Conduct, And The Same Conduct May Be Determined Either By Feeling Or By Thought.

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

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

Evil Is A Disease; And Worry Over Disease Is Itself An Additional Form Of Disease, Which Only Adds To The Original Complaint.

It Is Well For The World That In Most Of Us, By The Age Of Thirty, The Character Has Set Like Plaster, And Will Never Soften Again.

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.

If You Wish To Upset The Law That All Crows Are Black, You Mustn't Seek To Show That No Crows Are; It Is Enough If You Prove One Single Crow To Be White.

There Is A Law In Psychology That If You Form A Picture In Your Mind Of What You Would Like To Be, And You Keep And Hold That Picture There Long Enough, You Will Soon Become Exactly As You Have Been Thinking.

What A Teacher Needs To Know About Psychology "might Almost Be Written On The Palm Of One's Hand."

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'

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

In The Dim Background Of Our Mind We Know Meanwhile What We Ought To Be Doing: Getting Up, Dressing Ourselves, Answering The Person Who Has Spoken To Us, Trying To Make The Next Step In Our Reasoning. But Somehow We Cannot Start.

The Ultimate Test Of What A Truth Means Is The Conduct It Dictates Or Inspires.

When You Have To Make A Choice And Don't Make It, That Is In Itself A Choice.

To Suggest Personal Will And Effort To One All Sicklied O'er With The Sense Of Irremediable Impotence Is To Suggest The Most Impossible Of Things. What He Craves Is To Be Consoled In His Very Powerlessness, To Feel That The Spirit Of The Universe Recognizes And Secures Him, All Decaying And Failing As He Is.

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

What Every Genuine Philosopher (every Genuine Man, In Fact) Craves Most Is Praise Although The Philosophers Generally Call It Recognition!

Rewards And Recognition

To Know One Thing Thoroughly Would Be To Know The Universe.

If You Only Care Enough For A Result, You Will Almost Certainly Attain It. Only You Must, Then, Really Wish These Things, And Wish Them Exclusively, And Not Wish At The Same Time A Hundred Other Incompatible Things Just As Strongly.

We Can Change Our Circumstances By A Mere Change Of Our Attitude.

Only Necessity Understood, And Bondage To The Highest Is Identical With True Freedom.

The Great Use Of Life Is To Spend It For Something That Will Outlast It." "this Life Is Worth Living, We Can Say, Since It Is What We Make It." "believe That Life Is Worth Living And Your Belief Will Help Create The Fact.

Inspirational Life

The Ideas Gained By Men Before They Are Twenty-five Are Practically The Only Ideas They Shall Have In Their Lives.

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

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

My Experience Is What I Agree To Attend To.

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

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

Inspirational Sports

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.

Our Beliefs Are Really Rules For Action.

The First Effect Of The Mind Growing Cultivated Is That Processes Once Multiple Get To Be Performed In A Single Act. Lazarus Has Called This The Progressive "condensation" Of Thought. ... Steps Really Sink From Sight. An Advanced Thinker Sees The Relations Of His Topics Is Such Masses And So Instantaneously That When He Comes To Explain To Younger Minds It Is Often Hard ... Bowditch, Who Translated And Annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, Said That Whenever His Author Prefaced A Proposition By The Words "it Is Evident," He Knew That Many Hours Of Hard Study Lay Before Him.

The Thinker Philosophizes As The Lover Loves. Even Were The Consequences Not Only Useless But Harmful, He Must Obey His Impulse.

Romeo Wants Juliet As The Filings Want The Magnet; And If No Obstacles Intervene He Moves Towards Her By As Straight A Line As They. But Romeo And Juliet, If A Wall Be Built Between Them, Do Not Remain Idiotically Pressing Their Faces Against Its Opposite Sides Like The Magnet And The Filings With The Card. Romeo Soon Finds A Circuitous Way, By Scaling The Wall Or Otherwise, Of Touching Juliet's Lips Directly. With The Filings The Path Is Fixed; Whether It Reaches The End Depends On Accidents. With The Lover It Is The End Which Is Fixed, The Path May Be Modified Indefinitely.

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 States Of Consciousness Are All That Psychology Needs To Do Her Work With. Metaphysics Or Theology May Prove The Soul To Exist; But For Psychology The Hypothesis Of Such A Substantial Principle Of Unity Is Superfluous.

We With Our Lives Are Like Islands In The Sea, Or Like Trees In The Forest... But The Trees Also Commingle Their Roots In The Darkness Underground.

A Winner's Attitude: It May Be Difficult, But It's Possible. A Loser's Attitude: It May Be Possible, But It's Too Difficult.

Faith Is Synonymous With Working Hypothesis.

Success Or Failure Depends More Upon Attitude Than Upon Capacity Successful Men Act As Though They Have Accomplished Or Are Enjoying Something. Soon It Becomes A Reality. Act, Look, Feel Successful, Conduct Yourself Accordingly, And You Will Be Amazed At The Positive Results.

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

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'.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

A Genius Is The Man In Whom You Are Least Likely To Find The Power Of Attending To Anything Insipid Or Distasteful In Itself. He Breaks His Engagements, Leaves His Letters Unanswered, Neglects His Family Duties Incorrigibly, Because He Is Powerless To Turn His Attention Down And Back From Those More Interesting Trains Of Imagery With Which His Genius Constantly Occupies His Mind.

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

The Further Limits Of Our Being Plunge, It Seems To Me, Into An Altogether Other Dimension Of Existence From The Sensible And Merely Understandable World. Name It The Mystical Region, Or The Supernatural Region, Whichever You Choose. So Far As Our Ideal Impulses Originate In This Region (and Most Of Them Do Originate In It, For We Find Them Possessing Us In A Way For Which We Cannot Articulately Account), We Belong To It In A More Intimate Sense Than That In Which We Belong To The Visible World, For We Belong In The Most Intimate Sense Wherever Our Ideals Belong.

The Sovereign Cure For Worry Is Prayer.

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

But It Is The Bane Of Psychology To Suppose That Where Results Are Similar, Processes Must Be The Same. Psychologists Are Too Apt To Reason As Geometers Would, If The Latter Were To Say That The Diameter Of A Circle Is The Same Thing As Its Semi-circumference, Because, Forsooth, They Terminate In The Same Two Points.

The Last Peculiarity Of Consciousness To Which Attention Is To Be Drawn In This First Rough Description Of Its Stream Is That It Is Always Interested More In One Part Of Its Object Than In Another, And Welcomes And Rejects, Or Chooses, All The While It Thinks.

The Man Who Knows Governments Most Completely Is He Who Troubles Himself Least About A Definition Which Shall Give Their Essence. Enjoying An Intimate Acquaintance With All Their Particularities In Turn, He Would Naturally Regard An Abstract Conception In Which These Were Unified As A Thing More Misleading Than Enlightening.

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.

Religion Must Be Considered Vindicated In A Certain Way From The Attacks Of Her Critics.

To Some Of Us The Thought Of God Is Like A Sort Of Quiet Music Playing In The Background Of The Mind.

The Unrest Which Keeps The Never Stopping Clock Of Metaphysics Going Is The Thought That The Nonexistence Of This World Is Just As Possible As Its Existence.

We Forget That Every Good That Is Worth Possessing Must Be Paid For In Strokes Of Daily Effort.

Effort And Hard Work

Human Beings Are Born Into This Little Span Of Life Of Which The Best Thing Is Its Friendships And Intimacies … And Yet They Leave Their Friendships And Intimacies With No Cultivation, To Grow As They Will By The Roadside, Expecting Them To "keep" By Force Of Mere Inertia.

If It Works, It's True.

Choose A Self And Stand By It.

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