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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.

-William James

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The States Of Consciousness

William James

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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.

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

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.

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

Man's Chief Difference From The Brutes Lies In The Exuberant Excess Of His Subjective Propensities. Prune His Extravagance, Sober Him, And You Undo Him.

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.

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.

The Most Natively Interesting Object To A Man Is His Own Personal Self And Its Fortunes. We Accordingly See That The Moment A Thing Becomes Connected With The Fortunes Of The Self, It Forthwith Becomes An Interesting Thing.

We Divert Our Attention From Disease And Death As Much As We Can; The Slaughterhouses Are Huddled Out Of Sight And Never Mentioned, So That The World We Recognize Officially In Literature And In Society Is A Poetic Fiction Far Handsomer, Cleaner And Better Than The World That Really Is.

Disease And Death

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

'facts' Are The Bounds Of Human Knowledge, Set For It, Not By It.

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!

Life Shall Be Built In Doing And Suffering And Creating.

Organization And Method Mean Much, But Contagious Human Characters Mean More In A University.

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

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.

The Work That Leads To A Doctor's Degree Is A Constant Temptation To Sacrifice One's Growth As A Man To One's Growth As A Specialist.

Considering The Inner Fitness Of Things, One Would Rather Think That The Very First Act Of A Will Endowed With Freedom Should Be To Sustain The Belief In The Freedom Itself.

The Instinct Of Ownership Is Fundamental In Man's Nature.

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 University Most Worthy Of Rational Admiration Is That One In Which Your Lonely Thinker Can Feel Himself Lonely, Most Positively Furthered, And Most Richly Fed

In Modern Eyes, Precious Though Wars May Be They Must Not Be Waged Solely For The Sake Of The Ideal Harvest. Only When Forced Upon One, Is A War Now Thought Permissible.

If You Give Appreciation To People, You Win Their Goodwill. But More Important Than That, Practicing This Philosophy Has Made A Different Person Of Me.

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 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.

Once You Accept An Idea, It's An Idea Whose Time Has Come.

The Mind, In Short, Works On The Data It Receives Very Much As The Sculptor Works On His Block Of Stone.

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

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!

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

Making A Difference

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

Deepest Principle Of Human Nature Is To Be Appreciated.

It Would Probably Astound Each Of Them Beyond Measure To Be Let Into His Neighbor's Mind And To Find How Different The Scenery There Was From That In His Own.

You Can Alter Your Life By Altering The State Of Your Mind.

Our Lives Are Like Islands In The Sea, Or Like Trees In The Forest. The Maple And The Pine May Whisper To Each Other With Their Leaves ... But The Trees Also Commingle Their Roots In The Darkness Underground, And The Islands Also Hang Together Through The Ocean's Bottom.

The Instant Field Of The Present Is At All Times What I Call The 'pure' Experience. It Is Only Virtually Or Potentially Either Object Or Subject As Yet.

The Science Of Logic Never Made A Man Reason Rightly, And The Science Of Ethics Never Made A Man Behave Rightly. The Most Such Sciences Can Do Is To Help Us To Catch Ourselves Up And Check Ourselves, If We Start To Reason Or To Behave Wrongly; And To Criticise Ourselves More Articulately After We Have Made Mistakes.

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

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.

[there Are, In Us] Possibilities That Take Our Breath Away, And Show A World Wider Than Either Physics Or Philistine Ethics Can Imagine. Here Is A World In Which All Is Well, In Spite Of Certain Forms Of Death, Death Of Hope, Death Of Strength, Death Of Responsibility, Of Fear And Wrong, Death Of Everything That Paganism, Naturalism And Legalism Pin Their Trust On.

If It Works, It's True.

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

Psychology Is A Science, And Teaching Is An Art; And Sciences Never Generate Arts Directly Out Of Themselves.

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 Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can, And As Carefully Guard Against The Growing Into Ways That Are Likely To Be Disadvantageous.

Footnotes -- Little Dogs Yapping At The Heels Of The Text

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.

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.

If Things Are Ever To Move Upward, Some One Must Take The First Step, And Assume The Risk Of It. No One Who Is Not Willing To Try Charity, To Try Non-resistance As The Saint Is Always Willing, Can Tell Whether These Methods Will Or Will Not Succeed.

You May Not Get Everything You Dream About, But You Will Never Get Anything You Don't Dream About.

The War Against War Is Going To Be No Holiday Excursion Or Camping Party.

How Pleasant Is The Day When We Give Up Striving To Be Young-or Slender.

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.

If We Claim Only Reasonable Probability, It Will Be As Much As Men Who Love The Truth Can Ever At Any Given Moment Hope To Have Within Their Grasp.

Experience, As We Know, Has A Way Of Boiling Over, And Making Us Correct Our Present Formulas.

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

Our Colleges Ought To Have Lit Up In Us A Lasting Relish For A Better Kind Of Man, A Loss Of Appetite For Mediocrities.

Everybody Should Do At Least Two Things Each Day That He Hates To Do, Just For Practice.

For Morality Life Is A War, And The Service Of The Highest Is A Sort Of Cosmic Patriotism Which Also Calls For Volunteers.

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

The Perfect Stillness Of The Night Was Thrilled By A More Solemn Silence. The Darkness Held A Presence That Was All The More Felt Because It Was Not Seen. I Could Not Any More Have Doubted That He Was There Than That I Was. Indeed, I Felt Myself To Be, If Possible, The Less Real Of The Two.

To Be Conscious Means Not Simply To Be, But To Be Reported, Known, To Have Awareness Of One's Being Added To That Being.

We Have To Live Today By What Truth We Can Get Today And Be Ready Tomorrow To Call It Falsehood.

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.

We Have Nothing To Do But To Receive, Resting Absolutely Upon The Merit, Power, And Love Of Our Redeemer.

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 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.

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.

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

Belief Is Desecrated When Given To Unproved And Unquestioned Statements For The Solace And Private Pleasure Of The Believer . . . It Is Wrong Always, Everywhere, And For Every One, To Believe Anything Upon Insufficient Evidence.

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.

If An Unusual Necessity Forces Us Onward, A Surprising Thing Occurs. The Fatigue Gets Worse Up To A Certain Point, When, Gradually Or Suddenly, It Passes Away And We Are Fresher Than Before!

Compared To What We Ought To Be, We Are Half Awake.

We Believe As Much As We Can. We Would Believe Everything If We Could.

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

Marvelous As May Be The Power Of My Dog To Understand My Moods, Deathless As His Affection And Fidelity, His Mental State Is As Unsolved A Mystery To Me As It Was To My Remotest Ancestor.

The One Who Thinks Over His Experiences Most, And Weaves Them Into Systematic Relations With Each Other, Will Be The One With The Best Memory.

I Know That You, Ladies And Gentlemen, Have A Philosophy, Each And All Of You, And That The Most Interesting And Important Thing About You Is The Way In Which It Determines The Perspective In Your Several Worlds.

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

So Long As Antimilitarists Propose No Substitute For War's Disciplinary Function, No Moral Equivalent Of War, Analogous, As One Might Say, To The Mechanical Equivalent Of Heat, So Long They Fail To Realize The Full Inwardness Of The Situation.

The Bottom Of Being Is Left Logically Opaque To Us, A Datum In The Strict Sense Of The Word, Something We Simply Come Upon And Find, And About Which (if We Wish To Act) We Should Pause And Wonder As Little As Possible. In This Confession Lies The Lasting Truth Of Empiricism.

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

[religion Is] The Attempt To Be In Harmony With An Unseen Order Of Things.

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

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

Intellectualism' Is The Belief That Our Mind Comes Upon A World Complete In Itself, And Has The Duty Of Ascertaining Its Contents; But Has No Power Of Re-determining Its Character, For That Is Already Given.

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.

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 Simplest Rudiment Of Mystical Experience Would Seem To Be That Deepened Sense Of The Significance Of A Maxim Or Formula Which Occasionally Sweeps Over One.

Mystical Experiences

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.

We Never Fully Grasp The Import Of Any True Statement Until We Have A Clear Notion Of What The Opposite Untrue Statement Would Be.

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.

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.

There's Nothing So Absurd That If You Repeat It Often Enough, People Will Believe It.

Do Something Everyday For No Other Reason Than You Would Rather Not Do It, So That When The Hour Of Dire Need Draws Nigh, It May Find You Not Unnerved And Untrained To Stand The Test.

Philosophy, Beginning In Wonder, As Plato And Aristotle Said, Is Able To Fancy Everything Different From What It Is. It Sees The Familiar As If It Were Strange, And The Strange As If It Were Familiar. It Can Take Things Up And Lay Them Down Again. It Rouses Us From Our Native Dogmatic Slumber And Breaks Up Our Caked Prejudices.

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.

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

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.

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

Who Does Not See That We Are Likely To Ascertain The Distinctive Significance Of Religious Melancholy And Happiness, Or Of Religious Trances, Far Better By Comparing Them As Conscientiously As We Can With Other Varieties Of Melancholy, Happiness, And Trance, Than By Refusing To Consider Their Place In Any More General Series, And Treating Them As If They Were Outside Of Nature's Order Altogether?

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.

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.

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.

There Can Be No Existence Of Evil As A Force To The Healthy-minded Individual.

Most People Live, Whether Physically, Intellectually Or Morally, In A Very Restricted Circle Of Their Potential Being.

Creatures Extremely Low In The Intellectual Scale May Have Conception. All That Is Required Is That They Should Recognize The Same Experience Again. A Polyp Would Be A Conceptual Thinker If A Feeling Of 'hello! Thingumbob Again!' Ever Flitted Through Its Mind.

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

Nothing Is So Fatiguing As The Eternal Hanging On Of An Uncompleted Task.

Procrastination

Lets Take Full Advantage Of This Discovery

The Prevalent Fear Of Poverty Among The Educated Classes Is The Worst Moral Disease From Which Our Civilization Suffers.

Individuality Is Founded In Feeling

Our Intelligence Cannot Wall Itself Up Alive, Like A Pupa In A Chrysalis. It Must At Any Cost Keep On Speaking Terms With The Universe That Engendered It.

Every Sort Of Energy And Endurance, Of Courage And Capacity For Handling Life's Evils, Is Set Free In Those Who Have Religious Faith.

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

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.

Pessimism Leads To Weakness. Optimism Leads To Power.

Positive Thinking

... 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 Intellect, Everywhere Invasive, Shows Everywhere Its Shallowing Effect.

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

Our Acts Of Voluntary Attending, As Brief And Fitful As They Are, Are Nevertheless Momentous And Critical, Determining Us, As They Do, To Higher Or Lower Destinies.

I Am Only A Philosopher, And There Is Only One Thing That A Philosopher Can Be Relied On To Do, And That Is, To Contradict Other Philosophers.

Philosophy Lives In Words, But Truth And Fact Well Up Into Our Lives In Ways That Exceed Verbal Formulation. There Is In The Living Act Of Perception Always Something That Glimmers And Twinkles And Will Not Be Caught, And For Which Reflection Comes Too Late.

It Is Your Friends Who Make Your World.

Short Best Friend

Many Persons Nowadays Seem To Think That Any Conclusion Must Be Very Scientific If The Arguments In Favor Of It Are Derived From Twitching Of Frogs' Legs (especially If The Frogs Are Decapitated) And That, On The Other Hand, Any Doctrine Chiefly Vouched For By The Feelings Of Human Beings (with Heads On Their Shoulders) Must Be Benighted And Superstitious.

True To Her Inveterate Habit, Rationalism Reverts To 'principles,' And Thinks That When An Abstraction Once Is Named, We Own An Oracular Solution.

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.

We, The Lineal Representatives Of The Successful Enactors Of One Scene Of Slaughter After Another, Must, Whatever More Pacific Virtues We May Also Possess, Still Carry About With Us, Ready At Any Moment To Burst Into Flame, The Smoldering And Sinister Traits Of Character By Means Of Which They Lived Through So Many Massacres, Harming Others, But Themselves Unharmed.

Begin To Be Now What You Will Be Hereafter.

The Good We Do Today Becomes The Happiness Of Tomorrow.

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.

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

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

Philosophy Is "an Unusually Stubborn Attempt To Think Clearly.

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.

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.

It Is Very Important That Teachers Should Realize The Importance Of Habit.

We Are Thinking Beings, And We Cannot Exclude The Intellect From Participating In Any Of Our Functions.

If This Life Is Not A Real Fight, In Which Something Is Eternally Gained For The Universe By Success, It Is No Better Than A Game Of Private Theatricals From Which One May Withdraw At Will. But It Feels Like A Real Fight.

Real Culture Lives By Sympathies And Admirations, Not By Dislikes And Disdains; Under All Misleading Wrappings It Pounces Unerringly Upon The Human Core.

Whenever Two People Meet, There Are Really Six People Present. There Is Each Man As He Sees Himself, Each Man As The Other Person Sees Him, And Each Man As He Really Is.

The Education Of Attention Would Be An Education Par Excellence

Plasticity, Then, In The Wide Sense Of The Word, Means The Possession Of A Structure Weak Enough To Yield To An Influence, But Strong Enough Not To Yield All At Once. Each Relatively Stable Phase Of Equilibrium In Such A Structure Is Marked By What We May Call A New Set Of Habits.

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

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.

The Philosophy Which Is So Important In Each Of Us Is Not A Technical Matter; It Is Our More Or Less Dumb Sense Of What Life Honestly And Deeply Means. It Is Only Partly Got From Books; It Is Our Individual Way Of Just Seeing And Feeling The Total Push And Pressure Of The Cosmos.

We Must Make Automatic And Habitual, As Early As Possible, As Many Useful Actions As We Can. . . . The More Of The Details Of Our Daily Life We Can Hand Over To The Effortless Custody Of Automatism, The More Our Higher Powers Of Mind Will Be Set Free For Their Own Proper Work.

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.

A Great Many People Think They Are Thinking When They Are Merely Rearranging Their Prejudices.

Round About The Accredited And Orderly Facts Of Every Science There Ever Floats A Sort Of Dust-cloud Of Exceptional Observations, Of Occurrences Minute And Irregular And Seldom Met With, Which It Always Proves More Easy To Ignore Than To Attend To... Anyone Will Renovate His Science Who Will Steadily Look After The Irregular Phenomena, And When Science Is Renewed, Its New Formulas Often Have More Of The Voice Of The Exceptions In Them Than Of What Were Supposed To Be The Rules.

There Must Be Something Solemn, Serious, And Tender About Any Attitude Which We Denominate Religious. If Glad, It Must Not Grin Or Snicker; If Sad, It Must Not Scream Or Curse.

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

The Mind Of Your Own Enemy, The Pupil, Is Working Away From You, As Keenly And Eagerly As Is The Mind Of The Commander On The Other Side From The Scientific General. Just What The Respective Enemies Want And Think, And What They Know Or Do Not Know, Are As Hard Things For The Teachers As For The General To Find Out.

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.

Out Of Time We Cut 'days' And 'nights', 'summers' And 'winters.' We Say What, Each Part Of The Sensible Continuum Is, And All These Abstract Whats Are Concepts. The Intelletual Life Of Man Consists Almost Wholly In His Substitution Of A Conceptual Order For The Persceptual Order In Which His Experience Originally Comes.

Our Minds Thus Grow In Spots; And Like Grease-spots, The Spots Spread. But We Let Them Spread As Little As Possible: We Keep Unaltered As Much Of Our Old Knowledge, As Many Of Our Old Prejudices And Beliefs, As We Can. We Patch And Tinker More Than We Renew. The Novelty Soaks In; It Stains The Ancient Mass; But It Is Also Tinged By What Absorbs It.

The General Law Is That No Mental Modification Ever Occurs Which Is Not Accompanied Or Followed By A Bodily Change.

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.

Earnestness Means Willingness To Live With Energy, Though Energy Bring Pain.

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.

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

All The Daily Routine Of Life, Our Dressing And Undressing, The Coming And Going From Our Work Or Carrying Through Of Its Various Operations, Is Utterly Without Mental Reference To Pleasure And Pain, Except Under Rarely Realized Conditions.

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 Aim Of A College Education Is To Teach You To Know A Good Man When You See One.

Objective Evidence And Certitude Are Doubtless Very Fine Ideals To Play With, But Where On This Moonlit And Dream-visited Planet Are They Found?

Most Unhappiness Is Caused Because People Listen To Themselves... Instead Of Talking To Themselves.

I Wished By Treating Psychology Like A Natural Science, To Help Her Become One.

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.

Truth For Us Is Simply A Collective Name For Verification Processes

To Be A Real Philosopher All That Is Necessary Is To Hate Some One Else's Type Of Thinking.

It Does Not Follow, Because Our Ancestors Made So Many Errors Of Fact And Mixed Them With Their Religion, That We Should Therefore Leave Off Being Religious At All. By Being Religious We Establish Ourselves In Possession Of Ultimate Reality At The Only Points At Which Reality Is Given Us To Guard. Our Responsible Concern Is With Our Private Destiny, After All.

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.

Each Of Us Literally Chooses, By His Way Of Attending To Things, What Sort Of Universe He Shall Appear To Himself To Inhabit.

The First Thing That Intellect Does With An Object Is To Class It With Something Else.

An Idea, To Be Suggestive, Must Come To The Individual With The Force Of Revelation.

History Is A Bath Of Blood.

A Beethoven String-quartet Is Truly, As Some One Has Said, A Scraping Of Horses' Tails On Cats' Bowels, And May Be Exhaustively Described In Such Terms; But The Application Of This Description In No Way Precludes The Simultaneous Applicability Of An Entirely Different Description.

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.

With Mere Good Intentions Hell Is Proverbially Paved.

Good Intentions

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.

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

Rewards And Recognition

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.

No Living Person Is Sunk So Low As Not To Be Imitated By Somebody.

General Scepticism Is The Live Mental Attitude Of Refusing To Conclude. It Is A Permanent Torpor Of The Will, Renewing Itself In Detail Towards Each Successive Thesis That Offers, And You Can No More Kill It Off By Logic Than You Can Kill Off Obstinacy Or Practical Joking.

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.

In The Last Analysis, Then, We Believe That We All Know And Think About And Talk About The Same World Because We Believe Our Percepts Are Possessed By Us In Common

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.

Selection Is The Very Keel On Which Our Mental Ship Is Built. And In This Case Of Memory Its Utility Is Obvious. If We Remembered Everything, We Should On Most Occasions Be As Ill Off As If We Remembered Nothing.

So Far War Has Been The Only Force That Can Discipline A Whole Community, And Until An Equivalent Discipline Is Organized, I Believe That War Must Have Its Way.

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.

In Business For Yourself, Not By Yourself.

Tell Him To Live By Yes And No - Yes To Everything Good, No To Everything Bad.

Our Ideas Must Agree With Realities, Be Such Realities Concrete Or Abstract, Be They Facts Or Be They Principles, Under Penalty Of Endless Inconsistency And Frustration.

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

We May Be In The Universe As Dogs And Cats Are In Our Libraries, Seeing The Books And Hearing The Conversation, But Having No Inkling Of The Meaning Of It All.

To Consider Hypotheses Is Surely Always Better Than To Dogmatize Ins Blaue Hinein

For I Had Often Said That The Best Argument I Knew For An Immortal Life Was The Existence Of A Man Who Deserved One As Well As Child Did.

The Squalid Cash Interpretation Put On The Word Success Is Our National Disease.

[t]here Is Very Little Difference Between One Person And Another, But What Little Difference Ther Eis, Is Very Important.

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