First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of LifeWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Conduct of life
There is another infirmity of the mind to which my attention has been
called by an able paper read this spring to the Cambridge Moral Science
Club by my friend Miss Amber Reeves. In this she has developed a
suggestion of Mr. F.C.S. Schiller’s. The current syllogistic logic
rests on the assumption that either A is B or it is not B. The practical
reality, she contends, is that nothing is permanent; A is always
becoming more or less B or ceasing to be more or less B. But it would
seem the human mind cannot manage with that. It has to hold a thing
still for a moment before it can think it. It arrests the present moment
for its struggle as Joshua stopped the sun. It cannot contemplate things
continuously, and so it has to resort to a series of static snapshots.
It has to kill motion in order to study it, as a naturalist kills and
pins out a butterfly in order to study life.
You see the mind is really pigeon-holed and discontinuous in two
respects, in respect to time and in respect to classification; whereas
one has a strong persuasion that the world of fact is unbounded or
continuous.
1.9. PLANES AND DIALECTS OF THOUGHT.
Finally; the Logician, intent upon perfecting the certitudes of his
methods rather than upon expressing the confusing subtleties of truth,
has done little to help thinking men in the perpetual difficulty that
arises from the fact that the universe can be seen in many different
fashions and expressed by many different systems of terms, each
expression within its limits true and yet incommensurable with
expression upon a differing system. There is a sort of stratification
in human ideas. I have it very much in mind that various terms in our
reasoning lie, as it were, at different levels and in different
planes, and that we accomplish a large amount of error and confusion
by reasoning terms together that do not lie or nearly lie in the same
plane.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account