Sibylla : $b or, The revival of prophecyMace, C. A. (Cecil Alec)
Philosophy
Sibylla : $b or, The revival of prophecy
Mace, C. A. (Cecil Alec)
Civilization; Progress
The developments of intellectual life are the most difficult to
foresee. But there are a few clues which enable us to guess at their
possible nature. What purely intellectual achievements have been
made in the past seem to depend upon the development of language and
the elaboration of symbolism convenient to thought. Philosophers and
scientists have continually expressed dissatisfaction at the modes
of expression at their disposal in a language primarily devised to
express our emotional and practical demands. Scientists have invented
a technical terminology in their nouns. Mathematicians go somewhat
further, and have invented more thorough-going systems of symbolism.
Philosophers have always found it necessary to invent peculiar
manners of speech, and now are seriously beginning to follow the
mathematicians. It is possible that quite a new language will arise,
probably a variety of purely technical languages――useful for different
purposes of thought. The process of differentiation manifests itself
here as in other ways. Already people following different pursuits find
it almost impossible to converse, at least with anything approaching
mutual understanding. And this process of specialization which
education and increasing knowledge forces upon us points to another
obstacle in the way of the Esperantists and other propagandists for
a universal language. By the time this language is adopted, we shall
have lost all common interests for the discussion of which it might
have been employed. Perhaps our newer universities will inaugurate
professorships in small-talk to keep alive an obsolescent art and to
correct this serious menace of specialism.
More rapid than changes in the intellectual life will be those of
character and of temperament. There are two significant facts in the
trend of man’s emotional development, one of special and the other of
general interest.
Firstly, there is the curious decay of cruelty and the increased desire
to avoid inflicting pain. No one, surely, would deny an enormous
change in this respect even in recent centuries. And we are beginning
to discover the lengths to which development may go. Even now it often
causes a moral man to attribute base motives to himself in doing a
kindly act to spare his friend the subtle pain or sense of obligation
which occurs in the feeling of gratitude. Modest forms of generosity
often have this motive in their modesty.
There is not much further to go before we reach the social life of
Henry James’s novels――where the principal characters have exquisite
consciences, where good souls are tortured by the regret that they had
not expressed their reproaches a shade or so less directly so as more
to convey the impression that they had really said nothing at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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