The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinkerLloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Philosophy
The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinker
Lloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Belief and doubt; Philosophy -- Introductions
The person, furthermore, because of his particular class affiliation,
with the attainment in the way of skill and insight which this imparts,
is always naturally under constraint not merely to overcome the
specialism, but also to apply the special training beyond the immediate
sphere of its development to all sides of the nature that is within him.
Out of the depth and breadth of his personal character, bounded only by
the unity of experience, he must ever react against the narrowness and
the factional ritual, and taking this ritual--or special professional
technique--to be valid mediately rather than immediately, in spirit
rather than merely in letter, must ever seek to translate his factional
experience, its skill and its insight, to all parts of human life. Only
so can he be true both to his special classification and to his personal
wholeness.
But an insistent question: Is such translation possible? On the
possibility the case for either personality or a class-divided society
must finally depend. On the possibility hangs also the worth of this
case to the general argument of this book. Logically, there certainly
can be but one answer, and that an affirmative one, since analogy, the
primal condition of translation, must be universal [p.166] among the
parts of any unity as well as between any part and the whole. No two
parts, it is true, can be literal, prosaic reproductions of each other,
but metaphors of each other all parts are bound to be, and any part and
the whole must also have this relation of the metaphor, so that any
acquired, more or less highly developed power of thought or action,
however special and however technical, may and must have meaning
throughout the whole life of the person or of humanity. Accordingly,
with the acquired freedom of any part, the metaphors, relating part to
part, may, if not must, flash to the remotest regions of the person's
experience-world. The left hand, with its unconsciously developed power,
of course usually unexercised, of mirror-writing, affords only a very
crude illustration of what this implies, and a very imaginative
illustration is in the flashing of the morning light as it reaches
height after height of the beholder's outstretched world.
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.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account