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 soldier and the mechanic have been mentioned [p.238] as types of
personal individuality appropriate respectively to the medieval and the
modern period, to the period of the "universal individual," on the one
hand, and of unity realized, not through a type, but through the working
together of different individuals, on the other. The type was of another
world; the living unity is here and now in this. For the mechanic, then,
death is not what the soldier has found it, and immortality is different
too. But how fully to describe the difference, and how above all really
to appraise it, I do not clearly know. Perhaps there is not enough of
the poetic in my nature. The soldier, as the political historian or as
the philosopher sees him, has had his appreciative poets, but the
mechanic has been little sung. The mechanic's death, however, and the
life following it, afford a theme that some poet of the future, let me
hope, will be able to do justice to. The soldier leaves this for another
world, by his violent death only fulfilling his extreme subjection here.
The mechanic, somewhat like the tools which he employs, actually
continues with the always productive life of this world, by his death,
natural rather than violent, even contributing to, as well as sharing
in, what is produced. Not less than the soldier's is his after-life an
appropriate fulfilment of his earthly career; each gains through death
the natural reward of his life's service. But though I find myself so
unable to say what I would, to express either in prose or in poetry all
that I seem to feel, there is just one thought that I must try to
articulate, and that will certainly assist the understanding of the
difference between the two deaths or the two after-lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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