Russell W. Gough

“She was pointedly reminding me,' Professor Coles shares pensively, 'that she hadn't forgotten my repeated references to [Emerson's speech at Harvard], to the emphasis its author ... placed on character, the distinction he made between it and intellect. She was implying that even such a clarification, such an insistence, could all too readily become an aspect of the very problem Emerson was discussing---the intellect at work, analyzing its relationship to the lived life of conduct (character), with no apparent acknowledgement of the double irony of it all! The irony that the study of philosophy, say, even moral philosophy or oral reasoning, doesn't by any means necessarily prompt in either the teacher or the student a daily enacted goodness; and the further irony that a discussion of that very irony can prove equally sterile, in the sense that yet again one is being clever---with no apparent consequences, so far as one's every actions go.”
― Russell W. Gough, Character Is Destiny