Status Updates From Realms of Being

"mind was not created for the sake of discovering the absolute truth. The absolute truth has its own intangible reality, and scorns to be known" preface to realms of being, page 23

"History is a poetic art; the muse Clio, must inspire it; and the existing correlate or controlling cause of the historian's thoughts, even when they are true, is not the object described" the realm of Essence, page 132

This is gonna take a while

I should prefer that something of me should subsist anonymously buried in the public mind, than that my name should remain attached for a few years to some technical curiosity.

The criterion of perfection must not be imposed from outside. On the path towards some goal which, if missed, was perhaps never really proposed, a thousand minor things may be achieved. The path of failure is strewn with little successes, no less real to a free spirit than the alleged end.

All minds belong to their time and place; such is the condition of their existence that determines their point of view; yet they are minds only in the measure in which they transcend their physical station, and can view their place from other places and their moment from other moments.

[Life without consciousness valueless.] We talk of "life" as if it were unquestionably something precious or even divine. [Inutility of consciousness.] Evidently for the preservation and welfare of an organism fit reactions suffice. [Value of consciousness.] In the very act of becoming painful, life has become worth living in its own eyes.

Spirit, in its briefest and feeblest flash, sets up a moral center for the universe. ... But why should "I" (that is, spirit in me) be condemned to lodge in this particular body, with these parents and nationality and education and ridiculous fate? Why choose this grotesque center from which to view the universe?

Happiness in the truth is like happiness in marriage, fruitful, lasting, and ironical. You could not have chosen better, yet this is not what you dreamt of.

The love of truth is often mentioned, the hatred of truth hardly ever, yet the latter is the commoner. People say they love the truth when they pursue it, and they pursue it when unknown: not because of any felt affinity to it in their souls, but because they need information for practical purposes. Where known, truth is almost always dismissed or disguised, because the aspect of it is hateful.

Convention, correctness, orthodoxy are far more intimately precious to mankind than truth. The world of things seems arid and alien compared with the inexhaustible world of talk; and a man will laugh at his mistakes about matters of fact, when shame will consume him all his life long if he has slipped into a fault of speech or of manners.

It is as little philosophical to beautify reality as to be afraid of it. The face of existence, open to an omnivorously curious mind, is sublime and fascinating enough, but it is surely more than human, less than moral, other than dialectical.

The whole of life is a predicament, complex and prolonged; and the whole of mind is the cry, prolonged and variously modulated, which that predicament wrings from the psyche.

I confess that the life of a spider, or my own life, is not one which, if I look at it as a whole, seems to me worth realising; and to say that that human tastes and scruples are impertinent is simply to perceive that moral values cannot preside over nature, and that what arises is not the good, in any prior or absolute sense, but only a natural growth which becomes good in its own eyes.

This world is not easily probed or understood. Existence is nothing if not complex, elastic, fundamentally chaotic. Perception, description, and dogma over-simplify and over-regulate everything. The mind cannot pursue the roots of things into the darkness; it cannot discover why they exist; it must be satisfied with noting their passing aspect.

To ask whether substance must be discrete or continuous, finite or infinite, many or one, is like asking whether the Almighty must think in French or in English.

There is a prejudice against matter in some quarters. Matter seems an evil to the sour moralist because it is often untoward, and an occasion of imperfection and conflict in things. But if he took a wider view matter would seem a good to him, because it is the principle of existence: it is all things in their potentiality and thus the condition of all their excellence and possible perfection.

The type of being which I call essence has long been familiar to philosophers, and it is unfamiliar to the man on the street, not because it is too remote from him but because it is too near. My theory is nearly a variant of Platonism, designed to render Platonic logic consistent with the facts of nature. But this readjustment unhinges Platonism so completely that I have no right to call my doctrine Platonic.

The nature of essence appears in nothing better than in the beautiful. In a form felt to be beautiful an obvious complexity forms an obvious unity. The divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in the world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished: for it visits time, but belongs to eternity.

I should not call this object "table," unless it were a piece of furniture of a certain height with a flat top; and I should not call the other object "John," unless it were a male inhabiting an English-speaking country; but these conditions for applying those names are far from being the objects; the objects named are particular, natural, fluid, indefinable.

Whenever we use the same word we suppose ourselves to have the same idea; and in any long argument direct intuition must give place to guidance by a conventional notation: discourse becomes a sort of calculating machine, by which material counters are shuffled and intuition is only required to read off the result attained mechanically. Demonstration is something verbal and technical; logic is a kind of rhetoric.

The best seems still more than half hope and a strange uncertainty; and when we look at our clearest thought, at our most comprehensive intuition, we find in it almost nothing: we are always at crossroads in a narrow valley, the whole world but a vague object of faith, only this poor halting-place actually ours.

Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural faculty and moral harmony; afterwards, gladly relinquishing zone after zone of vegetation, and letting the snow-peak of integrity rise to what height it may.

The realm of essence, like the empyrean, is a clear and tranquil region when you once reach it; but for the observer from the earth clouds may intervene, or his eye may be arrested at some nearer sphere which, just because it has some opaqueness, he may think the true blue.

What is this free life of the mind? What are the necessary and sufficient themes that may occupy it? What troubles does it suffer from, when do they vanish, and in what then may it find a positive joy? Such are the questions that ultimately concern me in this book.

Possession of the absolute truth is not merely by accident beyond the range of particular minds; it is incompatible with being alive, because it excludes any particular station, organ, interest, or date of survey: the absolute truth is undiscoverable just because it is not a perspective.