A poem of Latinate proportions…

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo--
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

--A.D. Godley

(Hat tip to The Smithy. This declension cheat sheet might help you parse the humor. Or is parsing humor––explaining the joke––even worth it? I would like to think so, in some cases.)

Captain's log…

Sea-date Friday, October 12, 1492, the date Christopher Columbus reached the New World, after leaving Spain on August 3, 1492:

"At dawn we saw naked people, and I went ashore in the ship's boat …I unfurled the royal banner and the captains brought the flags which displayed a large green cross with the letters "F" [Ferdinand] and "Y" [Isabella] at the left and right side of the cross…. To this land I gave the name San Salvador, in honor of our Blessed Lord. …

The people here …are friendly and well-dispositioned… who bear no arms except for small spears and they have no iron. … I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude towards us because I know they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Catholic Faith more by love than by force. I therefore gave red caps to some and glass beads to others. They hung the beads around their necks …And they took great pleasure in this and became so friendly that it was a marvel. They traded and gave everything they had with good will, but it seems to me they have very little and are poor in everything. I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange."

Pope Paul III, in Sublimus Deus, dated May 29, 1537:

"The sublime God so loved the human race that He created man in such wise that he … endowed him with capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face; and since man… has been created to enjoy eternal life and happiness, which none may obtain save through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, it is necessary that he should possess the nature and faculties enabling him to receive that faith….

"The enemy of the human race [the Devil]… invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge, should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.

"We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of his flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.

"Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare… that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

"By virtue of Our apostolic authority We define and declare that the said Indians and other peoples should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living."

Truth and Revelation by Nicolas Berdyaev

Truth and Revelation (New York: Collier Books, 1962 [tr. R. M. French]) by Nicolas Berdyaev

Be advised that just because I read and post these ideas, does not mean I agree with or endorse them (a proviso that holds for all the books I cite here).

p. 8 …it must be remembered that man has been the one and only organ which revelation has used in order to reach man. … It is not upon revelation that man passes judgment so much as upon his own human reception and understanding of revelation.

9 God is that which cannot be expressed. … And of that which cannot be expressed there cannot be any doubts. There can be doubt only of what is expressed.

13 Existentialism may be defined … as a philosophy which will not accept objectifying knowledge.

14 Existence (Existenz) is not essence, it is not substance, it is a free act.

15 There can be no causal relations between God and man. There is nothing which God determines. God is not a power "outside" and "above."

18 Man is a tragic being for the simple reason that he finds himself placed on the frontier between two worlds, a higher and a lower, and he includes both worlds in himself.

20 Unlike Kant's thing-in-itself, transcendental man operates in this world, he reveals himself in every great creative man…. Transcendental man does not evolve, he creates.

23 Truth is always supernatural, its very meaning is that the spirit has risen above the natural.

26 Truth is primary, not secondary, that is to say it is not conformity with something else. … Truth is not a reality, nor that which corresponds to a reality. … Truth does not face a ready-made reality outside itself, it is the creative transforming of reality. … Truth means change, it is the transfiguration of reality.

28 Truth is communal….

29 I am in darkness and I search for light; as yet I do not know the truth and I am seeking it. But by this very fact I am already asserting the existence of Truth and light, though their existence is of another kind that that of the beings of the realities of the world. … My search is already the light…. Truth is value… truth is spiritual, it is the process of instilling spirit into the world of reality.

30 Truth is God… truth is human. The knowledge of God is a human thing.

32 Pragmatism is highly optimistic and fails to see the tragic fate of truth in the world. … In reality there is a pragmatism of falsehood, the lie is often useful to the organization of life…. The supporters of pragmatism very often accept the useful lie as truth.

33 To long after pure truth which nothing suppresses, however distressing it may be, is to reach out towards the divine. … The attainment of truth assumes fearlessness…. Truth is the voice of eternity in time….

34 Truth is not something which is of service to the world….

35 [in Marx's materialism and Leninism] Truth is known in praxis. … Truth ought to contribute to the victory of socialism. That is the only truth which is acknowledged and valued, just as that is the only freedom which is acknowledged and valued.

36 [in Marxism] …any conclusions whatever may be drawn so long as they are serviceable at a given moment…. Is Marxist truth merely a reflection and expression of the struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie––simply a useful weapon in the conflict?

Cf. pp. 79–80 in J. Ratzinger's The Nature and Mission of Theology

38 …Nietzsche's philosophy… was a philosophy of values whereas Marx's was a philosophy of well-being. … But in turning truth into an instrument of the will to power, he [Nietzsche] does in actual fact lapse into pragmatism and regards truth as that which is serviceable to the process of life. He does this in spite of the fact that he hated the idea of "the useful," which he justly looked upon as a very anti-aristocratic and most plebeian conception. Supramundane truth is just that––and it must not be perverted to the service of the processes of life, or the will to power.

39 The importance of Nietzsche is immense in that he understands truth dynamically….

40 Truth serves no man, and nothing; it is they who serve it.

43 The knowledge of truth is attained by the aggregate of the spiritual powers of man and not by his intellectual faculties only. … Truth is free and a matter of the will; it is not simply an intellectual act, it is the turning of the whole human being in the direction of creative value.

44 …the very recognition of the material world as capable of being known assumes an elementary act of faith…. There is a certain naïveté in supposing that the objective existence of matter can be scientifically proved. … A decisive "no" is faith to the same extent as a decisive "yes," and the very denial assumes and assertion….

45 Man is by nature a creature that believes…. I am affirming truth, even in the event of having no desire to hear anything about the truth.

46 Man should be ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of the truth, but Truth is often bitter to the taste and he frequently prefers some deceitful illusion…. At times it may even be that such deception takes a form which leads him in the pride of his heart to cast away every consolation that the Truth bestows and to regard a state of despair as the attainment of the highest Truth.

51 Christian truth cannot be made to depend upon historical facts…. As Kierkegaard was fond of saying, God is in the world incognito. … Revelation is always at the same time some measure of concealment.

52 Revelation cannot be something which is finished, static….

54 An exclusively apophatic understanding of God… [amounts to a] confusion between Gott and Gottheit….

56 The revelation of a suffering and yearning God is higher than the revelation of a God whose satisfaction and sufficiency in himself. … God does not act in power but in humanity. … The degrees of revelation correspond to the degrees of correlation….

57 The ancient biblical idea of God can hardly be in harmony with our religious thought.

58 Feuerbach was half right. … Sociomorphism has entirely distorted the idea of God.

59 In relation to the world God is freedom and not necessity, not determination.

60 …final truth lies with mysticism rather than with dogmatics.

63 There is no criterion of the Truth outside the Truth. … the very concept of pure act ought to be abandoned as belonging to an outworn philosophy.

72 Freedom is more primary than being and it cannot be determined by our being….

73 Tragedy in the Christian world is the tragedy of freedom, not the tragedy of fate.

74 Christian metaphysics ought to be in the first place a philosophy of history.

75 No revelation ought to lay claim to finality and completeness, it goes on to the end of the world.

82 It is man that makes history, history is not a phenomenon of nature….

83 To a notable degree history is a history of crime, and all the dreams of idealists about a better state of society have ended in criminal deeds. … History is a horrible crime.

84 I ought not to regard anything as entirely outside myself. I too am answerable for the act of Cain.

85 Nothing in history ought to be regarded as sacrosanct….

86 …sacred history does not exist…. History must either be entirely repudiated, as it is in Indian thought and by Schopenhauer and, with particular consistency, by Leo Tolstoy, or it must be received into oneself while one makes an effort not to be infected by the evil of it.

87 Hegel's freedom is the freedom of the universal and not of the individual. In the last resort it is the universal spirit which is free and not of the individual, who is offered as a sacrifice to the universal spirit. It was against this that Belinsky protested and at a still deeper level Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard.

88 I call freedom empty when it is unaware of resistance…. Freedom demands sacrifice and self-surrender. Self-assertion is the last thing it is.

89–90 history is by no means a rational process in which the progressive triumph of reason comes to pass. Volcanic and irrational forces are at work in it, and they are at times concealed and suppressed. But from time to time they break out in wars and revolutions. … The great experiment made by the Russian people displays the irrationality of the rational.

95 It does not become Christians to be self-satisfied and to despise those to whom the problem of God is a torment. It certainly does not become them to despise Nietzsche….

97 But there is no sense at all in which God is a cause. He causes nothing and determines nothing.

97–98 …out-and-out consistent godlessness does not exist. Man is more inclined to be an idolater than an atheist. … He deifies the most diverse objects, he deifies the cosmos, man and humanity, he deifies society, the State, abstract good or justice or science ,he deifies race, nationality or class, he deifies a particular social order, socialism, and he makes a god of his own godlessness.

99 The arguments for atheism which are derived from the natural sciences are just as weak as the arguments intended to support belief in God which are based upon those same natural sciences. Christian apologetics which seek to ward off the attack of the natural sciences upon belief in God are very feeble and out of date. Arguments from the natural sciences may be entirely ignored.

100 A historical biography of Jesus cannot in actual fact be written and the Gospels cannot be acknowledged as historical documents. But that only proves that the reality of Jesus Christ is borne witness to by the faith of the Christian community, and that outside that community it is a reality of history which is scarcely noticeable.

101 [Marcion's heresy was ethically motivated, insofar as he was gravely disquieted by the evil in the world; could the creator of such a world be worshiped as the true God?]

102 Out of a desire to destroy suffering and to construct a world in which suffering may not exist, he may be the cause of immeasurable suffering, but that, of course, he regards as only for the time being. This is the fundamental moral inconsistency of the atheistic revolutionary.

103 The godlessness of Marx is derived from Feuerbach, that is from Feuerbach's idea of the alienation of human nature in religion.

104 [by suggesting an inner drive to the material forces that shape society and man, Marxism ascribes rationality and creative efforts to matter, which means that a rational principle is inherent in matter; in such wise, Marxism fails to be a thoroughgoing atheism, in the sense that it denies every sacred or divine principle as such]

105–106 Nietzsche's is "a tragic godlessness" … The murder of God was also the murder of man. Nietzsche's atheism was not in the least a humanist atheism. … There was no element of Marcionism in him. He repudiated the Christian God rather because he brings consolation and happiness. Christianity gives a meaning to suffering and that Nietzsche could not endure. To him it meant the denial of the tragic principle. He wanted suffering and he did not want consolation. But the Christian theme is still there in Nietzsche. He was a man whom Christ had wounded. This passionate foe of Christianity was nearer to it than Goethe who wished it well.

109 [For Heidegger] Being is fallen and guilty in its structure. This is catholic theology without God. It is a very pessimistic philosophy, more pessimistic than Schopenhauer's.

111 To Sartre the freedom of man is connected with godlessness, to him God is an enemy of human freedom. He regards himself as a more consistent atheist than are the Marxists, for they acknowledge that there is a meaning in the historical process and look to it for support. In spite of their materialism, they believe in the triumph of social reason….

113 Traditional theology has never been the theology of the Holy Spirit.

115 All intellectual proofs for the existence of God are bankrupt; they belong to the world of thought and they stay there.

121 It must be said to the credit of Russian philosophical religious thought that it has always reacted vigorously against the forensic interpretation of Christianity and of Redemption.

123 The Eucharistic Sacrifice ought to be entirely freed from traces of the forensic interpretation. … The idea of predestination is indissolubly connected with the juridical way of understanding Christianity and it loses all meaning if another way of interpretation is adopted.

128 Christianity is a religion of social and cosmic transfiguration and resurrection. This has been almost forgotten in official Christianity.

131 The Roman Catholic Church, which has been very fond of frightening people with hell in order to keep souls in submission….

133 To him [Bulgakov] an eternal hell means the failure of God. It is the defeat of God by the powers of darkness.

134 …the significance of the historical Gospels is not absolute.

148 The whole cosmos, the whole creation, is included in Spirit and it is only within the Spirit that there is any cosmos.

149 It is very important to understand the difference between symbolization and objectification. Symbolization always provides signs of another world. It does not remain closed within the circle of this world.

152 The era of the Spirit [or the third revelation] can be nothing but a revelation of a sense of community which is not merely social but also cosmic, not only a brotherhood of man, but a brotherhood of men with all cosmic life….

Paging Dr. Latin…

To anyone out there with Latin "skeelz": Does the following mean "Truth can defend itself"?

Veritate defendare se potest.

My grasp of Latin grammar is deplorably weak, so I need to know if that sentence is acceptable.

Thanks for any help!

With much gratitude, I am updating this post in light of the prompt help thomas (HTH) provided, and, in turn, I amend my little motto to say POTEST VERITAS SE DEFENDERE. [17.10.08]

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 1975 [1942; tr. Justin O'Brien 1955]) by Albert Camus

p. 1 There is but on truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

6 Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind.

12 At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman….

14 I am interested… not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences.

15 The mind's first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false.

[FALSE: Cf. St. Thomas on the mind first recognizing reality (res), and as a unity, then this or that being (aliquid), and finally judging truth or falsity in light of the foregoing. St. Thomas notes in De Ver, i, 1, resp. "that which the intellect first conceives as, in a way, the most evident, and to which it reduces all its concepts, is being. [Illud autem quod primo intellectus concipit quasi notissimum, et in quod conceptiones omnes resolvit, est ens….]" Adrian Reimers, on page 97 of his The Soul of the Person, expands on this by saying, "To understand is to grasp the essence of a being, and this is the first act of the intellect. The second act is 'composition and division,' that is, in predicating something of a subject." Further, Étienne Gilson, on page 64 of his God and Philosophy, offers this:

…such is the natural order followed by our rational knowledge: we first conceive certain beings, then we define their essences, and last we affirm their existences by means of a judgment. But the metaphysical order of reality is just the reverse of the order of human knowledge: what first comes into it is a certain act of existing which, because it is this particular act of existing, circumscribes at once a certain essence and causes a certain substance to come into being. … In Saint Thomas' own words: dicitur esse ipse actus essentiae––"to be" is the very act whereby an essence is.
–– Cf. Qu. disp. de Pot., qu. VII, art. 2, ad 9.]

18–19 But you [a scientist] tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. … So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot for all that apprehend the world. … And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but are not sure.

20 But what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. … From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.

24 [Kierkegaard as a Don Juan of the understanding, full of pseudonyms and contradictions]

25 Husserl and the phenomenologists… reinstate the world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason. … it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment.

28–29 …absurdity springs from a comparison. … The absurd is essentially a divorce. … I can say therefore that the Absurd is not in man… nor in the world, but in their presence together. … For me the sole datum is the absurd.

30 …a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

32 "The only true solution… is precisely where the human judgement sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? We turn towards God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice." If there is a Chestovian philosophy, I can say that it is altogether summed up in this way.

34 To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.

36 Christianity is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is the third sacrifice required by Ignatius Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: 'The sacrifice of the intellect.'

37 The important thing, as Abbé Galiani said to Mme d'Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments.

38 Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation. … I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone. I am told again that here the intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of reason, I do not therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers.

39 …sin is what alienates from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the conscious man, does not lead to God. …the absurd is sin without God.

40 For the existential[ist]s negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason.

41 …phenomenology declines to explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion tat there is not truth, but merely [phenomenally concrete] truths.

44–45 …after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he [Husserl] leaps by this expedient to eternal Reason [i.e., in the innumerable panoply of Platonic phenomenal essences].

47 The irrational, as it is conceived by the existentialists, is reason becoming confused and escaping by negating itself. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

48 My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together. Kierkegaard suppresses my nostalgia and Husserl gathers together that universe. That is not what I was expecting. It was a matter of living and thinking with those dislocations, of knowing whether one had to accept or refuse.

51–53 At a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. … He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. … It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. … Living is keeping the absurd alive. … One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. … That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it. … In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know that in oder to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. … I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life and yet I must carry it alone.

54 The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State.

57 …completely turned towards death (taken here as the most obvious absurdity), the absurd man feels released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in him. He enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules. … In the same way… the slaves of antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew that freedom which consists in not feeling responsible.* Death, too, has patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate. [* … The absurd man is the contrary of the reconciled man.]

58 …refusal to hope…. Indifference to the future and a desire to give up everything that is given. … Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.

61 The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man.

64 What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal.

65 Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences o those actions. It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility.

67 In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility [i.e., for generating hope and futurity]. … [Don Juan always looking for total love in each woman, not finding it, and thus seeking just as ardently and puppyish in the next woman.]

70 Not to believe in the profound meanings of things belongs to the absurd man. … 'Collecting' amounts to being capable of living off one's past. But he rejects regret, that other form of hope.

71 One must be Werther or nothing.

76 Never has the absurd been so well illustrated or at such length [as in drama and acting].

83 [Thus spake the Conqueror:] 'Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes…. [84] Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it at least I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me? … [85] Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only on it. … A revolution is always accomplished against the gods, beginning with the revolution of Prometheus, the first of modern conquerors.'

89 If the term 'wise man' can be applied to the man who lives on what he has without speculating on what he has not, then they [consistently absurd men] are the wise men. …a conqueror but in the realm of the mind, a Don Juan of knowledge, an actor but of the intelligence, knows this better than anyone…

90 …the absurd joy par excellence is creation. 'Art and nothing but art,' said Nietzsche; 'we have art in order not to die of the truth.'

91 For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

96 If any art is devoid of lessons, it is certainly music. It is too closely related to mathematics not to have borrowed their [sic] gratuitousness.

109 It is possible to be Christian and absurd. There are examples of Christians who do not believe in a future life. [??]

"…we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen." (The Nicene Creed)

110 [Moby Dick as a truly absurd work]

114 A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

117 It is during that return [down the hill], that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. … when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

122 [Kafka's Metamorphosis embodies] an ethic of lucidity.

125 [Kafka's The Trial] a complete success. Flesh wins out.

Before and after Socrates by F. M. Cornford

Selected quotations from Before and After Socrates (London: Cambridge, 1932) by F. M. Cornford

p. 1 …the revolution of thought he [Socrates] effected––how he turned philosophy from the study of external Nature to the study of man and of the purposes of human action in society.

2 The kind of reason Socrates wanted was the reason why.

5 The development of Ionian science culminated two centuries later in the Atomism of Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato.

7 …we see the cosmogonies of the Milesian School [viz., Thales] as the dawn or infancy of science.

8 [three features of the pre-scientific age: 1) progressive discovery of the object vs. the subject; 2) preoccupation with practical use of the researched object; 3) belief in unseen, supernatural powers behind the object of inquiry.]

12–13 In Roman religion we find countless numina––powers whose whole content is expressed in abstract nouns, nomina: Janua is not a fully personal god presiding over doorways, but simply the spirit of 'doorness', conceived as a power present in all doors….

15 The Ionian cosmogonists assume … that the whole universe is natural, and potentially within the reach of knowledge as ordinary and rational as our knowledge that fire burns and water drowns. That is what I meant by the discovery of Nature.

18–19 …the system of Thales' successor, Anaximander, which set the pattern for the Ionian tradition. … The significance of this cosmogony lies not so much in what it contains as in what it leaves out. Cosmogony has been detached from theogony.

22 The Atomists held that the tactile properties are the real ones; the visual properties are not substantial or objective.

23–24 Where scientific Atomism went beyond common sense was in its demand that the atoms of body shall be absolutely indestructible and unchanging. … But ancient science, holding to the principle that nothing can come out of nothing, demanded some permanent and indestructible 'being' behind the screen of shifting appearances. This postulate met the same rational need that has prompted the assertion by modern science of the principle of conservation in various forms: the law of inertia, the conservation of mass, the conservation of energy. … The something––whatever it may be––of which modern science has required the conservation corresponds to the permanent 'being' or 'nature of things' required by the ancients.

27 The Socratic philosophy is a reaction against this materialistic drift of physical science.

30 If Xenophon may be trusted, Socrates rejected the current speculation about Nature on two grounds: it was dogmatic, and it was useless.

31 A fabrication of the reason may be as dangerously false as a fabrication of the myth-making imagination.

32 If I cannot know the beginnings of life in the unrecorded past, I can, Socrates thought, know the end of life here and now. This shift from the search for beginnings to the search for ends naturally coincides with the shift of interest from external Nature to man.

35 Socrates held that happiness was to be found in what he called the perfection of the soul––'making one's soul as good as possible'––and that all other ends which men desire were strictly of no value in themselves.

36 [Such power in the Apology! "…I shall question and cross-examine and test him… I shall reproach him for holding the most precious things cheap and worthless things dear. This I shall do to everyone I meet. … such is heaven's command;… For I have no other business but to go around persuading you all, both young and old, to care less for your bodies and your wealth than for the perfection of your souls…."]

37 Socrates' claim to rank among the greatest philosophers rests upon his discovery of this soul and of morality of spiritual aspiration….

39 …pre-Socratic science as the childhood of the new form of thought. … The normal child… has a power of enjoying knowledge for its own sake, until this enjoyment is killed by what is known as education. …adolescence corresponds to the second phase of Greek philosophy––the age of the Sophists. [rebellion from society as common attraction between Sophists and youthful followers]

45 …Plato himself condemns this practice [i.e., laying traps and arguing just for victory] of 'Eristic'––verbal contention without regard for truth––he cannot have meant to represent it as characteristic of Socrates.

46 [For Socrates] Knowledge of values, in fact, is a matter of direct insight….

48 [Socrates was 'demoralizing' the youth by] undermining the morality of social constraint….

49 [Socrates did not prescribe 'doing whatever you please', but making 'sure that your eyes see with perfect clearness what is really good'.]

50 …the achievement of Socrates was the discovery of the soul.

52 [Socrates argues that] No one does wrong against his true will, when once that will has been directed to its object, the good, by a genuine and clear vision. … 'Virtue', at all times, means conformity to current ideals of conduct. [??]

55 True, the central germ of Platonism… is the new Socratic morality of aspiration; but under Plato's hands this germ has grown in a tree whose branches cover the heavens [as opposed to merely the individual soul].

58 [Plato read the secret of Socrates' inmost thought and formulated its essence in The Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, Lysis, Protagoras, and Gorgias.]

62–63 The ancients recognized it [Pythagoreanism] as an independent tradition, off the main track of Ionian science. They called it the Italian philosophy because the chief Pythagoreans were established in Lower Italy. … Pythagorean influence is everywhere traceable in the dialogues of the middle period, centred round the Republic––the Meno, Phaedo, Symposium, and Phaedrus. … Platonism proper, in fact, dates from the confluence of these two streams of inspiration––the Socratic and the Pythagorean. From Socrates Plato learnt that the problems of human life were to be solved by the morality of aspiration and the pursuit of an invariable ideal of perfection. From Pythagoras he learnt how this conception could be extended beyond the field of human concerns into a system embracing the whole of Nature and transforming the scope of science as the Socrates of the Phaedo wished to see it transformed. Unlike that Ionian materialism we considered at the outset, Platonism seeks the key to Nature, not in the beginning, but in the end––not in the mechanical causes impelling from behind, but in the final causes which attract… a movement of desire towards a pattern of ideal perfection.

64 Thus Platonism is a system which extends to the interpretation of all existence the principle of aspiration announced in the morality of Socrates.

65 In spite of certain heretical doctrines, they [Plato and Aristotle] might have been canonised in the Middle Ages, had they not happened to be born some centuries before the Christian era.

67 In Greek 'cosmos' means beauty as well as order, and Pythagoras is said to have been the first to call the universe a cosmos.

69 [Sophrosyne: temperance, self-control, right-mindedness, wisdom.]

74 …no visual image of the Triangle can even be conceived.

82 From first to last, the mainspring of Platonism is its moral and political motive.

86–87 Plato was… an introvert…; a philosophy of withdrawal from the world of common experience. The native bent of Aristotle's mind was in the other direction, towards the study of empirical fact.

90 Aristotle could never cease to be a Platonist. His thought… is governed by the idea of aspiration, inherited by his master from Socrates––the idea that the true cause or explanation of things is to be sought, not in the beginning, but in the end.

94 [Aristotle on natural science: We should approach] "every form of life without disgust, knowing that in every one there is something of Nature and of beauty. For it is in the works of Nature above all that design, in contrast with random chance, is manifest; and the perfect form which anything born or made is designed to realise, holds the rank of beauty." … living tools or 'organs'….

98–99 Matter is not simply like the steel of which the spring is made; it is like the coiled spring in which the latent power of movement is stored. Aristotle defines a natural object as a thing that has a source of motion in itself. … in the act of generation this Form is communicated to the new individual, and, with it, is transmitted the force or power tat will carry the process of development once more from the potential phase to the actual. Thus the specific Form travels through an unending series of individuals. … In this way the Platonic Form of the species is brought down from its heaven of unchanging reality, and plunged in the flow of time and sensible existence.

100–101 [brilliant summary of the arg. for the Unmoved Mover: although substances perish, change and time are not perishable, but enduring, which indicates that a circle––as the form of enduring motion––is the basis for all other cosmic motion; hence it is pure Form, the activity of which must be of the highest conceivable form, namely, intellectual self-contemplation, wanting nothing but being the world's revolving center of desire]

102 God has no operation upon the world, nor even a knowledge of the world.

103 It has always seemed to me unfortunate that the word 'God'… should have been retained by philosophers as the name for a factor in their systems that no one could possibly regard as an object of worship, far less of love.

105 By a curious turn of the wheel, the philosophy of aspiration ends with a God whose function, in relation to the world, is the same as that of the Intelligence in Anaxagoras' system. … It seems to matter little whether the Prime Mover be placed, with Anaxagoras, at the beginning, or, with Aristotle, at the end. The philosophy of aspiration has become an inverted mechanism.

106 Charity is the missing element which Dante and his teachers strove to fuse with the Aristotelian desire in that Amor which moves the sun and the other stars. … The Aristotelian system… is a colossal monument of rationalism…. It is the fate of such a monument to become a cenotaph, not a permanent refuge of the spirit. The Greeks asserted the claims of the head, Christianity, the claims of the heart.

108 The Stoic… [held] to the tradition of Socrates' cheerful indifference to bodily pleasures, but disposed to mistake this indifference for a rather grim and graceless asceticism.

109 …nothing remains but the philosophy of old age, the resignation of a twilight that deepens alike over the garden of [Epicurean] Pleasure and the hermitage of [Stoic] Virtue.