William Blake (1757-1827)

Ideas
- Imagination is the Divine Being in every person.
- All division is contrary to the infinite imagination (the body is not distinct from the soul).
- Divisions, which emanate from the Fall (master/servant, rich/poor, male/female) hold some people in bondage; thus, humankind's fallen vision has produced the exploitation, oppression, and tyranny manifested in class stratifications, poverty, slavery, child labor, sexual discrimination, restrictive laws, and wars.
- Imagination, unifying and infinite, supersedes reason, divisive and finite.
- Rationalism is limited to time, space, sequential operations, natural causality, and measurements.
- Science and industry reduce the universe to a vast machine and one unalterable law.
- Empiricism limits knowledge to sensory perception; life is revealed to imaginative vision and not to the corporeal eye.
- Orthodox religions and deism enslave humankind to a system that promises future rewards or punishments, a dogma that controls human minds.
- Eternity is a condition in which no divisions exist; in order for human kind to regain this innocence, it must rediscover Paradise, an act of the poetic genius or imagination.

Biography
A British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books.
Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life. His father was a successful London hosier who encouraged Blake's artistic talents. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother. In 1767 he was sent to Henry Pars' drawing school. Blake has recorded that from his early years, he experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks and that he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and various historical figures.
At the age of 14, Blake was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire. Gothic art and architecture influenced him deeply. In 1783 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener. Blake taught her to draw and paint, and she assisted him devoutly.
Blake engraved and published most of his major works himself. In the "Prophetic Books", Blake expressed his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural energies from reason and organized religion. Among Blake's later artistic works are drawings and engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy and the 21 illustrations to the book of Job, which was completed when he was almost 70 years old.
Blake never shook off his economic poverty, which was in a large part due to his inability to compete in the highly competitive field of engraving and his expensive invention that enabled him to design illustrations and print words at the same time.
He died on August 12, 1827, and was buried in an unmarked grave at the public cemetery of Bunhill Fields.

Major Works of William Blake
- All Religions Are One, c.1788
- America, a Prophecy, 1793
- An Island in the Moon, 1784-5
- The Book of Ahania, 1795
- The Book of Thel, 1789
- The Book of Urizen, 1794
- Continental prophecies, 1793-1795
- Europe, a Prophecy, 1794
- The First Book of Urizen, 1794
- The Four Zoas, 1797
- The French Revolution, 1791
- Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, 1804-1820
- Jerusalem, 1804
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793
- Milton a Poem, c.1804-c.1811
- Poetical Sketches, 1783
- Songs of Experience, 1794
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789
- There Is No Natural Religion, c.1788
- Tiriel, 1789
- Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 1793

Quotes from William Blake
- "Human nature is the image of God." (from "Annotations to Lavater's 'Aphorisms on Man", 1788)
- "I am astonish'd how such Contemptible Knavery and Folly as this Book contains can ever have been call'd Wisdom by Men of Sense, but perhaps this never was the Case and all Men of Sense have despised the Book as Much as I do." (from "Annotations to Bacon's 'Essays'", 1789)
- "A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent." (from "Auguries of Innocence", 1789)
- "A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage." (from "Auguries of Innocence", 1789)
- "If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They'd immediately Go out." (from "Auguries of Innocence", 1789)

"To See a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour." (from "Auguries of Innocence", 1789)

- "Everything that lives is holy, life delights in life." (from "America: A Prophecy", 1793)
- "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "The busy bee has no time for sorrow." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "Energy is Eternal Delight." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "Expect poison from the standing water." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "The lust of the goat is the bounty of God." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "One thought fills immensity." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "The weak in courage is strong in cunning." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "What is now proved was once only imagin'd." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)
- "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." (from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", 1793)

"Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there."
(from "Poems and Fragments from the Note-Book", 1793)

"He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise." (from "Poems and Fragments from the Note-Book", 1793)

"I wander thro' each dirty street,
Near where the dirty Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man
In every infant's cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban
The mind forg'd manacles I hear." (from "Poems and Fragments from the Note-Book", 1793)

"Love to faults is always blind,
Always is to joy inclin'd,
Lawless, wing'd, and unconfin'd,
And Breaks all chains from every mind." (from "Poems and Fragments from the Note-Book", 1793)

"Why of the sheep do you not learn peace?"
"Because I don't want you to shear my fleece.""
(from "Poems and Fragments from the Note-Book", 1793)

"I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow."
(from "Songs of Innocence and of Experience", 1794)

"If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death."
(from "Songs of Innocence and of Experience", 1794)

"The modest rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble Sheep a threat'ning horn;
While the Lilly white shall in Love delight,
Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright."
(from "Songs of Innocence and of Experience", 1794)

- "As a man is, so he sees." (from a letter to Rev. D. Trusler, 1799 )

- "I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation and even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render'd Non Existent, and an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labor of a long life, all produc'd without Labor or Study." (from "a letter to Thomas Butts", 1803)

- "I may praise [the Poem], since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary; the Authors are in Eternity." (from "a letter to Thomas Butts", 1803)

"I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land."
(from "Milton: A Poem", 1804-1808)

"He has observ'd the Golden Rule,
Till he's become the Golden Fool."
(from "Epigrams, Verses and Fragments from the Note-Book", 1808-1811)

- "Manners make the Man, not Habits." (from "A Vision of the Last Judgment", 1810)

- ""What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."" (from "A Vision of the Last Judgment", 1810)

- "Works of Art can only be produced in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it." (from "A Vision of the Last Judgment", 1810)

"This Life's dim windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to Believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro', the Eye."
(from "The Everlasting Gospel", 1818)

- "One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, The Divine Vision.")

Karl Raimund Popper

(1902-1994)

Born in Vienna (then Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to middle-class parents of Jewish origins, Karl Popper was educated at the University of Vienna. He took a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928, and taught in secondary school from 1930 to 1936. In 1937, the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss led Popper to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College New Zealand (at Christchurch). In 1946, he moved to England to become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, where he was appointed professor in 1949. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active until his death in 1994. He was invested with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982.

Popper won many awards and honors in his field, including the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, the Sonning Prize, and fellowships in the Royal Society, British Academy, London School of Economics, King's College London, and Darwin College Cambridge. Austria awarded him the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold.
Major Books of Karl Raimund Popper

- A World of Propensities, 1990
- All Life is Problem Solving, 1994
- Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 1963
- Die Zukunft ist offen (The Future is Open), with Konrad Lorenz, 1985
- In Search of a Better World, 1984
- Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interaction, edited by Mark Amadeus Notturno, 1994
- The Lesson of This Century, 1992
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1935
- The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality, edited by Mark Amadeus Notturno, 1994
- Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972
- The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volumes 1 and 2, 1945
- The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, 1956-57
- The Poverty of Historicism, 1936
- Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, 1956-57
- Realism and the Aim of Science, 1956-57
- The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism, with Sir John C. Eccles, 1977
- The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, 1930-33
- Unended Quest; An Intellectual Autobiography, 1976
- The World of Parmenides, Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, edited by Arne F. Petersen and Jorgen Mejer, 1998
Major Articles of Karl Raimund Popper

- 1978, Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind, Dialectica,(republished in Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, 1984)

Source:
Wikipedia
Quotes from Karl Raimund Popper

- "All criticism consists in pointing out some contradictions or discrepancies, and scientific progress consists largely in the elimination of contradictions wherever we find them." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "[Democracy] makes possible the reform of institutions without using violence." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "It is his intuition, his mystical insight into the nature of things, rather than his reasoning which makes a great scientist." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "Nationalism appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "One can sometimes extract a valuable suggestion even from an absurd philosophical theory." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "Plato ... could boast a total of at least nine tyrants among his onetime pupils and associates." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "The present is the future of the past." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "Rational thought is not non-intuitive; it is, rather, intuition submitted to tests and checks (as opposed to intuition run wild)." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But ... the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder. ... This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "We can discover the fact that we had a prejudice only after having got rid of it." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "We may distinguish two main types of government. The first type consists of governments of which we can get rid without bloodshed-for example, by way of general elections. ... The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of except by way of a successful revolution-that is to say, in most cases, not at all." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "What we need ... is to moralize politics, and not to politicize morals." (from "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945)

- "Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride or laziness of mind." (from an article by Ryszard Kapuscinski)

Thomas Henry Huxley

(1825-1895)

Thomas Henry Huxley, the distinguished zoologist and advocate of Darwinism, madeseveral incursions into philosophy.

From his youth he had studied its problems unsystematically; he had a way of going straight to the point in any discussion; and, judged by a literary standard, he was a great master of expository and argumentative prose. Apart from his special work in science, he had an important influence upon English thought through his numerous addresses and essays on the topics of science, philosophy, religion, and politics.

Among the most important of his papers are those entitled 'The Physical Basis of Life' (1868), and 'On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata' (1874), along with a monograph on Hume (1879) and the Romanes lecture Ethics and Evolution (1893).

Huxley is credited with the invention of the termagnosticism to describe his philosophical position: it expresses his attitude towards certain traditional questions without giving any clear delimitation of the frontiers of the knowable. He regards consciousness as a collateral effect of certain physical causes, and only an effect -never also a cause. But, on the other hand, he holds that matter is only a symbol, and that all physical phenomena can be analyzed into states of consciousness. This leaves mental facts in the peculiar position of being collateral effects of something that, after all, is only a symbol for a mental fact; and the contradiction is left without remark.

His contributions to ethics are still more remarkable. In a paper entitled 'Science and Morals' (1888), he concluded that the safety of morality lay "in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization on the track of immorality." His Romanes lecture reveals a different tone. In it the moral order is contrasted with the cosmic order; evolution shows constant struggle; instead of looking to it for moral guidance, he "repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence." He saw that the facts of historical process did not constitute validity for moral conduct; and his plain language compelled other to see the same truth. But he exaggerated the opposition between them and did not leave room for the influence of moral ideas as a factor in the historical process.

However, as "Darwin's bulldog", Huxley is best remembered today for his prominent role in defending evolution against attacks from scientists, theists, and philosophers; in fact, one might well wonder how readily the scientific establishment of England would have accepted Darwin's views without Huxley's indefatigable efforts. The point holds a certain irony, for Huxley's biological writings show much less explicit support for natural selection than for evolution itself.
Major Books of Thomas Henry Huxley

- A Critical Examination of "On The Origin of Species, 1877
- American Addresses, 1877
- Collected Essays: Vol. 1: Methods and Results, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 2: Darwiniana, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 3: Science and Education, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 4: Science and Hebrew Tradition, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 5: Science and Christian Tradition, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 6: Hume, With Helps to the Study of Berkeley, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 7: Man's Place in Nature, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 8: Discourses Biological and Geological, 1893-94
- Collected Essays: Vol. 9: Evolution and Ethics, and Other Essays, 1893-94
- Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, 1863
- The Oceanic Hydrozoa, 1859
- On Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature, 1862
- On the Reception of the 'Origin of Species', in Francis Darwin, editor, Life & Letters of Charles Darwin 1 and 2, 1887
Major Articles of Thomas Henry Huxley

- 1855, On Certain Zoological Arguments Commonly Adduced in Favour of the Hypothesis of the Progressive Development of Animal Life in Time, Proceedings of the Royal Institution
- 1857, Untitled Letter on Theory of Glaciers, Philosophical Magazine
- 1860, On Species, and Races and Their Origin, Proc. Roy. Inst.
- 1860, The Origin of Species, Westminster Review
- 1861, On the Zoological Relations of Man With the Lower Animals, Natural History Review
- 1862, On the Fossil Remains of Man, Proceedings of the Royal Institution
- 1864, Further Remarks on the Human Remains From the Neanderthal, Natural History Review
- 1870, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews
Quotes from Thomas Henry Huxley

- "The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance." (from "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews", 1870)

- "Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest skepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith." (from "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews", 1870)

- "The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification." (from "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews", 1870)

- "Like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as willful disobedience-incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are boxed." (from "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews", 1870)

- "If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes." (from "Administrative Nihilism", 1871)

- "The great tragedy of Science-the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." (from "Critiques and Addresses", 1873)

- "History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions." (from "Science and Culture and Other Essays", 1881)

- "Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors." (from "Science and Culture and Other Essays", 1881)

- ""Learn what is true in order to do what is right" is the summing up of the whole of duty of man." (from "Science and Culture and Other Essays", 1881)

- "I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything." (from a letter to Herbert Spencer, 1886)

- "The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying" (from "Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions, 1893)

- "If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?" (from "Collected Essays", 1895)

- "Truly it has been said, that to a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the Infinite may be seen." (from "Discourses, Biological and Geological Essays", 1896)

- "Economy does not lie in sparing money but in spending it wisely." (from "Aphorisms and Reflections")

- "True science and true religion are twin sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious; and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis." (from "Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical" by Herbert Spencer)

William James

(1842-1910)
Ideas

- Human consciousness is selective; it concentrates on some things and ignores others.

- Ideas and beliefs are essentially plans for organizing and structuring our experience and world.

- One cannot prove finally whether human action is free or determined, but there are good reasons, especially moral ones, for believing that human action involves freedom.

- A person's psychological makeup affects his or her religious experience, and that experience is best evaluated in terms of its moral quality.

- Pragmatism consists of two parts: It is a method for the determination of meaning, and it is a theory about the nature of truth.

- The truth or falsity of a judgment, its agreement or disagreement with reality, depends on obtaining or failing to obtain corroboration of the expectations that follow from the judgment in question.
Biography

William James (like his younger brother, Henry James, one of the important novelists of the nineteenth century) received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, thanks in large part to his fluency in both German and French. His early artistic bent led to an early apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but yielded in 1861 to scientific studies at Harvard University's Lawrence Scientific School.

In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical and mental difficulties, including problems with his eyes, back, stomach, and skin, as well as periods of depression in which he was tempted by the thought of suicide. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War, but the other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice) all suffered from periods of invalidism. James was, however, able to join Harvard's Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River in 1865.

The entire James family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts after William James decided to study medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in 1866; he obtained his degree in 1869 after several extended interruptions of his studies for illness, which led him to live for extended periods in Germany, in the search of cure. (It was at this time that he began to publish -- at first, reviews in literary periodicals like the North American Review.) What he called his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching.

James's time in Germany proved intellectually fertile, for his true interests were not in medicine but in philosophy and psychology. Later, in 1902 he would write: "I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave" (Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, p. 228).

James studied medicine, physiology, and biology, and began to teach in those subjects, but was drawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was constituting itself as a science. James's acquaintance with the work of figures like Hermann Helmholtz in Germany and Pierre Janet in France facilitated his introduction of courses in scientific psychology at Harvard University. He established one of the first -- he believed it to be the first -- laboratory of experimental psychology in the United States in Boylston Hall in 1875. (On the question of this claim to priority, see Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought [Yale Univ. Press, 1986], p. 486.)

William James spent his entire academic career at Harvard. He was appointed instructor in physiology in 1872, instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1873, assistant professor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, professor of psychology in 1889, professor of philosophy in 1897, and emeritus professor of philosophy in 1907.

Among James's students at Harvard were such luminaries as George Santayana, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Barton Perry, Gertrude Stein, Horace Kallen, Morris Raphael Cohen, Alain Locke, and C. I. Lewis.
Major Books of William James

- A Pluralistic Universe, 1909
- Collected Essays and Reviews, 1920
- The Correspondence of William James: Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1992-2004
- Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912
- Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, the Ingersoll Lecture, 1897
- Letters of William James, 1920
- The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to "Pragmatism", 1909
- Memories and Studies, 1911
- Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907
- The Principles of Psychology: Volumes 1 and 2 1890
- Psychology, Briefer Course, 1892
- Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy, 1911
- Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, 1899
- The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897
- Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 1902
- William James on Psychical Research, 1960
Major Articles of William James

- 1884, On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology, Mind
- 1884, What is an Emotion?, Mind
- 1884, Absolutism and Empiricism, Mind
- 1885, On the Function of Cognition, Mind
- 1887, The Perception of Space (1, 2, 3 and 4), Mind
- 1887, Phantasms of the Living, Science
- 1889, The Psychological Theory of Extension, Mind
- 1889, The Psychology of Belief, Mind
- 1890, Origin of Right-Handedness, Science
- 1893, The Original Datum of Space-Consciousness, Mind
- 1895, Is Life Worth Living?, International Journal of Ethics
- 1904, Does `Consciousness' Exist?, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods
- 1904, Humanism and Truth, Mind
- 1908, The Pragmatist Account of Truth and its Misunderstanders, The Philosophical Review
- 1908, "Truth" Versus "Truthfulness", The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods
- 1910, A Suggestion About Mysticism, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods
Quotes from William James

- "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "Genius ... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention. ...- But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "Habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate and diminishes fatigue." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallible right." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "Self-esteem = Success/Pretensions" (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "To make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy ... we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague." (from "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

- "A fact [may] not come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. ... Faith in a fact can help create the fact." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter. It is not only the size of the difference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its kind." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "The details vanish in the bird's-eye view; but so does the bird's-eye view vanish in the details." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as ... one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The community may evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this or that ferment decides in which way it shall evolve." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight-as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "Not every "man" fits every "hour." ... A given genius may come either too early or too late. Peter the Hermit would now be sent to a lunatic asylum. John [Stuart] Mill in the tenth century would have lived and died unknown." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "To be fertile in hypotheses is the first requisite [of creativity], and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "When walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile at some preposterously grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of the same reservoir. ... The grotesque conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten. The scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification. I read, write, experiment, consult experts. Everything corroborates my notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am enshrined in the Pantheon of great diviners of nature's ways. The environment preserves the conception which it was unable to produce in any brain less' idiosyncratic than my own." (from "The Will to Believe", 1897)

- "A genuine first-hand religious experience ... is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "As far as this world goes, anyone who makes an out-and-out saint of himself does so at his peril." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. ... Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "He can engage in actions and experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The hot place in a man's consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself and from which he works, call it the habitual center of his personal energy." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "If things are ever to move upward, someone must be ready to take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try nonresistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But nonresistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "If we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do we put our moral house in order." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Innumerable times [the saints] have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Mankind's common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis ... is the ecstasy of happiness produced." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "No adequate report of [mysticism's] contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Phenomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied in their germ and in their over-ripe decay." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The religious experience ... is that which lives itself out within the private breast. First-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Revivalism has always assumed that only its own type of religious experience can be perfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "There is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute, and we become aware of our oneness." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe ... takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God's demands." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "We never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proven itself to be incompatible." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "When the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "When the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Whenever ... wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms." (from "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature", 1902)

- "Man lives by habits, indeed, but what he lives for is thrills and excitements. The only relief from Habit's tediousness is periodical excitement. From time immemorial wars have been, especially for noncombatants, the supremely thrilling excitement." (from the dinner address before the World's Peace Congress in Boston, 1904)

- "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That-with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success-is our national disease." (from a letter to H. G. Wells, 1906)

- "In general, whether a given idea shall be a live idea depends more on the person into whose mind it is injected than on the idea itself." (from "The Energies of Men", 1906)

- "Experience ... has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas." (from "Pragmatism", 1907)

- "Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed." (from a letter to W. Lutoslawski, 1906)

- "I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences." (from "Pragmatism", 1907)

- "New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity." (from "Pragmatism", 1907)

- "History is a bath of blood." (from "The Moral Equivalent of War", 1910)

- "The intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing, and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the "peace"-interval." (from "The Moral Equivalent of War", 1910)

- "Men at large still live as they always have lived, under a pain-and-fear economy-for those of us who live in an ease-economy are but an island in the stormy ocean." (from "The Moral Equivalent of War", 1910)

- "There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir." (from "Memories and Studies", 1911)

- "A tremendous muchness is suddenly revealed." (from "The Mystic's Experience of God" by Rufus M. Jones)

- "The perfection of rottenness." (from "Portraits from Memory" by Bertrand Russell)

- "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." (attributed)

- "All new doctrine goes through three stages. It is attacked and declared absurd; then it is admitted as true and obvious but insignificant. Finally, its true importance is recognized and its adversaries claim the honor of having discovered it"

- "Medical materialism finished up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus "a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.""

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

(1694-1778)
Ideas

- All religions of the supernatural are based on ignorance and superstition.

- The natural and human evils in the world cannot be reconciled with the view that this is the best of all possible worlds.

- The order in the universe indicates that there is a Designer, but not necessarily a moral or immoral one.

- People should not be punished for their ideas.

- Although we can have no complete explanations of nature, the best accounts of nature are empirical and materialistic.

- There is a natural basis for ethics and justice.

- The human situation can be improved by eliminating superstition and fanaticism.
Biography

Francois Marie Arouet (pen name Voltaire) was born on November 21, 1694 in Paris. Voltaire's intelligence, wit and style made him one of France's greatest writers and philosophers.

Young Francois Marie received his education at "Louis-le-Grand," a Jesuit college in Paris where he said he learned nothing but "Latin and the Stupidities." He left school at 17 and soon made friends among the Parisian aristocrats. His humorous verses made him a favorite in society circles. In 1717, his sharp wit got him into trouble with the authorities. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven months for writing a scathing satire of the French government. During his time in prison Francois Marie wrote "Oedipe" which was to become his first theatrical success and adopted his pen name "Voltaire."

In 1726, Voltaire insulted the powerful young nobleman, "Chevalier De Rohan," and was given two options: imprisonment or exile. He chose exile and from 1726 to 1729 lived in England. While in England Voltaire was attracted to the philosophy of John Lockeand ideas of mathematician and scientist, Sir Isaac Newton. He studied England's Constitutional Monarchy and its religious tolerance. Voltaire was particularly interested in the philosophical rationalism of the time, and in the study of the natural sciences. After returning to Paris he wrote a book praising English customs and institutions. It was interpreted as criticism of the French government and in 1734, Voltaire was forced to leave Paris again.

At the invitation of his highly-intelligent woman friend, "Marquise du Chatelet," Voltaire moved into her "Chateau de Cirey" near Luneville in eastern France. They studied the natural sciences together for several years. In 1746, Voltaire was voted into the "Academie Francaise." In 1749, after the death of "Marquise du Chatelet" and at the invitation of the King of Prussia, "Frederick the Great," he moved to Potsdam (near Berlin in Germany). In 1753, Voltaire left Potsdam to return to France.

In 1759, Voltaire purchased an estate called "Ferney" near the French-Swiss border where he lived until just before of his death. Ferney soon became the intellectual capital of Europe. Voltaire worked continuously throughout the years, producing a constant flow of books, plays and other publications. He wrote hundreds of letters to his circle of friends. He was always a voice of reason. Voltaire was often an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution.

Voltaire returned to a hero's welcome in Paris at age 83. The excitement of the trip was too much for him and he died in Paris. Because of his criticism of the church Voltaire was denied burial in church ground. He was finally buried at an abbey in Champagne. In 1791 his remains were moved to a resting place at the Pantheon in Paris.

In 1814 a group of "ultras" (right-wing religious) stole Voltaire's remains and dumped them in a garbage heap. No one was the wiser for some 50 years. His enormous sarcophagus (opposite Rousseau's) was checked and the remains were gone. His heart, however, had been removed from his body, and now lies in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. His brain was also removed, but after a series of passings-on over 100 years, disappeared after an auction.
Major Works of Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

- Candide, or the Philosophy of Optimism, 1759
- Essay on Manners, 1754
- Letters Concerning the English Nation, 1733
- Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
- Philosophical Letters, 1734
- Questions on the Encyclopedia, 1764
- The Philosophy of Newton, 1738
- Remarks on Pascal, 1733
- Treatise on Metaphysics, 1734
- Treatise on Tolerance, 1763

Quotes from Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

- "Englishmen! You want to kill me because I am a Frenchman! Am I not punished enough, in not being an Englishman?" (to a Francophobic London crowd 1727)

- "Thou sleepest, Brutus, and yet Rome is in chains." (from "The Death of Caesar", 1731)

- "The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, the amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in." (from a letter to the police commissioner of Paris, 1733)

- "If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome, we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero." (from a letter to the police commissioner of Paris, 1733)

- "All styles are good, except the tiresome kind." (from "L'Enfant prodigue", 1736)

- "The secret of being a bore ... is to tell everything." (from "Discours en Veis Sur 1'Homme", 1737)

- "The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds." (from a letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, 1738)

- "The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it up or flee from it." (from a letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, 1738)

- "The first king was a successful soldier." (from "Merope", 1743)

- "He slandered the world in revenge for his complete lack of success in it." (from "Zadig", 1747)

- "I am persecuted by everything in the world, and even by things which are not!" (from "Zadig", 1747)

- "[The passions] are the winds that fill the ship's sails. Sometimes they submerge the ship, but without them the ship could not sail." (from "Zadig", 1747)

- "All roads lead to Rome." (from a letter to Madame de Fontaine, 1750)

- "Cacambo: What is optimism?
Candide: Alas! It is the mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched." (from "Candide, or the Philosophy of Optimism", 1759)

- "Dr. Pangloss: All events are linked up in this the best of all possible worlds." (from "Candide, or the Philosophy of Optimism", 1759)

- "In this country [England] it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others." (from "Candide, or the Philosophy of Optimism", 1759)

- "Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need." (from "Candide, or the Philosophy of Optimism", 1759)

- "A country cannot gain unless another loses." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "A divine power is at work in the sensation of the meanest insect as well as in the brain of a Newton." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens and giving it to the other." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "I have seen men incapable of learning, I have never seen any incapable of virtue." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "I would detest individual tyranny less than collective tyranny. A despot always has some good moments; a group of despots, never." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "If you are attacked on your style, never answer; your work alone should reply." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "In this world we run the risk of having to choose between being either the anvil or the hammer." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "It is impossible on our wretched globe for men living in society not to be divided into two classes, one of oppressors, the other of the oppressed." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "Madness is a disease of the brain, which necessarily prevents a man from thinking and acting like other men." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today may have wished to live had he waited a week." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "Men are born equal and ... violence and ability made the first masters. The present ones have been made by laws." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "The most superstitious times have always been those of the most horrible crimes." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "Nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the means which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "Our wretched species is so made that those who walk [on] the beaten path always throw stones at those who teach a new path." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "The punishment of criminals should be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing and a man condemned to public labor still serves the fatherland and is a living lesson." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "Reason consists of always seeing things as they are." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "The superstitious man is to the rascal what the slave is to the tyrant." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "There is no sect in geometry." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "There is only one morality ... just as there is only one geometry." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "This is the character of truth: it is of all time, It is for all men, it has only to show itself to be recognized, and one cannot argue against it." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "This self-love is the instrument of our conservation; it resembles the instrument that perpetuates the species: It is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it must be hidden." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "What is toleration? It is the prerogative of humanity. We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: Let us forgive one another's follies, it is the first law of nature." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "What is virtue, my friend? It is to do good. Do it, that is enough. We shall not worry about your motives." (from "Philosophical Dictionary", 1764)

- "Your nation is divided into two species: the one of idle monkeys, who mock at everything; and the other of tigers, who tear." (from a letter to Madame du Deffand, 1766)

- "Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings and speech only to conceal their thoughts." (from "Le Chapon et la Poularde", 1766)

- "We use ideas merely to justify our evil, and speech merely to conceal our ideas." (from "Le Chapon et la Poularde", 1766)

- "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one." (from a letter to Frederick II, 1767)

- "You are perfectly right, Sire. A wise and courageous prince, with money, troops, and laws, can perfectly well govern men without the aid of religion, "which was made only to deceive them; but the stupid people would soon make one for themselves, and as long as there are fools and rascals there will be religions." (from a letter to Frederick II, 1767)

- "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it." (from a letter to M. Damilaville, 1767)

- ""If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." I am rarely satisfied with my lines, but I own that I have a father's tenderness for that one." (from a letter to M. Saurin, 1770)

- "The body of an athlete and the soul of a sage-these are what we require to be happy." (from a letter to Helvetius)

- "If Machiavelli had had a prince for [his] disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him to do would have been to write a book against Machiavell[ian]ism." (from "Memoirs")

- "It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." (from "A Cynic's Breviary" by J. R. Solly)

- "Dieu et liberte! [God and liberty!]" (from "Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men" by Samuel Arthur Bent)

- "A consideration of petty circumstances is the tomb of great things." (from "My Study Windows" by James Russell Lowell)

- "The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

- "His Sacred Majesty, Chance, decides everything."

- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Saint Thomas Aquinas

(1224-1274)
Ideas

- The existence of God is not self-evident to reason, but it is demonstrable.

- In God, essence and existence are inseparable, indeed, identical: It belongs to 'what' God is 'that' God is.

- The essence of finite things is separable from their existence.

- The finite order receives its existence by 'participation' in the divine.

- God is not only the first cause of all motion in the finite order, he is also the concurrent cause of all the operations of the natural order.

- The substances of finite things consist in a union matter and form.

- The forms or ideas of things, therefore, subsist primarily in things rather than as independent extra-mental forms or as mental abstractions resting on examination of things.

- Human knowledge arises as a result of the intellectual analysis of the forms of things as they area accessible to sense perception.
Biography

Thomas Aquinas was born in his family's castle around the end of 1224, near Aquino. He was the youngest of seven kids that his family had. His father was a relative of Frederick II, Emperor of Sicily. In 1230, his parents presented him as an oblate to the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino (he was offered up for the religious life). In 1239, the conditions became dangerous, when the Pope and Frederick II had a quarrel, and Aquinas returned to his parent's home for a couple of months. Then, he went to study liberal arts at the University of Naples. His father died at Christmas time in 1243, and Thomas joined the Dominican Order at Naples.

His family was very displeased at this choice, and a month later while he was traveling with the Dominican General, his brothers kidnapped him, and brought him home. He was held captive for a year, and then his brothers let him go, and he traveled back to Paris to continue his studies as a novice.

In 1248, he went with the famous Dominican scholar Albert the Great to Cologne. Albert valued the many writings of Aristotle and passed them on to Aquinas. Aquinas was very large, physically, and quiet. Many of the other students called him "the dumb ox", and Aquinas said that one day the entire world would be listening to the bellowing of this "dumb ox". In 1251, Aquinas was ordained a priest at Cologne, and he went to Paris to continue his studies. In the spring of 1256, he received his licentiate in theology and became a master of theology, and became a teacher at the University of Paris.

From 1256 to 1259, Aquinas served as regent master of theology at Paris. In 1259 he was appointed Preacher General in Italy. In 1265, he was sent to Rome to serve as Regent Master.

In November of 1268, he returned to the University of Paris. Classes were suspended in early 1272, and in the spring of 1272 he returned to Naples to start a Dominican house of studies. In December of 1273, he had an experience in church, in which he says that during mass he felt that all he had written was insignificant, and he ceased writing. In 1274, Pope Gregory X summoned him to the Council of Lyons in France, and on the way he fell ill, and stopped at his sister's house. He died in a Cistercian monastery at Fossanuova on March 7, 1274. Exactly three years after his death the Bishop of Paris condemned 219 propositions, including Aquinas's. In 1278, a General Chapter of Dominicans upheld Aquinas's views.

On July 18, 1323 Pope John XXII at Avignon canonized Aquinas. Soon after, the Archbishop of Paris revoked the condemnation of Aquinas's teachings.
Major Works of Saint Thomas Aquinas

- Catena Aurea
- De Anima (On the Soul), 1259-1267
- De Ente et Essentia (On Being and Essence)
- De Magistro (The Teacher)
- De Veritate (On Truth), 1256-1259
- Opera Omnia
- Human Nature
- Summa Contra Gentiles: Book 1: God, 1259-1267
- Summa Contra Gentiles: Book 2: Creation, 1259-1267
- Summa Contra Gentiles: Book 3: Providence, 1259-1267
- Summa Contra Gentiles: Book 4: Salvation, 1259-1267
- Summa Theologiae, 1265-1273
Quotes from Saint Thomas Aquinas

- "My writing days are over; for such things have been revealed to me that all I have written and taught seems of but small account to me." (from "Summit Theologica")

- "If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." (from "1999: Victory Without War" by Richard M. Nixon)

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

(1813-1855)
Ideas

- As human beings, we are often in situations in which we must choose between incompatibloe alternatives.

- God may place us religiously in paradoxical situations of anguished choice as a test of faith.

- There are objective problems, but they cannot be answered objectively for the person, who must decide about his or her subjective relation.

- We live aesthetucally without commitment, but ethical situations demand decisions from us that are decisive.

- The individual is more important than the universal.

- Uncertainty permeates human life and is only overcome by human decisiveness.

- Paradox stands at the center of all human existence.

- The essential self lives inwardly in ways that cannot be given full outward expression.
Biography

Søren Kierkegaard was born to an affluent family in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a strongly religious man. Convinced that he had earned God's wrath, he believed that none of his children would live to the age of 34. The sins necessitating this punishment, he believed, included cursing the name of God in his youth, and possibly impregnating Kierkegaard's mother out of wedlock. In fact, his predictions were realized for all but two of his seven children.

This early introduction to the notion of sin, and its connection from father and son, laid the foundation for much of Kierkegaard's work (particularly Fear and Trembling). Kierkegaard's mother, Anne Sørensdatter Lund Kierkegaard, is not directly referred to in his books, although she too affected his later writings.

Despite his father's occasional religious melancholy, Kierkegaard and his father shared a close bond. Kierkegaard learned to explore the realm of his imagination through a series of exercises and games they played together.

Another important aspect of Kierkegaard's life (generally considered to have had a major influence on his work) was his broken engagement to Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard's motive for ending the engagement remains mysterious. It is generally believed that the two were deeply in love -- perhaps even after she married Johan Frederik Schlegel (1817-1896), a prominent civil servant (not to be confused with the German philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel, 1772-1829). For the most part, their contact was limited to chance meetings on the streets of Copenhagen. Some years later, however, Kierkegaard went so far as to ask Regine's husband for permission to speak with her, but was refused. Soon afterward, the couple left the country, Schlegel having been appointed Governor in the Danish West Indies. By the time Regine returned, Kierkegaard was dead. Regine Schlegel lived until 1904, and upon her death she was buried near Kierkegaard in the Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen.

Kierkegaard's final years (1854-1855) were taken up with a sustained attack on the Danish State Church by means of newspaper articles published in The Fatherland (Fædrelandet) and a series of self-published pamphlets called The Moment (Øieblikket). Kierkegaard was initially called to action by a speech by Professor Hans Lassen Martensen, which called his recently deceased predecessor Bishop Jakob P. Mynster a "truth-witness, one of the authentic truth-witnesses." Kierkegaard had an affection towards Mynster, but had come to see that his conception of Christianity was in man's interest, rather than God's, and in no way was Mynster's life comparable to that of a 'truth-witness.'

On 2 October, 1855, before the tenth number of the Moment could be published, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street and was taken to hospital. He stayed in the hospital for nearly a month and refused to receive communion from a priest of the church, whom Kierkegaard regarded as merely officials and not servants of God. He said to his friend since boyhood Emil Boesen, who kept a record of his conversations and was himself a pastor, that his life had been one of great and unknown suffering, which looked like vanity to others but was not. Kierkegaard died in Frederick's Hospital after being there for over a month, possibly from complications from a fall he had taken from a tree when he was a boy. He was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen.

At Kierkegaard's burial at Assistents Cemetery, his nephew Henrik Lund caused a disturbance by protesting that Kierkegaard was being buried by the official church even though in his life he had broken from and denounced it. Lund was later fined.
Major Works of Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

- Christian Discourses, 1848
- The Concept of Dread, 1844
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 1846
- Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits, 1847
- Either/Or, 1843
- Fear and Trembling, 1843
- On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, 1841
- Philosophical Fragments, 1844
- Practice in Christianity, 1850
- Repetition, 1843
- Sickness unto Death, 1848
- Stages on Life's Way, 1845
- Works of Love, 1847
Quotes from Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

- "Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown." (from his journal, 1835)

- "Oh, cursed be that arrogant satisfaction in standing alone." (from his journal, 1838)

- "My life has been brought to an impasse, I loathe existence. ... Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?" (from "Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology", 1841)

- "Twaddle, rubbish, and gossip is what people want, not action. ... The secret of life is to chatter freely about all one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented-and then do nothing." (from his journal, 1846)

- "To love one's self in the right way and to love one's neighbor are absolutely analogous concepts, are at bottom one and the same." (from "Works of Love", 1847)

- "Far from all disturbances, suffering too a little from melancholy, I throw myself into my work on a tremendous scale." (from his journal, 1848)

Socrates

(469-399 BC)

Socrates, the celebrated Greek philosopher and moralist, was born at Athens in the year 469 B.C. His father, Sophroniskus, was a sculptor and he followed the same profession in the early part of his life. His family was respectable in descent, but humble in point of means. He had the usual education of the Athenian citizen, which included not only a knowledge of the mother tongue, and readings in the Greek poets, but also the elements of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy as then known. Excepting in connection with his philosophical career, few circumstances of his life are known. He served as a hoplite, or heavy-armed foot-soldier, at the siege of Potidaea, at the battle of Deliurn, and at Amphipolis, and his bravery and endurance were greatly extolled by his friends.

An interesting thing about Socrates was that his religious thoughts were very different from basically about everybody during that time. While the Greeks were busy worrying about pleasing some petty gods running around on top of Mount Olympus, Socrates was focused on the idea of a much greater and perfect God that created everything and that watched over all of us. He thought that there was a higher and greater God than that of the pagan Greek gods. Socrates would make fun of the Greek gods through the Iliad and the Odessy. He would read sections of them to his students, talking about their jealousy and pride. Socrates would wonder how people actually believe them to be gods as imperfect as they were. To Socrates they were just immortal humans with magical powers.

Somewhere about the middle period of his life, he relinquished his profession as statuary, and gave himself up to the career that made him famous. Deservedly styled a philosopher, he neither secluded himself for study, nor opened a school for the regular instruction of pupils. He disclaimed the appellation of teacher; his practice was to talk or converse, "to prattle without end," as his enemies said. Early in the morning he frequented the public walks, the gymnasia for bodily training, and the school where youths were receiving instruction; he was to be seen at the market-place at the hour when it was most crowded, among the booths and tables where goods were exposed for sale. His whole day was usually spent in this public manner. He talked with any one, young or old, rich or poor, who sought to address him, and in the hearing of all who stood by. As it was engaging, curious, and instrutive to hear, certain persons made it their habit to attend him in public as companions and listeners.

Another peculiarity of Socrates was his persuasion of a special religious mission, of which he believed that he had received oracular intimation. About the time when he began to have repute as a wise man, an admirer and friend, Chaerephon, consulted the oracle at Delphi, as to whether any man was wiser than Socrates. The priestess replied "none." The answer, he said, perplexed him very much; for he was conscious to himself that he possessed no wisdom, on any subject, great or small. At length he resolved to put the matter to the test, by taking measure of the wisdom of other persons as compared with his own. Seleting a leading politician, accounted wise by himself and others, he put a series of questions to him, and found his supposed wisdom was no wisdom at all. He next tried to demonstrate to the politician himself how much he was deficient; but he refused to be convinced. He then saw a meaning in the oracle, to the effect that his superiority to others lay not in his wisdom, but in his being fully conscious of his ignorance. He tried the same experiment on other politicians, then on poets, and lastly on artists and artisans, and with the same result. Thereupon, he considered it as a duty imposed on him by the Delphian god, to cross-question men of all degrees, as to their knowledge, to make them conscious of their ignorance, and so put them in the way of becoming wise. According to Xenophon, he would pass from his severe cross-questioning method, and address to his hearers plain and homely precepts, inculcating self-control, temperance, piety, duty to parents, brotherly love, fidehty in friendship, diligelice, etc.

Cicero said that "Socrates brought down philosophy from the the heavens to the earth." The previous philosophies consisted of vast and vague speculations on nature as a whole, blending together Cosmogony, Astronomy, Geometry, Physics, Metaphysics, etc. Socrates had studied these systems, and they had left on his mind a feeling of emptiness and unsuitability for any human purpose. It seemed to him that men's endeavors after knowledge would be better directed to human relationships, as involving men's practical concerns. Accordingly he was the first to proclaim that "the proper study of mankind is man;" human nature, human duties and human happiness make up a field of really urgent and profitable inquiry.

In the year 400 B.C., an indictment was laid against Socrates, in the following terms; "Socates is guilty of crime; first, for not worshipping the gods whom the city worships, and for introducing new divinities of his own; next for corrupting the youth. The penalty due is death." The trial took place before a court composed of citizen-judges, like modern-day juries, but far more numerous; the number present seems to have been 557.

His defense is preserved by Plato, under the title Apology of Socrates. He dwelt on his mission to convit men of their ignorance for their ultimate benefit; pronounced himself a public blessing to the Athenians; declared that if his life was preserved he would continue in the same course; and regarded the prospect of death with utter indifference. By a majority of five or six he was adjudged guilty and sentenced to death by poison. The last day of his life he passed in conversation with his friends on the Immortality of the soul. He then drank the hemlock, and passed away with the dignity and calmness becoming his past career.
Major Works of Socrates

- Although Socrates never wrote anything of his own, we did manage to come to know and understand Socrates’s thoughts and methods through some dialogs recorded mostly by his follower and disciplePlato. We can’t exactly be sure that these are all of Socrates’s words. Probably the closest record of Socrates’s actual words was his farewell speech given while he was in court called The Apology.
Quotes from Socrates

- "A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong-acting the part of a good man or of a bad." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "[The affidavit] says that Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new divinities of his own." (when he sentenced to death from "Apology" by Plato)

- "Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?" (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "I have a sufficient witness to the truth of what I say-my poverty." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "If you think that by killing men you can prevent someone from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken. That is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable. The easiest and noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet and saying to him after my manner: You, my friend-a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens-are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all!" (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "Neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man to use every way of escaping death. ... The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "O men of Athens ... either acquit me or not; but whichever you do, understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "The unexamined life is not worth living." (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "Young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing; and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: this confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!" (from "Apology" by Plato)

- "This is ... self-knowledge-for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know." (from "Charmides" by Plato)

- "Speech is a kind of action." (from "Cratylus" by Plato)

- "The worst of all deceptions is self-deception." (from "Cratylus" by Plato)

- "Doing evil in return for evil ... is the morality of the many. ...
We ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him." (from "Crito" by Plato)

- "The nearest way to glory ... is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be." (from "De officiis" by Cicero)

- "A man may be thought wise; but the Athenians, I suspect, do not much trouble themselves about him unless he begins to impart his wisdom to others." (from "Euthyphro" by Plato)

- "The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods." (from "Ion" by Plato)

- "Anonymous: Should I marry or not?
Socrates: Whichever you do you will repent it." (from "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius)

- "How many things I can do without." (from "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius)

- "I am nearest to the gods in that I have the fewest wants." (from "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius)

- "It takes two to make a quarrel." (from "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius)

- "The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live." (from "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius)

- "There is only one good, that is, knowledge; and only one evil, that is, ignorance." (from "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius)

- "If the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal. Wherefore be of good cheer, and try to recollect what you do not know, or rather what you do not remember." (from "Meno" by Plato)

- "Virtue comes to the virtuous by the gift of God." (from "Meno" by Plato)

- "The highest wisdom consistts] in distinguishing between good and evil." (from "Moral Letters to Lucilius" by Seneca the Younger)

- "Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels." (from "Moral Letters to Lucilius" by Seneca the Younger)

- "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?." (from "Phaedo" by Plato)

- "I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of Socrates: agree with me, if I seem to you to be speaking the truth; or if not, withstand me might and main, that I may not deceive you as well as myself in my enthusiasm, and like the bee, leave my sting in you before I die." (from "Phaedo" by Plato)

- "Let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who having cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him and working harm rather than good, has sought after the pleasures of knowledge; and has arrayed the soul, not in some foreign attire, but in her own proper jewels: temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth-in these adorned she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her hour comes." (from "Phaedo" by Plato)

- "Let us suppose that there are two sorts of existences-one seen, the other unseen. ...
The seen is the changing, and the unseen is the unchanging." (from "Phaedo" by Plato)

- "Wars are occasioned by the love of money." (from "Phaedo" by Plato)

- "I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my business." (from "Representative Men" by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

- "Memory, the mother of the Muses." (from "Theaetetus" by Plato)

- "Nothing ever is, but all things are becoming. ... All things are the offspring of flux and motion." (from "Theaetetus" by Plato)

- "Philosophy begins in wonder." (from "Theaetetus" by Plato)

Self-Respect is an empowering emotion that can be cultivated.

—Thoreau said,

"What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."

"Man is the artificer of his own happiness." — Journal, 21 January 1838

Have a clear idea of the person you wish to be then begin acting like you are already that person, show compassion and do random acts of kindness if that is your goal. Start now, where you are with the tools at hand.

Starving People, Droughts and Pestilence

John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919.
The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

John Keats. (1795–1821)

Ode to a Nightingale


MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,  5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades  75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?  80