Adversaria (22)
‘When ideas are dead their ghosts usually walk; but no ghost walks for ever, and the main thing is for the people they haunt to remember that they are only ghosts’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 149f.; cf. another ghost)
‘For when a master is instructing his scholar, if the scholar understand all the parts of the thing defined, which are resolved in the definition, and yet will not admit of the definition, there needs no further controversy betwixt then, it being all one as if he refused to be taught. But if he understand nothing, then certainly the definition is faulty; for the nature of a definition consists in this, that it exhibit a clear idea of the thing defined; and principle are either known by themselves, or else they are not principles’ —Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore, VI.15)
‘Rembrandt’s scenes of the Old Testament permit us to trace the course of the artist’s own life, since the ancient stories become real to him only through the medium of his own experiences; but vice versa, the old figures furnish him with a better approach toward his own life. Just so the Greek discovered the human intellect—by reading it into myths’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 206)
‘…this kind of metaphor may be appropriate, it may be striking, and even witty, but it lacks the element of necessity which would make it philosophically profitable’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 198)
‘According to the eudaemonistic theory of ethics the guilty conscience proves that moral conduct may safely be founded on a refined and intelligent understanding of happiness and unhappiness. […] The upshot of these reflexions was that those who speculated on the subject of happiness and morality, like those who talked of profit and morality, did not content themselves with the promise of ease and complacency as the rewards of a moral life. Instead, they granted virtue the prospect of a permanent “inner” happiness, that that is simply the assurance of having done no wrong’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 163f.)