Will Durant

“ Philosophy is too divinely splendid a thing to be kept from the most divine of things,—creation. Some of us love it as the very breath of our lives; it is our vital medium, without which life would be less than vegetation; and we will not rest so long as the name philosopher means anything less aspiring and inspiring than it did with Plato. Science flourishes and philosophy languishes, because science is honest and philosophy sycophantic, because science touches life and helps it, while philosophy shrinks fearfully and helplessly away. ”

“ You say we cannot be your comrades, your friends; that we can be only tyrants or slaves; but what else can we be, with all the instructive wealth of life kept from us? You hide from us the great books that are being written to-day, and then you are surprised at our gossip, our silly scandal-mongering, our inability to converse with you on business and politics, on science and religion and philosophy; you will not let us grow, and then you complain because we are so small. But we want to grow now, we want to grow! We cannot longer be mothers only. The world does not need so many children ”

“ He feels the exhilaration of one who has burst free from the shackles of intellectual authority: he sees before him an uncharted future, raw material for hands that dare to mould it; and he dares. All his life long he is mixed up with the heart of things; every day is an adventure. Exiled from politics he plunges gladly into the field of scientific reconstruction; he does not forget that he is an administrator, any more than Plato could forget that he was a dramatist; he finds the world of thought a chaos, and bequeaths it a planful process for the coördination of human life ”

“ Truth that but hungers to be felt or seen;
and again we are hot with the passion for perfection. We will remake. We will wonder and desire and dream and plan and try. We are such beings as dream and plan and try; and the glory of our defeats dims the splendor of the sun. We will take thought and add a cubit to our stature; we will bring intelligence to the test and call it together from all corners of the earth; we will harness the genius of the race and renew creation. ”

“ Are not belief and disbelief in private property determined less by logic and “justice” than by one’s own success or failure in the acquisition of private property? Do only the weak and uncontrolled advocate absolute lack of restraint? Do most men want liberty so much that they will tolerate chaos and a devil-take-the-hind-most individualism for the sake of it? Can it be, after all, that freedom is a negative thing,—that what men want is, for some, achievement, for others, peace,—and that for these they will give even freedom? ”

“ And yet if there is no remedy for men’s ills in this nascent science and renascent philosophy, in what other quarter, then, shall men look for hope and cure?
There is no other, Bacon feels; unless victory is first won in the laboratory and the study it will never be won in political assemblies; no plebiscite or royal edict, but only truth, can make men free. Man’s hope lies in the reorganization of the processes of discovery and interpretation. Unless philosophy and science be born again of social aims and social needs they cannot have life in them. A new spirit must enter. ”

“ Perhaps we are at the bottom of our spiritual toboggan, and an ascending movement is around the corner of the years. Now that our Christian bubble has burst into Schopenhauer, we are left free to recover some part of the joyous strength of the ancients. Let us become again as little children, unspoiled by religion and morality; let us forget what it is to feel sinful; let the thousandfold laughter of children clear the air of the odor of decay. Let us begin anew; and the soul will rise and overflow all its margins with the joy of rediscovered life. [220] Life has not deceived us! ”

“ This does not mean that all ethics lies compact in the shibboleth, “Be yourself.” Those who make the least sparing use of this phrase are too apt to consider it an excuse for lives that reek with the heat of passion and smack of insufficient evolution. These people need to be reminded—all the more forcibly since the most palatable and up-to-date philosophies exalt instinct and deride thought—that one cannot be thoroughly one’s self except by deliberation and intelligence. To act indeliberately is not to be, but in great part to cancel, one’s self. ”

“ Here for order’s sake are sacrificed that communal plasticity, that freedom of variety, that happy looseness and changeability of structure, in which lie all the suggestion and potency of social reconstruction. If there is any lesson which shines out through all the kaleidoscope of history, it is that a political system is doomed to early death if its charter offer no provision and facility for its own reform. Plasticity is king. Human ideals change, and leave nations, institutions, even gods, in their wake. ”

“ You are a Socialist; and you yearn for a Utopia of friends and equals; but will you, to make men equal, be compelled to chain the strength of the strong with many laws and omnipresent force?—will you sacrifice the superiority of the chosen few to the mediocrity of the many? Will you, to control the exploiter, be obliged to control all men, even in detail?—will your socialism really bring the slavery and servile state that Spencer and Chesterton and Belloc fear? Is further centralization of government desirable? ”

“ There was a higher law than the laws of men,—a natural law, engraved in every heart, and judge of every other law. The conscience of the individual was above the dictates of any state. All radicalisms lay compact in that pronouncement. Plato, prolific of innovations though he was, yet shrank from such a leap into the new. But the Sophists pressed their point, men listened to them, and the Greek world changed. When Socrates appeared, he found that world all out of joint, a war of all against all, a stridency of uncoördinated personalities rushing into chaos. ”

“ We are expert eyes, asked to point the way; and all that we report is that there is nothing to see, and nowhere to go. We are without even a partial sense of the awful responsibility of intelligence.
It is time we put this problem of knowledge, even the problem of the validity of knowledge, into the hands of science. How we come to know, what the process of knowledge is, what “truth” is,—all these are questions of fact; they are problems for the science of psychology, they are not problems for philosophy. ”

“ Men would turn to these reports all the more willingly because the reports were pledged to confine themselves to fact. Men would find here no attacks, no argument, no theory or creed; it would be refreshing, in some ways, to bathe the mind, hot with contention, in these cool streams of fact, and to emerge cleansed of error and filled with the vitality of truth. We have spent so much time attacking what we hate that we have not stopped to tell people what we like; if we would only affirm more and deny less there would be less of cross-purpose in the world. And information is affirmation. ”

“ He will not permit himself to be praised; he does what serves his purpose. The essence of him is that he has a purpose, for which he will not hesitate to run all risks, even to sacrifice men, to bend their backs to the worst. That something may exist which is a hundred times more important than the question whether he feels well or unwell, and therefore too whether the others feel well or unwell: this is a fundamental instinct of his nature. To have a purpose, and to cleave to it through all dangers till it be achieved,—that is his great passion, that is himself. ”

“ Without the power to form concepts we could never turn experience to use, it would slip between our fingers; we should be like the maidens condemned to carry water in a sieve. The idea of anything is the sum of its observed constancies of behavior; hence the medium of our adaptation and control. To have ideas of things is to know the map or plan of things; it is to see tendencies, directions, and results; it is to know how to use things. That is why knowledge is power; every idea is a tool with which to bend the world to serve our will. ”

“ Some of them are even learning the old truth that war is good in itself, aside from any gain in land or other wealth; instead of saying “A good cause will hallow every war,” they learn to say “A good war hallows every cause.” When the instincts of a society ultimately make it give up war and conquest, it is decadent: it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers. A state which should prevent war would not only be committing suicide (for war is just as necessary to the state as the slave is to society) ; it would be hostile to life, it would be an outrage on the future of man. ”

“ We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be loved even for the errors he has made. But above all we love him because of his high passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation, but for the remoulding, of the world. ”

“ We shall not rest until we have freed ourselves from the sting of your generosity; until our bread comes not from your hand in kindness but from the state or our employers in recognition of our work. Then we shall be free to leave you, and you free to leave us, as we were free to take one another at the beginning,—so far, alas! as the categorical imperative of love left us free. And our children will not suffer; better for them that they see us part than that they live with us in the midst of hypocrisy and secret war. ”

“ He is a sceptic (not that he must appear to be one) ; freedom from any kind of conviction is a necessary factor in his strength of will. He does not make propaganda or proselytes; he keeps his ideals to himself as distinctions; his opinion is his opinion: another person has not easily a right to it; he has renounced the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. He knows that he cannot reveal himself to anybody; like everything profound, he loves the mask; he does not descend to familiarity; and is not familiar when people think he is. If he cannot lead, he walks alone. ”

“ BUT what is justice?—asks Plato. Don’t you see that our notion of justice is the very crux of the whole business? Is justice merely a matter of telling the truth? Nonsense; it may be well to have our children believe that; but those who are not children know that if a lie is a better instrument of achievement than the truth in some given juncture of events, then a lie is justified. Truth is a social value, and has its justification only in that; if untruth prove here and there of social value, then untruth is just. ”

“ The Sophists were the first group of men in Greece to overcome the natural tendency to acquiesce in the given order of things. They were proud men,—humility is a vice that never found root in Greece,—and they had a buoyant confidence in the newly discovered power of human intelligence. They assumed, in harmony with the spirit of all Greek achievement, that in the development and extension of knowledge lay the road to a sane and significant life, individual and communal; and in the quest for knowledge they were resolved to scrutinize unawed all institutions, prejudices, customs, morals. ”

“ The strongest objection to the Socratic doctrine is that intelligence is not a creator, but only a servant, of ends. What we shall consider to be our good appears to be determined not by reason, but by desire. Reason itself seems but the valet of desire, ready to do for it every manner of menial service. Desire is an adept at marshalling before intelligence such facts as favor the wish, and turns the mind’s eye resolutely away from other truth, as a magician distracts the attention of his audience while his hands perform their wonders. ”

“ Think of letting a man build the world’s greatest bridge because he is popular! You accuse me of plagiarizing from Pythagoras, but in truth, you who believe in democracy are the Pythagoreans of politics,—you believe in number as your god. Your equality is the equality of the unequal, and is all a matter of words and never of reality; your liberty is anarchy, it is the congenital sickness wherein your democracy was conceived and delivered, and whereof it inevitably dies; your freedom of speech is a license to lie ”

“ Slavery, let us understand it well, is the necessary price of culture; the free work, or art, of some involves the compulsory labor of others. As in the organism so in society: the higher function is possible only through the subjection of the lower functions. A high civilization is a pyramid; it can stand only on a broad base, its first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. In order that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected. ”

“ We workers must get hold of the offices, and turn government into administration. Without that our strikes and boycotts, our ‘direct action’ and economic organization, arrive at little result; every strike we ‘win’ means that prices will go up, and our time and energy—and dues—have gone to nothing but self-discipline in solidarity. We can control prices only by controlling monopolies; and we can control monopolies only by controlling government. That means politics, and it’s a scheme that won’t work until the proletariat get brains enough to elect honest and sensible men to office ”

“ We see him as above all a lover of life: strong enough, too, to love life without deceiving himself about it. There is no memento mori here; rather a memento vivere; rich instincts call for much living. A hard man, loving danger and difficulty: what does not kill him, he feels, leaves him stronger. Pleasure—pleasure as it is understood by the rich—is repugnant to him: he seeks not pleasure but work, not happiness but responsibility and achievement. ”

“ Perhaps only children and geniuses can be truly anarchistic? Perhaps freedom itself is a problem and not a solution? Does the mechanization, through law and custom, of certain elements in our social behavior, like the mechanization, through habit and instinct, of certain elements in individual behavior, result in greater freedom for the higher powers and functions? Again, to have freedom for all, all must be equal; but does not development make for differentiation and inequality? ”

“ We do not seem to understand how much of the past is dead, how much of it is but a drag on the imaginative courage that dares to think of a future different from the past, and better. Philosophy is too much a study of the details of superseded systems; it is too little the study of the miraculous living moment in which the past melts into the present and the future finds creation. ”

“ All pantheism tends to quietism; to see things sub specie eternitatis may very well pass from the attitude of the scientist to the attitude of the mystic who has no interest in temporal affairs. It is the task of philosophy to study the eternal and universal not for its own sake but for its worth in directing us through the maze of temporal particulars; the philosopher must be like the mariner who guides himself through space and time by gazing at the everlasting stars. It is wholesome that the history of philosophy should begin with Thales ”

“ But a world fed on self-sacrifice is a world of lies, a world choking with the stench of hypocrisy. To preach self-sacrifice is not to solve, it is precisely to shirk, the problem of ethics,—the problem of eliminating individual self-sacrifice while preserving social stability: the problem of reconciling the individual as such with the individual as citizen. Or will our leaders try to replace superstition with an extended physical compulsion, making the policeman and the prison do all the work of social coördination? ”