Minim

“ Whether minima or meer minima may not be compar'd by their sooner or later evanescence, as well as by more or less points, so that one sensible may be greater than another, though it exceeds it not by one point? ”

“ According to Thomas Morley (A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical Music, 1597) , its introduction into manuscript music is ascribed to Phillipus de Vitriaco, a musician of the 14th century.
In medicine a minim is the smallest fluid measure, being equal to one drop. Sixty minims make a fluid drachm. ”

“ As an empirical rule, the principle of the minimum is, no doubt, essential to the scientific method. To erect it into a metaphysical axiom, however, is preposterous; for simple explanations are not necessarily true explanations. ”

“ In other words, the minimum in each sphere of being contains implicitly in itself the whole reality of that sphere. The minimum is its substance, not merely the ultimate of analysis, but the actual source, the [Pg 232] dynamic origin of reality, as God is implicitly the whole universe and also the source of the universe as it actually exists. It is because the minimum is all reality, is the maximum, that the knowledge of it gives us that of the whole. ”

“ The tendency is for actual perception to limit itself to the minimum which will serve as sign. But, in the second place, since it is never wholly so limited, since there is always a surplusage of perceived object, the fact stated in the objection is admitted. ”

“ We answer that it is an image in which not one single minimum is in itself reversed, but in which all the minima are transposed merely in relation to one another. The inversion regards merely the relative position of the minima, and not the minima themselves. Thus, the upward part of each minimum in the object must also point upwards in the image on the retina. ”

“ Give me the statistics of pyrotechnic powder burnt by a people, and I shall tell you the standard measure of their souls and bodies. If the figure be a maximum, then the physical and moral measure will be the minimum, for the ratio is inverse. ”

“ "A well-used minimum suffices for everything." ”

“ And I for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is it to be,—that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide. ”

“ By this illustration, then, we obtain a rule to determine what one ought to take from him who has the greater, and what to add to him who has the less. The excess of the mean over the less must be added to the less, and the excess of the greater over the mean be taken from the greater. ”

“ What is this universality, and where is its limit? It is this: that all individuals, without an exception, have a special moral destination of their own; and whatever this destination is for every particular individual, lies beyond the limit. ”

“ Knowledge of our circumstances.—We may estimate our forces but not our force. Circumstances do not only conceal it from and show it to us—nay, they even exaggerate and diminish it. We ought to consider ourselves variable quantities whose active power may, under specially favourable circumstances, become equivalent to that of the highest order. We ought, therefore, to weigh the circumstances, and spare no effort in studying them. ”

“ And from hence it may be understood, that the proportions of excess and defect are quantity, being capable of more and less; but the proportion of equality is not quantity, because not capable neither of more, nor of less. ”

“ It may be possible, however, to bring out more clearly the principle on which common-sense proceeds in deciding what chance will and will not account for, although our exposition amounts only to making more clear what it is that we mean by chance as distinguished from assignable reason. ”

“ In actuality there is, from the very beginning onward, nothing but just these individually limited and definite qualities, from which only we, by our comparative thinking, subsequently form the abstraction of a universal, unmoulded ‘Quality.’ And it is precisely the aforesaid limited qualities that are the things themselves. ”

“ With some people it is a condition which is present all the time. Now you take a condition which is present all the time, and the results of that condition will be uniform; this uniformity of result will in time become monotonous; monotonousness, by the law of its being, is fatiguing. ”

“ Thus interpreted, the maxim loses much of its vitality and significance: it becomes irrelevant, and indeed misleading: it turns the footsteps of inquirers off into a wrong path. For the proper question is not, What is the strength or the weakness, the extent or the limitations, of man's capacities? ”

“ Why rob one to feed the other?
“If you adopt, as absolute, a standard of evenness which is so only relatively, your results will not be absolutely even. If you adopt, as absolute, a criterion of right which is so only relatively, your results will not be absolutely right. ”

“ In an affirmative mood, with one premiss particular, only one term can be distributed in the premisses, and this cannot be the Minor without leaving the Middle undistributed. In a negative mood, with one premiss particular, only two terms can be distributed, and the Minor cannot be one of them without leaving either the Middle or the Major undistributed. ”

“ How far such expectations are rational, and with what degrees of confidence they should be entertained, are the questions for the Logic of Inference, but we may first note that we do as a matter of habit found expectations on repeated coincidence, and indeed guide our daily life in this way. If we meet a man repeatedly in the street at a certain hour, we go out expecting to meet him: it is a shock to our expectations, a surprise, when we do not. ”

“ How, then, are they intermediate, when they have three things in common with the lowest, and only one in common with the highest? Who does not see that the intermediate position is abandoned in proportion as they tend to, and are depressed towards, the lowest extreme? ”

“ These are some of those Difficulties which arise from Discourses which our finite Understanding makes about Infinites, by ascribing to them Attributes which we give to Things finite and terminate, which I think most improper, because those Attributes of Majority, Minority, and Equality, agree not with Infinities, of which we can’t say that one is greater than, less than, or equal to another. ”

“ The mere equality of the alternatives, supposing them to be perfectly equal, would justify us as much in expecting that each would have its turn in a single revolution of the series, in one complete cycle of the alternatives. ”

“ The maxims derived from this study may be called maxims of abstract or absolute right; they are not absolutely universal, ‘eternal and immutable,’ but they are independent of the individual, and practically universal for the present condition of the human species. ”

“ The general notion of the Unconditioned is the same in all these cases, and all must finally culminate in the last, the Unconditioned par excellence. The general notion is that of the One as distinguished from the Many, the substance from its accidents, the permanent reality from its variable modifications. ”

“ The problem that confronts you, then, in either kind of analysis, however formal or informal it may be, is, How shall I go to work? The first necessity is the choosing of a basis for division of the subject, whether it be in classification or partition. The necessity for this arises from the demand of the human mind for logical consistency. Life seems often wildly inconsistent, but we demand that explanation of it or any phase of it be arranged according to what seems to us some logical law of progression, some consistent point of view. ”

“ The application of the principle in human affairs is rendered uncertain by the immense complication of the phenomena, the difficulty of experiment, and the special liability of our judgments to prejudice. That men and communities of men are influenced by circumstances is not to be denied, and the influence of circumstances, if it is to be traced at all, must be traced through observed facts. Observation of the succession of phenomena must be part at least of any method of tracing cause and effect. ”

“ In certain branches of science we can ascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference between our own judgments and an average standard: may there not be some corresponding correction of our personal partialities in moral theorizing? ”

“ The numbers present, therefore, in proportion to the demand for men, constituted one of the life conditions. It is a life condition which is subject to constant variation, and one in regard to which the sanctions of wise action are prompt and severe. ”

“ Soon disciples joined him, and with the bishop’s approval he built a church and monastery. At first they called themselves “Hermits of St Francis”; but the object they proposed to themselves was to go beyond even the strict Franciscans in fasts and bodily austerities of all kinds, in poverty and in humility; and therefore, as the Franciscans were the Minors (minores, less) , the new order took the name of Minims (minimi, least) . By 1474 a number of houses had been established in southern Italy and Sicily, and the order was recognized and approved by the pope. ”

“ But it is the little things that are most important—the smaller the thing the more vital its importance, until”—he added in a genuine burst of his old eloquence—“the thing becomes so small that it isn’t anything at all, and then the value of nothing becomes so enormous that it is past all computation. ”

“ And if we carry our observation outward, we also find that light and darkness, sound and silence, motion and quiescence, equality and inequality, preceding and following, succession and simultaneousness, any positive phenomenon whatever and its negative, are distinct phenomena, pointedly contrasted, and the one always absent where the other is present. I consider the maxim in question to be a generalization from all these facts. ”

“ If you examine all single cases to which this general proposition applies, you will find that there is not one case in which the proposition is wrong except in the opinion of those who do not make any distinction between negative and positive properties, or between two opposites, or do not know the nature of things,--who, e.g., do not know that health in general denotes a certain equilibrium, and is a relative term. ”

“ We must use the means, and yet, in our most accurate using, somehow screen and cloak them, as we can only give them any beauty, by a reflection of the glory of the end. That is the good head, which serves the end, and commands the means. The rabble are corrupted by their means: the means are too strong for them, and they desert their end. ”

“ A proportion—what proportion?—are weeded out, entirely by the voluntary action of the men themselves, and given temporary work, carrying sandwich-boards, addressing envelopes, sorting paper, etc.; but the cause of their social dilapidation remains unaltered. ”

“ Qualities are our insurmountable barriers; we cannot possibly help feeling mere differences of quantity as something fundamentally different from quantity—that is to say, as qualities, which we [Pg 70] can no longer reduce to terms of quantity. ”

“ The very events which in their own nature appear most capricious and uncertain, and which in any individual case no attainable degree of knowledge would enable us to foresee, occur, when considerable numbers are taken into the account, with a degree of regularity approaching to mathematical. What act is there which all would consider as more completely dependent on individual character, and on the exercise of individual free will, than that of slaying a fellow-creature? ”

“ And as ceteris paribus our tense awareness of active states always throws into insignificance a passive state sandwiched between them; so, bent as we are upon our red and black extensions, and their comparative lengths and directions, we shall treat the uninteresting white extensions as a blank, a gap, as that which separates the objects of our active interest, and takes what existence it has for our mind only from its relation of separating those interesting actively measured and compared lines. ”

“ We have learned how the internal meaning is related to its own Limit, in so far as that is just a limit. But thus to view Being is still not to take account of what seems to common sense the most important of all our relations to the Real. ”

“ And so the balance sways and the story runs—here a gain, there a loss, and Nature’s great average struck across the two, whereof the sum total forms one of the factors in that mighty equation in which the result will equal the unknown quantity of her purpose. ”

“ The normal is either the usual, the habitual, the customary, or is, at best, an ideal construction of the variations of life more or less successfully adjusted to the conditions of the external environment. ”

“ But if any one pretends that while freedom and variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and uniformity are something altogether different, I do not see how we can debate at all. ”

“ For in all the mental habits which have been described, as well as in all others also, there is a certain aim, by a reference to which the rational being is guided either in relaxing or in restricting: and there is a certain definite boundary of those medial points, which we affirm to exist between excess and defect, determinable according to right reason. ”

“ If on principles which are indemonstrable, then, the very moment that either the sum total of these principles, or even one single one of them, is incorrectly urged, the whole demonstration falls instantly to pieces. ”