Sophistication

“ Factional life, as we know, develops through imitation and repetition, but personality through invention under guidance of the flashing analogies. Invention, too, the application of special development beyond the sphere of its origin, is only the psychological term for what sociologically is leadership. In the theory and in the practice of art, morals, religion, politics, science, and all the other special sides of experience, the factional and the personal are ever to be distinguished in this way—the one imitative, the other inventive. ”

“ This idea of likeness which underlies classification, nomenclature, language spoken and written, reasoning, and art; and which plays so important a part because all acts of intelligence are made possible only by distinguishing among surrounding things, or grouping them into like and unlike;—this idea we shall find to be the one of which science is the especial product. Already during the stage we have been describing, there has existed qualitative prevision in respect to the commoner phenomena with which savage life is familiar ”

“ Culture, we are told, is reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it and with system. The purpose, it is presumed, is attainment, but what is the system? We are to have knowledge, and not only knowledge but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment. ”

“ Of these the one is a question of terminology, and relates to the precise object, or collection of objects, that is signified by the technical term “common sense,” when it is used as the term expressive of the proper province of his science. The other is a question of scientific method, and enforces the necessity of the labour of analysis and criticism for the discovery and arrangement of the genuine principles of common sense, purified from the prejudices and conventionalisms with which they are apt to be confounded, and by which they are almost always marred. ”

“ If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is justifiable, then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty, must coalesce with the objective, which is truth; and sociology mast be neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of personality that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature. ”

“ Now since those who study style in itself must allow a proper place to the emphatic expression, this experiment, which supplies as novel examples of success as of failure, should be full of interest; and such interest will promote tolerance. ”

“ To elaborate these convictions of the connexion of intelligence with what men undergo because of their doings and with the emergence and direction of the creative, the novel, in the world is of itself a program which will keep philosophers busy67 until something more worth while is forced upon them. For the elaboration has to be made through application to all the disciplines which have an intimate connexion with human conduct:—to logic, ethics, esthetics, economics, and the procedure of the sciences formal and natural. ”

“ They create, namely, an ascending progress from the individual to the more general notions, by a methodical process of filiation; they operate upon living beings, or objects of the same nature, having consequently a common standard. The history, even in brief, of these classifications is instructive: it shows the progressive passage of concrete-abstract ideas to more and more abstract concepts, from a statement of gross resemblances to the quest after subtle similarities, from the period of assimilation to that in which dissociation predominates. ”

“ The "simplifiers,"—whose aims were wholly moral and whose methods were purely pacific—felt that their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? ”

“ THEAETETUS: Now I begin to understand, and am ready to acknowledge that there are two kinds of production, and each of them twofold; in the lateral division there is both a divine and a human production; in the vertical there are realities and a creation of a kind of similitudes.
STRANGER: And let us not forget that of the imitative class the one part was to have been likeness-making, and the other phantastic, if it could be shown that falsehood is a reality and belongs to the class of real being. ”

“ The artist creates a figure on the basis of a general scheme, rejecting whatever may hinder or impede the play of the living forces of reality; such a production, founded on a general scheme, is what we call the Ideal. ”

“ As a matter of fact what has happened in every case like these is an actual change of standard, a new construction in the growing system of one's norms of value and behavior. Provisionally, though hopefully, a step has been taken—a real event in personal and in social history has been given place and date. From some source beyond the scope and nature of the earlier function a suggestion or an impulsion has come by which the agent has endeavored to move forward. ”

“ What title has the opinion of experts to authority in matters aesthetic? Even if it showed that agreement in which it is so conspicuously lacking, why should men endeavour to mould their feelings into the patterns it prescribes? In the practical affairs of life we follow those who have made a special study of some particular problem, only because they have greater knowledge than ourselves of the relevant facts. ”

“ But whilst the business of the speculative philosopher is solely with the phenomena that have been unintended, the business of the practical sociologist is solely with the phenomena that have been intended. ”

“ The paths pursued by those great examples must become yours, young gentlemen, or you can neither be eminent in colouring, nor sure in the execution of your art. It is possible, that by habits of practice, handed over from one to another, or by little managements in laying colours on the canvass, where little or nothing of the general science has been studied and attained, many may so far succeed as to avoid glaring errors, and a violation of those first principles which have their foundation in nature. ”

“ It will be a very tedious and irksome task to copy the various traditions bearing on the above subjects and to discuss their authenticity, and criticise their genuineness, on the principles of the technicalities peculiar to the Science of Traditions, as well as on the basis of scientific and rational criticism. ”

“ We have had to reject the idea that a standard of excellence can either be extracted by critical analysis from the practice of accepted models, or that it can be based on the consensus of experts, or upon universal suffrage. ”

“ Armed with open-mindedness, then, with balance and common sense, with knowledge of the field, and with ability to analyze, you are ready to begin. What method shall you pursue? Though no absolutely sharp line can be drawn between kinds of criticism, we may treat of three that are fairly distinct: the historical method, the method by standards, and the appreciative. In most criticism we are likely to find more than one method employed, often all three. ”

“ I say these things after all with the sense, so founded on past experience, that, in closer quarters and the intimacy of composition, pre-noted arrangements, proportions and relations, do most uncommonly insist on making themselves different by shifts and variations, always improving, which impose themselves as one goes and keep the door open always to something more right and more related. ”

“ It was the era of the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they were sometimes called; of men who came in some instances to great fame and fortune, by way of a literary cultivation of “science.” That science, it has been often said, must have been wholly an affair of words. ”

“ Just as the speculative mind was tempted to model the real after the intelligible, and to raise the subjective laws of its imagination into laws constituting the existence of things, so the state spirit rushed into the opposite extreme, wished to make a particular and fragmentary experience the measure of all observation, and to apply without exception to all affairs the rules of its own particular craft. ”

“ That all these semiotic means-expression in very complex dynamic sign systems-change the nature of individual practical experiences and of social life cannot be emphasized enough. Everything we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt, sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actually produced. ”

“ I am convinced that such among you as may intend to hereafter prosecute your speculative researches in a profound and zealous spirit, and to study philosophy both in itself and in its history,—I am convinced that you must build your labours upon the distinction now brought before you. ”

“ Recognition of the principle of likeness and of its corollary, analysis by function rather than by trade, marks perhaps the greatest single step yet taken in the development of scientific business. The principle, however, has its dangers. ”

“ Let us eliminate the intellectual and moral qualities characteristic of each group, which establish notable differences between them, and let us consider only their inventive capacity as applied to practical life. ”

“ The most universal of the forms in which this difference of method is accustomed to present itself, is the ancient feud between what is called theory, and what is called practice or experience. There are, on social and political questions, two kinds of reasoners: there is one portion who term themselves practical men, and call the others theorists ”

“ Such an approach presents a world-machine, immense and regular, and when, later, psychology and sociology arise, how easy it is to call the human life which they study a by-product of the sub-human world, an exudation arising from the activities of matter. ”

“ True culture, in which knowledge and judgment go hand in hand, can only be brought to bear on a few; and still fewer are capable of receiving it. For the great mass of men a kind of training everywhere takes its place. It is effected by example, custom, and the very early and firm impression of certain conceptions, before any experience, understanding, or judgment were there to disturb the work. ”

“ Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms. ”

“ We have given the history of the different forms which they successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality and their necessity are manifest. ”

“ And yet these standing forms of gesticulation which are universally observed are certainly the outcome of no convention; they are natural and original, a true language of nature, which may have been strengthened by imitation and custom. ”

“ By cultivation of the Abstract-Concrete Sciences, there is produced a further habit of thought, not otherwise produced, which is essential to right thinking in general, and by implication to right thinking in Sociology. Familiarity with the various orders of physical and chemical phenomena gives distinctness and strength to the consciousness of cause and effect. Experiences of things around do, indeed, yield conceptions of special forces and of force in general. ”

“ Sometimes the superior quality of these products is contemplated: and sometimes the new or improved appliances by which they are produced. When, again, we speak of moral or intellectual progress, we refer to the state of the individual or people exhibiting it; while, when the progress of Knowledge, of Science, of Art, is commented upon, we have in view certain abstract results of human thought and action. Not only, however, is the current conception of Progress more or less vague, but it is in great measure erroneous. ”

“ Our general ideas, from those immediately bordering on the concrete to those which attain pure symbolism, constitute a hierarchy of ever-increasing simplicity. What value must be assigned to this thinking by concepts, in proportion as it ascends higher in the scale? We are all familiar with the debates upon this question, bearing, as it does, fundamentally upon the objective value of abstraction and generalisation. ”

“ These arts have worked by tradition, by prescription, by precedent. They all wait for an infusion of the scientific method, the method of principle based upon natural laws immutable and indestructible. ”

“ But among all the possible systems that may be exploited for purposes of social idealization or criticism, those that win the competition for acceptance are usually distinguished by comprehensiveness, rigour, practical relevance, and flexibility—virtues that are unequally distributed among philosophers. ”

“ I have indeed done little more than announce the leading principle of their philosophy, showing you very briefly how this principle—the maxim, namely, that man is the measure of all things—how this principle, if carried out as the Sophists interpreted it, must have the effect of unsettling both truth and morality. ”