Metaphysical Club

gradualism in theory, is perpetuity in practice. (p. 15)

When you strike at a king, you must kill him. (p. 25)



Brown made "the gallows glorious like the cross," exclaimed Emerson. (p. 29)



His take on the war was Spartan: he regarded it as an opportunity to toughen up an elite class of young men who had been made effete by too much prosperity. ... The North ... was simply too fond of life: "We have thought it braver to save than to spend it." All out war would cure that. "if we wrest from it the secrets of our weakness ... But if not, then let us be ready for another and another defeat, till our souls shall be tempered and our forces disciplined for the worthy attainment of victory." (p. 51)

He (Dr Holmes) was skeptical of some of the claims of medical science anyway, and took the view that "a very large proportion of disease get well of themselves, without any special medication." (p. 58)

Before the war

To believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, --- that is genius. (p. 58)

After the war,

To the Wendell Holmes who returned from the war, generalism was the enemy of seriousness. War had made him appreciate the value of expertise: soldiers who understand the mechanics of battle fought better --- more effectively, but also more bravely --- than soldiers who were motivated chiefly by enthusiasm for a cause. ... Holmes's rejection of the intellectual style of prewar Boston mirrored a generational shift. To many of the men who had been through the war, the value of professionalism and expertise were attractive; they implied impersonality, respect for institutions as efficient organizers of enterprise, and a modern and scientific attitude --- the opposite of the individualism, humanitarianism, and moralism that characterize Northern intellectual life before the war. (p. 59)



Only when you have worked alone --- when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounding a dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will --- then only will you have achieved. (p. 60)


But William's lack of systematic education gave him one distinct advantage: it permitted him to approach intellectual problems uninhibited by received academic wisdom. The openness that characterizes both the style and import of his writings on pragmatism seemed to some of his followers to have been specifically a consequence of his disorganized schooling. His later admirer John Dewey, for example, thought those things had "an intimate connection". And the consciousness that he was not a product of a particular school or academic tradition, or even a practitioner of a particular scholarly discipline, meant that in whatever he did, James could honestly feel that he was responsible for his belief to none but himself. This not only lent passion to his convictions but --- something even more useful --- made it easier for him to ignore those convictions when he felt them beginning to operate as prejudices. It helped him to do what his temperament inclined him to do anyway: to change his mind.

For even after he had settled on a career in science, when James arrived at Harvard in 1861, he did not settle on any particular science. And his disinclination to pledge an academic allegiance was one of the things that made it possible for him to sign up for an expedition led by the most famous of the many enemies of Charles Darwin.  (p. 95)

But what is the evidence of senses? Without concepts, it is unintelligible, and without preferences, no one would bother to accumulate it. Agassiz had concepts and he had preferences. These were not modern at all, and the manner in which he used advanced scientific practices to reach reactionary conclusions is, in retrospect, the most interesting thing about him. Despite his insistence on divorcing science from politics, Agassiz provided scientific ammunition to the politicians of his own time and well beyond it. The lesson of his career is that since everything we do out of some interest, we had better be clear about what our interests are. (p. 101)

Comment: Most of the time, scientific establishment was on the wrong side of the history. This is not only in economics, but in natural sciences in general. The establish is always a minority, representing top 1% or 5% of the population. But all the money flows, including money flowing into scientific research, are directly by this establishment.

Each previous creation had been succeeded by a catastrophe, like the Ice Age, wiping out everything, and each catastrophe had been followed by a new creation, introducing superior species to the planet. Happily , the end of this process had been reached. "I think it can be shown by anatomical evidence," Agassiz wrote ... "that man is not only the last and highest among the living beings, for the present period, but that he is the last term of the series beyond which there is no material progress possible upon the plan upon which the whole animal kingdom is constructed. (p. 107)

"He was a Darwinian for fun," wrote Henry Adams about Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams. He meant he had, as a young man, regarded the theory of natural selection as unproved, and probably unprovable, but had accepted it anyway. Two of the most striking things about the reception of Darwin's theory are the degree to which it was regarded, even by its supporters, as highly speculative, and the speed with which it was nevertheless assimilated by younger intellectuals. "One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits," as Adams explained. "One had no time to paint the surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution." Darwinism dropped into a cultural configuration already aligned to accommodate it. Its fitness was generally appreciated before its rightness was generally established. (p. 140)

The real lesson of On the Origin of Species for James --- the lesson on which he based his own major work, The Principles of Psychology (1890) --- was that natural selection has produced, in human beings, organisms gifted with the capacity to make choices incompatible with "the survival of the fittest." There is intelligence in the universe: it is ours. It was our good luck that somewhere along the way, we acquired minds. They released us from the prison of biology. (p. 146)

Comment: Our works show that we are part of nature. Our mind is a natural adaption to enhance our survival and not incompatible with survival. We are not released from biology. We are always in harmony with natural laws.