Aphorisms and Observations – Page 39

Seductive, but Fallacious

For an anarchist to claim that without laws there would be no criminals would be like claiming that without chemists there would be no chemicals.

Be Glad there is no Physiognomy of Belief

If the faces of people were as radically different as their beliefs, how few of our fellows would we recognize as human!

Inversions

The bad weans us from this world and is therefore in that measure good; the good ties us to it and is in that measure bad.

Affinity

True affinity is not that of consanguinity or of propinquity. True affinity is spiritual similarity.

Time is a goddess of healing — for a time. She heals the wounds that come inevitably to those who must march to her beat. She brings us ill and makes us well again until such time as she does us in for good.

Doubt

An engine can be used for braking, even though an engine is not a brake, but a motor. Similarly with doubt. The main use of it is as an engine of inquiry, not as a brake on belief.

Who Needs Sex?

We the living do not need sex. Only the ones not yet living need it.

Civic Engagement

One use of civic engagement is to help bring about an arrangement in which one needn't civically engage with people one finds morally and politically repellent.

The Leftist

A leftist is a person who can justify unspeakably evil deeds to advance a worldview according to which people are basically good and evil does not exist.

The Need for Outside Help

A human life is too short for the acquisition by oneself of the wisdom needed to live it well — or to end it well. And the same goes for the appropriation of the hard-won wisdom of one's predecessors: the brevity of life militates against the needed appropriation as much as against the needed acquisition. So wisdom must come from outside the human-all-too-human if it is to come at all.

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Addendum . Dave Bagwill submits the following pertinent quotation from George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul for July 15th:

Who sets himself not sternly to be good,
Is but a fool, who judgment of true things
Has none, however oft the claim renewed.
And he who thinks, in his great plenitude,
To right himself, and set his spirit free,
Without the might of higher communings,
Is foolish also--save he willed himself to be.

Philosophy, Pride, and Humility

Philosophy can fuel intellectual pride. And it manifestly does in far too many of its practitioners. But pursued far enough and deep enough it may lead to insight into the infirmity of reason, an insight one salutary benefit of which is intellectual humility. Our patron saint was known for his knowing nescience, his learned ignorance. It was that which made Socrates wise.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

When I asked Harry if he uses the Internet to look up old friends, "Let sleeping dogs lie" was his reply. His attitude, qualified, recommends itself.

The friendships of old were many of them mere friendships of propinquity. They were born of time and place and circumstance, and they died the death of distance, whether temporal or spatial or circumstantial. They are relics that can be fingered but not reanimated. They are best left in the boneyard of memory.