text,updated_at,metaphor,created_at,context,theme,reviewed_on,dictionary,comments,provenance,id,work_id
"I have considered it in every possible light; and reason tells me that death is the boundary of the life of man, yet I feel, I believe in the direct contrary... The senses are the only inlets of knowledge, and there is an inward sense that had persuaded me of this.",2009-09-14 19:46:01 UTC,"""The senses are the only inlets of knowledge, and there is an inward sense that had persuaded me of this.""",2006-10-03 00:00:00 UTC,"","",,"","","Reading Reisner, Thomas A. ""Tablua Rasa: Shelley's Metaphor of Mind."" Ariel IV.2 (197): 90-102. p. 91.",16199,6143
"In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain (as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general;) nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes (as Hartley teaches)--nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various shapes (as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established) images out both past and present. Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis; or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation; tho' in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed the word kinaeseis, to express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating the latter always by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the contrary, in his treatise ""De Anima,"" he excludes place and motion from all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous.
(p. 100-2)",2011-09-13 15:12:10 UTC,"""The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain (as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general;) nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes (as Hartley teaches)--nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various shapes (as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established) images out both past and present.""",2005-09-22 00:00:00 UTC,Chapter 5,"",2011-07-21,"","•I cut and pasted this from Project Gutenberg and then cleaned it up. Only later checked against Princeton UP edition (9/13/2011). Note, I transliterated the Greek.
•I've included twice: Billiard Balls and Etching
•INTEREST. STC on other philosophers metaphors of mind. Meta-metaphorical.
•Chapter 5 is titled ""on the Law of Association""",Reading,16413,6202
"By the mind we understand that within us which feels and thinks, the seat of sensation and reason. Where it resides we cannot tell, nor can authoritatively pronounce, as the apostle says, relatively to a particular phenomenon, ""whether it is in the body, or out of the body."" Be it however where or what it may, it is this which constitutes the great essence of, and gives value to, our existence; and all the wonders of our microcosm would without it be a form only, destined immediately to perish, [page 8] and of no greater account than as a clod of the valley.
(pp. 7-8)",2009-09-14 19:47:20 UTC,"""By the mind we understand that within us which feels and thinks, the seat of sensation and reason""",2005-08-11 00:00:00 UTC,Essay I. Of Body and Mind. The Prologue.,"",,"","","Searching ""mind"" at Electronic Text Center at UVA Library",16578,6270
"But what is of more importance in the temporary oblivion we are enabled to throw over the refuse of the body, it is thus we arrive at the majesty [page 14] of man. That sublimity of conception which renders the poet, and the man of great literary and original endowments ""in apprehension like a God,"" we could not have, if we were not privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviæ of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, added a youthful beauty and grace to his motions, and caused his eyes to flash with more than mortal fire. With what disdain, when I have been rapt in the loftiest moods of mind, do I look down upon my limbs, the house of clay that contains me, the gross flesh and blood of which my frame is composed, and wonder at a lodging, poorly fitted to entertain so divine a guest!
(pp. 13-14)",2009-09-14 19:47:22 UTC,"In poetry we are ""privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviæ of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, added a youthful beauty and grace to his motions, and caused his eyes to flash with more than mortal fire""",2005-08-11 00:00:00 UTC,Essay I. Of Body and Mind. The Prologue.,"",,"",•I've included twice: Slough and Exuviae and Rags,"Searching ""mind"" at Electronic Text Center at UVA Library",16589,6270
"What a contrast does this species of instruction exhibit, to the ordinary course of scholastic education! There, every lesson that is prescribed, is a source of indirect warfare between the instructor and the pupil, the one professing to aim at the advancement of him that is taught, in the career of knowledge, and the other contemplating the effect that is intended to be produced upon him with aversion, and longing to be engaged in any thing else, rather than in that which is pressed upon his foremost attention. In this sense a numerous school is, to a degree that can scarcely be adequately described, the slaughter-house of mind. It is like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor -- with this difference, that our modern schoolmasters are not [page 46] endowed with the gift of working miracles, and, when the experiment falls into their hands, the result of their efforts is a pitiful miscarriage. Knowledge is scarcely in any degree imparted. But, as they are inured to a dogged assiduity, and persist in their unavailing attempts, though the shell of science, so to speak, is scarcely in the smallest measure penetrated, yet that inestimable gift of the author of our being, the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed, that it can scarcely ever be usefully employed even for those purposes which it was originally best qualified to effect.
(pp. 45-6)",2009-09-14 19:47:23 UTC,"Teaching in a crowded school is ""like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor ... the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed""",2005-08-11 00:00:00 UTC,Essay II. Of The Distribution of Talents.,"",,"","","Searching ""mind"" at Electronic Text Center at UVA Library",16595,6270
"[...] I was right in this respect. I knew my friends from my foes. So did Lord Castlereagh: so did not Benjamin Constant. Did any of the Princes of Europe ever regard Buonaparte as any thing more than the child and champion of Jacobinism ? Why then should I: for on that point I bow to their judgments as infallible. Passion speaks truer than reason. If Buonaparte was a conqueror, he conquered the grand conspiracy of kings against the abstract right of the human race to be free; and I, as a man, could not be indifferent which side to take. If he was ambitious, his greatness was not founded on the unconditional, avowed surrender of the rights of human nature. But with him, the state of man rose exalted too. If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in a state of military blockade, on garrison-duty, and not to be defended by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor he could not become, a tyrant by right divine. Tyranny in him was not sacred: it was not eternal: it was not instinctively bound in league of amity with other tyrannies; it was not sanctioned by all the laws of religion and morality. There was an end of it with the individual: there was an end of it with the temporary causes, which gave it birth, and of which it was only the too necessary reaction. But there are persons of that low and inordinate appetite for servility, that they cannot be satisfied with any thing [End Page xvi] short of that sort of tyranny that has lasted for ever, and is likely to last for ever; that is strengthened and made desperate by the superstitions and prejudices of ages; that is enshrined in traditions, in laws, in usages, in the outward symbols of power, in the very idioms of language; that has struck its roots into the human heart, and clung round the human understanding like a nightshade ; that overawes the imagination, and disarms the will to resist it, by the very enormity of the evil; that is cemented with gold and blood; guarded by reverence, guarded by power; linked in endless succession to the principle by which life is transmitted to the generations of tyrants and slaves, and destroying liberty with the first breath of life; that is absolute, unceasing, unerring, fatal, unutterable, abominable, monstrous. These true devotees of superstition and despotism cried out Liberty and Humanity in their desperate phrenzy at Buonaparte's sudden elevation and incredible successes against their favourite idol, ""that Harlot old, the same that is, that was, and is to be,"" but we have heard no more of their triumph of Liberty and their douce humanit´, since they clapped down the hatches upon us again, like wretches in a slave-ship who have had their chains struck off and pardon promised them to fight the common enemy; and the poor Reformers who were taken in to join the cry, because they are as fastidious in their love of liberty as their opponents are inveterate in their devotion to despotism, continue in vain to reproach them with their [End Page xvii]
temporary professions, woeful grimaces, and vows made in pain, which ease has recanted; but to these reproaches the legitimate professors of Liberty and Humanity do not even deign to return the answer of a smile at their credulity and folly. Those who did not see this result at the time were, I think, weak; those who do not acknowledge it now are, I am sure, hypocrites. -- To this pass have we been brought by the joint endeavours of Tories, Whigs, and Reformers; and as they have all had a hand in it, I shall here endeavour to ascribe to each their share of merit in this goodly piece of work. It is, perhaps, a delicate point, but it is of no inconsiderable importance, that the friends of Freedom should know the strength of their enemies, and their own weakness as well; for
--"" At this day,
When a Tartarean darkness overspreads
The groaning nations; when the impious rule,
By will or by established ordinance,
Their own dire agents, and constrain the good
To acts which they abhor; though I bewail
This triumph, yet the pity of my heart
Prevents me not from owning that the law
By which mankind now suffers, is most just.
For by superior energies; more strict
Affiance to each other; faith more firm
In their unhallowed principles ; the bad
Have fairly earned a victory o'er the weak,
The vacillating, inconsistent good.""(pp. xv-xviii)",2009-09-14 19:49:49 UTC,"""If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in a state of military blockade, on garrison-duty, and not to be defended by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor he could not become, a tyrant by right divine.""",2009-05-05 00:00:00 UTC,Preface,"",,"","",Reading,17332,6516 "[...] A Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries Long Life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side -- the side of corruption and prerogative. He says what others say; he does as he is prompted by his own advantage. He knows on which side his bread is buttered, and that St. Peter is well at Rome. He is for going with Sancho to Camacho's wedding, and not for wandering with Don Quixote in the desert, after the mad lover. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth to Reform, but broad is the way that leadeth to Corruption, and multitudes there are that walk therein. The Tory is sure to be in the thickest of them. His principle is to follow the leader; and this is the infallible rule to have numbers and success on your side, to be on the side of success and numbers. Power is the rock of his salvation; priestcraft is the second article of his implicit creed. He does not trouble himself to inquire which is the best form of government -- but he knows that the reigning monarch is ""the best of kings."" He does not, like a fool, contest for modes of faith; but like a wise man, swears by that which is by law established. He has no principles himself, nor does he profess to have any, but will cut your throat for differing with any of his bigotted dogmas, or for objecting to any act of power that he supposes necessary to his interest. He will take his Bible-oath that [End Page xxvi] black is white, and that whatever is, is right, if it is for his convenience. He is for having a slice in the loan, a share in a borough, a situation in the church or state, or for standing well with those who have. He is not for empty speculations, but for full pockets. He is for having plenty of beef and pudding, a good coat to his back, a good house over his head, and for cutting a respectable figure in the world. He is Epicuri de grege porcus -- not a man but a beast. He is styed in his prejudices -- he wallows in the mire of his senses -- he cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of gold or wood. Truth and falsehood are, to him, something to buy and sell; principle and conscience, something to eat and drink. He tramples on the plea of Humanity, and lives, like a caterpillar, on the decay of public good. Beast as he is, he knows that the King is the fountain of honour, that there are good things to be had in the Church, treats the cloth with respect, bows to a magistrate, lies to the tax-gatherer, nicknames the Reformers, and ""blesses the Regent and the Duke of York."" He treads the primrose path of preferment; ""when a great wheel goes up a hill, holds fast by it, and when it rolls down, lets it go."" He is not an enthusiast, a Utopian philosopher or a Theophilanthropist, but a man of business and the world, who minds the main chance, does as other people do, and takes his wife's advice to get on in the world, and set up a coach for her to ride in, as fast as possible. This fellow is in the right, and [End Page xxvii] ""wiser in his generation than the children of the light."" The ""servile slaves"" of wealth and power have a considerable advantage over the independent and the free. How much easier is it to smell out a job than to hit upon a scheme for the good of mankind! How much safer is it to be the tool of the oppressor than the advocate of the oppressed! How much more fashionable to fall in with the opinion of the world, to bow the knee to Baal, than to seek for obscure and obnoxious truth! How strong are the ties that bind men together for their own advantage, compared with those that bind them to the good of their country or of their kind![...]
(pp. xxvi-xxviii)",2009-09-14 19:49:50 UTC,"""He is styed in his prejudices -- he wallows in the mire of his senses -- he cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of gold or wood.""",2009-05-05 00:00:00 UTC,Preface,"",,"",I've included twice: Pig and Mire,"Reading Terry Eagleton's ""The Critic as Partisan: William Hazlitt's Radical Imagination."" Harper's Magazine. Vol 318, No. 1907. April 2009. p. 78.",17335,6516 " [...] My heart had palpitated at the thoughts of a boarding-school ball, or gala-day at Midsummer or Christmas: but the world I had found out in Cooke's edition of the British Novelists was to me a dance through life, a perpetual gala-day. The six-penny numbers of this work regularly contrived to leave off just in the middle of a sentence, and in the nick of a story, where Tom Jones discovers Square behind the blanket; or where Parson Adams, in the inextricable confusion of events, very undesignedly gets to bed to Mrs. Slip-slop. Let me caution the reader against this impression of Joseph Andrews; for there is a picture of Fanny in it which he should not set his heart on, lest he should never meet with any thing like it; or if he should, it would, perhaps, be better for him that he had not. It was just like ---- ---- ! With what eagerness I used to look forward to the next number, and open the prints! Ah! never again shall I feel the enthusiastic delight with which I gazed at the figures, and anticipated the story and adventures of Major Bath and Commodore Trunnion, of Trim and my Uncle Toby, of Don Quixote and Sancho and Dapple, of Gil Bias and DameLorenza Sephora, of Laura and the fair Lucretia, whose lips open and shut like buds of roses. To what nameless ideas did they give rise,—with what airy delights I filled up the outlines, as I hung in silence over the page !--Let me still recal them, that they may breathe fresh life into me, and that I may live that birthday of thought and romantic pleasure over again! Talk of the ideal! This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life.
(pp. 69-70) ",2012-07-24 19:54:00 UTC,"""This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life.""",2012-07-24 19:54:00 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,19892,7305 "[...] Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason, ""has something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do."" It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power. This language is not the less true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear--and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. Our eyes are made the fools"" of our other faculties. This is the universal law of the imagination [...]
(pp. 6-7)",2013-06-06 20:53:04 UTC,"""It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power.""",2013-06-06 20:53:04 UTC,"","",,"","","Reading M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1953), p. 54. ",20458,7406 "[...] Her power is indeed manifested at the bar, in the senate, in the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,--wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,--there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.
The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his comrades the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have, for more than twenty centuries, been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves, her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And when those who have rivaled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abodes in distant continents; when the scepter shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall, in vain, labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the rained dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts;--her influence and her glory will still survive,--fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin and over which they exercise their control.
(pp. 101-2)",2013-08-14 17:58:22 UTC,"""Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines.""",2013-08-14 17:57:12 UTC,"","",,"","","Reading Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013), 77.",22143,7582