The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons: 1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.
Where the doubting game tests an idea by helping us see its weaknesses and shortcomings, the believing game tests an idea by helping us see the strengths of competing ideas.
Far from having dirtier hands, the officials of the Machiavellian state have hands at least as clean as those of the rest of us and possibly a good deal cleaner. In other words, Machiavelli is not advising a prince to disregard the conventional, Christian and classical virtues when this is necessary to protect the state; he requires this of a prince who has been given responsibility for the protection of the state, because it is sometimes a necessity.
I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it.
In my view, curiosity is the great quality that binds writers to readers. Curiosity sends writers on their quests, and curiosity is what makes readers read the story.
All externality is imaginary; for externality—a mutual outsideness in the abstract sense of the denial of a mutual insideness—is as such abstraction, and abstraction is always intuition or imagination.es that result.
The primacy of appearance for all living creatures to whom the world appears in the mode of an it-seems-to-me is of great relevance to the topic we are going to deal with—those mental activities by which we distinguish ourselves from other animal species.
Polar logic is not the same as having logical opposites. These are merely contradictory and only cancel each other out. Polar opposites exist, Barfield says, ‘by virtue of each other, and are generative of new products’. They are opposites as are day and night, but they need each other to exist. They are radically different, but inseparable and are in a dynamic, not static, relationship. It is the tension between them that provides the energy for creative transformation. Polarity, as Barfield says, is ‘the manifestation of one power by opposite forces’.
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