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Sir Francis Bacon
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Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.
--Francis Bacon (in 1597)
HOW HAD “LUCKY AMERICA” managed to avoid the French disaster? To begin with, it was fortunate in the enemy it faced—not the absolute king who dominated France but a constitutional monarch whose powers were already reined in by legal institutions and tradition. The American colonists had grown up with a legacy of rule by law, whereas the French had known only dictatorship, and thinking in each case reflected past political experience.
The true opposite of factual, as distinguished from rational, truth is not error or illusion but the deliberate lie.
In the Indian yogic tradition, jñ-dna yoga is the yoga of the intellect, the path of philosophy whereby one awakens the embryo of enlightenment and arrives finally at the intellectual intuition of the “hypothesis beyond all hypotheses,” as Plato called it. Plato and the Upanisadic authors analyzed knowledge into similar levels.
America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior.
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