“That process starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” [Quoting "Sherlock Holmes"]
I raise this . . . to point out one somewhat obvious and yet absolutely central element of the human mind: we never stop learning. The Holmes that took the case of a mysterious lodger and ended up embroiled in a saga of secret societies and international crime rings (for that is the meaning of Red Circle: a secret Italian crime syndicate with many evil deeds to its name) is no longer the same Holmes who made such seemingly careless errors in “The Yellow Face.” Holmes may have his Norburys. But he has chosen to learn from them and make himself a better thinker in the process, ever perfecting a mind that already seems sharp beyond anything else. We, too, never stop learning, whether we know it or not.
In a population where 88 percent have some level of metabolic dysfunction, the entire concept of healthy has been obfuscated.
Marxist social theory betrays striking similarities to Rousseau's conceptions. It fails to anticipate the rise of a ruling group in a socialist society.
A successful upstart who wants to become king needs something extra. His authority cannot be maintained by force alone; he needs to persuade others that he has legitimate authority.
Strangely enough, it is easier to become a god-king than merely a king.
To become god-king the successful upstart needs several things. Obviously, he must be at the top of the military chain of command. But he also needs to become the ritual leader, so that he controls the religious hierarchy—large-scale ritual cults that evolved to cement tribal alliances. Finally, the king-in-the-making needs a fanatically loyal retinue that will follow his orders without question and compel others to do the same. The king needs loyal warriors to protect him from assassination, and to put to death any commoner who shows insufficient respect and obedience. Basically, the king and his retinue are a coalition of upstarts, with the king as the alpha male and his followers as lesser upstarts, but who also do quite well out of the deal.
In Heraclitus’s statement that the restraining of impulse is difficult but necessary to the soul’s health lies the source of the Stoic emphasis on intervening in the mental process that leads from sensation to action. And in Democritean athambia is found the root of Epicurus’s ataraxia. Most Greek philosophies, like most Indian philosophies, were, in their ethics anyway, philosophies of retreat.
One paints a thing in order to see it People who don’t paint, naturally, won’t believe that; it would be too humiliating to themselves. They like to fancy that everybody, or at least everybody of refinement and taste like themselves, sees just as much as an artist sees, and that the artist only differs in having the technical accomplishment of painting what he sees. But that is nonsense. You see something in your subject, of course, before you begin to paint it (though how much, even of that, you would see if you weren’t already a painter is a difficult question); and that, no doubt, is what induces you to begin painting; but only a person with experience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how little that is, compared with what you come to see in it as your painting progresses.
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