If such a human nature were to exist, it would be a natural phenomenon, and to call behavior in accordance with it “human” would assume that human and natural behavior are one and the same. In the eighteenth century the greatest and historically the most effective advocate of this kind of humanity was Rousseau, for whom the human nature common to all men was manifested not in reason but in compassion, in an innate repugnance, as he put it, to see a fellow human being suffering.
Restoration in Europe appears today in the form of three fundamental concepts. First there arose the concept of collective security, which is in reality not a new concept but one taken over from the happy times of the Holy Alliance; it was revived after the last war in the hope that it would serve as a check on nationalistic aspirations and aggression. If this system went to pieces, however, it was not because of such aggression but because of the intervention of ideological factors.
Montesquieu’s moving and guiding principles—virtue, honor, fear—are principles insofar as they rule both the actions of the government and the actions of the governed.
However, not all of past life is historically reclaimable. What cannot be re-enacted cannot be known. And what cannot be known, for Collingwood, includes the immediacy of the past, an immediacy that is essential to sensation and to feelings, and which is to some degree present in thought, too. Historical blunders, failures of various kinds, even accidents and strokes of luck can be rethought so long as they can be related to the agent’s aims and purposes.
Mainstream conservatives organized themselves in parties of the center-right. They were flanked by two kinds of dissent from within the right: conservatives on the party fringes who refused to compromise with the liberal-democratic status quo, and conservative critics, outside party politics and often indifferent to policy, who found ugly or unethical the liberal-modern world that political conservatives were helping to create.
[T]he economic optimists’ view implies that the human species is biologically exceptional and that our modern economies are historically exceptional.
The main reason people have a problem with procrastination is that they don’t see the connection between completing something and having new, fresh energy come out of that.
It is fundamental to every school of Buddhism that there is no ego, no enduring entity which is the constant subject of our changing experiences. For the ego exists in an abstract sense alone, being an abstraction from memory, somewhat like the illusory circle of fire made by a whirling torch.
