In its more extreme forms persecution mania is a recognised form of insanity. Some people imagine that others wish to kill them, or imprison them, or to do them some other grave injury. Often the wish to protect themselves against imaginary persecutors leads them into...
Mankind has lived believing either in the reality of the soul and the illusoriness of matter, or in the reality of matter and the illusoriness of the soul. You can divide the humanity of the past into those who are spiritual and those who are...
A man had placed a carved image on his donkey and was leading him along. Many people bowed down when they met them along the way. The donkey grew arrogant, thinking that the country folk were bowing down before him, so he began to leap...
'History', says Professor Oakeshott, who on this point stands near to Collingwood, 'is the historian's experience. It is "made" by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it' This searching critique, though it may call for some serious reservations, brings...
“The northern wind does not agitate our sails; nor Auster trouble our course with storms. In strength, talent, figure, virtue, honour, wealth, we are short of the foremost, but before the last.” (Horace) I had only need of what was sufficient to content me: which nevertheless is a government...
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness,...
RUFINUS We, who take no pleasure in costly intrigues, prefer servants to ladies of high station. The latter smell of scent, and give themselves the airs of their class, and they are attended even at the rendez- vous (?). The charm and fragrance of a servant are her own, and her...
Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.” At the beginning of any path,...
So, for many centuries, rationality and emotionality were considered two opposing properties of the brain, operating as competing territories. They were like two substances that repelled each other and never mixed, rather like oil and water. The rational brain helps us analyse facts and assess...
Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, exemplars of genius, inspiration for generations of artists and scientists, are icons of the twentieth century. Modern science is Einstein and modern art, Picasso. How this came about is one of the great sagas in the history of Western thought. While...
