A Quote by William James
We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
Related Quotes
We cannot afford to exclude any vision - any way of looking at the world - that human beings have invented for ourselves.
I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.
What the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight that intellect gets, and that intellect must get right, because it's always identical to its objects, it's always the same as the forms that it's thinking about.
Americans are cultured from their earliest years to be either one-sided douloi or one-sided banausoi, i.e. either they cannot think abstractively/conceptually/orchestrally or else they can only think abstractively. Thinking in a truly rational dialectic between intuition and intellect is just beyond the reach of our nation of emotionalist helots. What prevails among us truly has to be called not thinking but "thinking," a pathetic surrogate for actual thinking for the benefit of existentially or modally crippled mentalities.
Participation is bliss because the whole universe is celebrating. Every moment it is celebrating. It is a great celebration, a constant celebration. Only we are not part of it. We have detached ourselves and are in misery. Man is in misery because of the mind. The flowers are participating in the celebration, the moon is participating, the stars are participating, the earth is participating, the oceans are participating, the air and the clouds - everything is participating in that continuous, eternal celebration.
We can study various psychic functions and also the more primitive sensory functions, such as seeing, hearing, and so on, which constitute our image of our everyday world. They have a material side and the psychic side. And that is a gap which you cannot explain.
As far as the search for truth is concerned, 98% of our thinking is rubbish. The remaining 2% is garbage. Throw it all out and be empty! Truth cannot be caught by intellect alone - grace is needed.
We're living in the anthropocene age and now human beings will be the shapers of our future, that totally control the overall functions of not just our planet, but our relationship with other planets.
It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.... We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father—a noble, pious man.
I hesitate to say what the functions of the modern journalist may be, but I imagine that they do not exclude the intelligent anticipation of the facts even before they occur.
Our intellect, our awareness, and our consciousness is the most powerful form of life on this planet. It's totally worthwhile. If our animal instincts stopped, we would die. We don't think about it, but if your consciousness were responsible for all of your bodily functions, you would die.
When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom.
If Christians cannot communicate as thinking beings, they are reduced to encountering one another only at the shallow level of gossip and small talk. Hence the perhaps peculiarly modern problem - the loneliness of the thinking Christian.
Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.
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