The Abolition of Man
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Started reading October 8, 2025
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pillory
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but I cannot be silent about what I think the actual tendency of their work.
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veneration.
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pons asinorum
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The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake.
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It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
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venal
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bathetic
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If Gaius and Titius were to stick to their last and teach their readers (as they promised to do) the art of English composition, it was their business to put this advertisement side by side with passages from great writers in which the very same emotion is well expressed, and then show where the difference lies.
Riley Nevarez
ACTUAL BARS
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They might have taken that place in The Prelude where Wordsworth describes how the antiquity of London first descended on his mind with ‘Weight and power, Power growing under weight’.
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A lesson which had laid such literature beside the advertisement and really discriminated the good from the bad would have been a lesson worth teaching.
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There would have been some blood and sap in it—the trees of knowledge and of...
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Or, if there is indeed any obstacle which will prevent a critic from ‘debunking’ Johnson and Wordsworth (and Lamb, and Virgil, and Thomas Browne, and Mr. de la Mare) as The Green Book debunks the advertisement, Gaius and Titius have given their schoolboy readers no faintest help to its discovery.
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What he will learn quickly enough, and perhaps indelibly, is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible.
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He will have no notion that there are two...
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immune to such an advertisement— that it falls equally flat on those who are above it and those who are below it, on the man ...
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Gaius and Titius, while teaching him nothing about letters, have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane.
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And he falls into the same trap as Gaius and Titius. Of Ruksh and Sleipnir and the weeping horses of Achilles and the charger in the Book of Job—nay even of Brer Rabbit and of Peter Rabbit—of man’s prehistoric piety to ‘our brother the ox’—of all that this semi-anthropomorphic treatment of beasts has meant in human history and of the literature where it finds noble or piquant expression—he has not a word to say.
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Why the composition before them is bad, when others that lie open to the same charge are good, they do not hear.
Riley Nevarez
Bars again
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above and below the danger of such writing—the man who really knows horses and really loves them, not with anthropomorphic illusions, but with ordinate love, and the irredeemable urban blockhead to whom a horse is merely an old-fashioned means of transport.
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Some pleasure in their own ponies and dogs they will have lost: some incentive to cruelty or neglect they will have received: some pleasure in their own ...
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What I have called (presuming on their concurrence in a certain traditional system of values) the ‘trousered ape’ and the ‘urban blockhead’ may be precisely the kind of man they really wish to produce.
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That position will be discussed later. If it is the position which Gaius and Titius are holding, I must, for the moment, content myself with pointing out that it is a philosophical and not a literary position.
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In filling their book with it they have been unjust to the parent or headmaster who buys it and who has got the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians.
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obiter dicta
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But I doubt whether Gaius and Titius have really planned, under cover of teaching English, to propagate their philosophy.
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literary criticism is difficult, and what they actually do is very much easier.
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Even Dr. Richards, who first seriously tackled the problem of badness in literature, failed, I think, to do it.
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misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda—they
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they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental—and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion.
Riley Nevarez
What do we want to produce in our students and how are we going to produce it… and if we want to produce it we must SHOW students how to identify the negative and rectify it with the right or positive… we must point to a better way
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For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess or sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.
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The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will...
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They may be perfectly ready to admit that a good education should build some sentiments while destroying others. They may endeavour to do so. But it is impossible that they should succeed. Do what they will, it is the ‘debunking’ side of their work, and this side alone, which will really tell.
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Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed,
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that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.
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The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be m...
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The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the objec...
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Augustine defines virtue
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ordo amoris,
Riley Nevarez
Order of love
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the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of...
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Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics: but to the corrupt man t...
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so that he becomes a man of gentle heart.
Riley Nevarez
To accept or appreciate or allow in beauty and reject and deny all that is ugly or abhorrent
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Wordsworth that through virtue the stars were strong,
Riley Nevarez
Beautiful
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The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
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This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’.
Riley Nevarez
The Order essentially or the world or of all things…. Inverted pyramid… it all funnels down in an order
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But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief
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that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.
Riley Nevarez
I feel like what Lewis is getting at is that every ideology and belief system has a basis of desiring truth or praising truth or what is right or acceptable
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Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.
Riley Nevarez
THIS
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I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason
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(when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that lik...
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