The Abolition of Man

by C.S. Lewis

alog...

But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reaso...

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, a...

But this reference to something beyond the emotion is what Gaius and Titius exclude from every sentence containing a predicate of value.

paralogism

it does not rise even to the dignity of error.

When a Roman father told his son that it was a sweet and seemly thing to die for his country, he believed what he said.

The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds—making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing.

In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.

BARS CLIVE

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

syllogisms

As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’.

The head rules the belly through the chest—the

It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man:

for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be cal...

Barssss

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out.

Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

Ooookkkayy

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.

wait this is facts

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.

We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

okay so good

They write in order to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good, yet certainly because they think them to be the means to some state of society which they regard as desirable.

And this end must have real value in their eyes.

subterfuge.

For the whole purpose of their book is so to condition the young reader that he will share their approval,

Not the right kind of education

and this would be either a fool’s or a villain’s undertaking unless they held that their approval was in some way valid or correct.

dogma...

dulce et decorum

What is really meant is that the death of some men is useful to other men.

But on what ground are some men being asked to die for the benefit of others?

‘Why should I be one of those who take the risk?’

imperative

The preservation of society, and of the species itself, are ends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are given by Instinct.

posterity.

That, again, is why the modern situation permits and demands a new sexual morality: the old taboos served some real purpose in helping to preserve the species, but contraceptives have modified this and we can now abandon many of the taboos.

In reality we have not advanced one step.

(to say that migratory birds find their way by instinct is only to say that we do not know how migratory birds find their way),

for I think it is here being used in a fairly definite sense, to mean an unreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt ...

Is it maintained that we must obey instinct, that we cannot do otherwise? But if so, why are Gree...

It looks very much as if the Innovator would have to say not that we must obey instinct, nor that it will satisfy us to do so, but that we ought to obey instinct.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people’. People say different things: so do instincts.

Our instincts are at war.

Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest.

preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the ‘basic’, or ‘fundamental’, or ‘primal’, or ‘deepest’ instinct.