The Abolition of Men

by C.S. Lewis

It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief 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.

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

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

20The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-MagnanimitySentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. 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.

Men without Chests.

sentiment

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.

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.

'progressing towards what?',

they are given by Instinct.

Only people educated in a particular way have ever had the idea 'posterity' before their minds at all.

The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.

Nietzschean ethic