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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Durant
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July 28 - September 24, 2022
We must show that “pure reason can be practical; i. e., can of itself determine the will independently of anything empirical,”26 that the moral sense is innate, and not derived from experience. The moral imperative which we need as the basis of religion must be an absolute, a categorical, imperative.
to “act as if the maxim of our action were to become by our will a universal law of nature.”
And an action is good not because it has good results, or because it is wise, but because it is done in obedience to this inner sense of duty, this moral law that does not come from our personal experience, but legislates imperiously and à priori for all our behavior, past, present, and future. The only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will—the will to follow the moral law, regardless of profit or loss for ourselves. Never mind your happiness; do your duty. “Morality is not properly the doctrine how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of
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To achieve perfection in yourself and happiness in others, “so act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of another, in every case as an end, never only as a means”:
Pascal was right: the heart has reasons of its own, which the head can never understand.
The essay on religion is a remarkable production for a man of sixty—nine; it is perhaps the boldest of all the books of Kant. Since religion must be based not on the logic of theoretical reason but on the practical reason of the moral sense, it follows that any Bible or revelation must be judged by its value for morality, and cannot itself be the judge of a moral code. Churches and dogmas have value only in so far as they assist the moral development of the race.
Creed and ritual have again replaced the good life; and instead of men being bound together by religion, they are divided into a thousand sects; and all manner of “pious nonsense” is inculcated as “a sort of ;heavenly court service by means of which one may win through flattery the favor of the ruler of heaven.”
—Again, miracles cannot prove a religion, for we can never quite rely on the testimony which supports them; and prayer is useless if it aims at a suspension of the natural laws that hold for all experience.
The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.
“that I think many things with the clearest conviction,. . . which I never have the courage to say; but I will never say anything which I do not think.”
the Kantian position that the external world is known to us only through our sensations and ideas.
How can we explain mind as matter, when we know matter only through mind?
We do not want a thing because we have found reasons for it, we find reasons for it because we want it; we even elaborate philosophies and theologies to cloak our desires.
“Men are only apparently drawn from in front; in reality they are pushed from behind”;35 they think they are led on by what they see, when in truth they are driven on by what they feel,—by instincts of whose operation they are half the time unconscious. Intellect is merely the minister of foreign affairs; “nature has produced it for the service of the individual will.
For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it.”65
But if the world is will, it must be a world of suffering. And first, because will itself indicates want, and its grasp is always greater than its reach. For every wish that is satisfied there remain ten that are denied.
And then, again, the more distinctly a man knows—the more intelligent he is—the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all. 76
For whence did Dante take the materials of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell out of it.
But when, on the other hand, he came to describe heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this.. . .
The fear of death is the beginning of philosophy, and the final cause of religion. The average man cannot reconcile himself to death; therefore he makes innumerable philosophies and theologies; the prevalence of a belief in immortality is a token of the awful fear of death.
Nevertheless, a life devoted to the acquisition of wealth is useless unless we know how to turn it into joy; and this is an art that requires culture and wisdom.
“Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man is contributes more to his happiness than what he has.”
By seeing so far he does not see what is near; he is imprudent and “queer”; and while his vision is hitched to a star he falls into a well. Hence, partly, the unsociability of the genius; he is thinking of the fundamental, the universal, the eternal; others are thinking of the temporary, the specific, the immediate; his mind and theirs have no common ground, and never meet. “As a rule, a man is sociable just in the degree in which he is intellectually poor and generally vulgar.”
And how absurd it is to give property—rights to women! “All women are, with rare exceptions, inclined to extravagance,” because they live only in the present, and their chief out—door sport is shopping. “Women think that it is men’s business to earn money, and theirs to spend it”;151 this is their conception of the division of labor. “I am therefore of opinion that women should never be allowed altogether to manage their own concerns, but should always stand under actual male supervision, be it of father, of husband, of son, or of the state—as is the case in Hindostan; and that consequently
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Dear Sir: On arriving here last week, I found the December livraison of your Biology, and I need hardly say how much I regretted the announcement in the paper annexed to it.. . . I propose that you should write the next of your treatises, and that I should guarantee the publisher against loss.. . . I beg that you will not consider this proposal in the light of a personal favor, though even if it were I should still hope to be permitted to offer it. But it is nothing of the kind—it is a simple proposal of ;coöperation for an important public purpose, for which you give your labor and have given
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Economic relationships are so different from political relationships, and so much more complex, that no government could regulate them all without such an enslaving bureaucracy. State interference always neglects some factor of the intricate industrial situation, and has failed whenever tried; note the wage—fixing laws of medieval England, and the price—fixing laws of Revolutionary France. Economic relations must be left to the automatic self—adjustment (imperfect though it may be) of supply and demand. What society most wants it will pay for most heavily; and if certain men, or certain
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Conduct, like anything else, should be called good or bad as it is well adapted, or maladapted, to the ends of life; “the highest conduct is that which conduces to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of life.”
of the Makololo women, on the shores of the Zambesi, that they were quite shocked to hear that in England a man had only one wife: to have only one was not ‘respectable.’
The formula of justice should be: “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”
He thinks that as war decreases, the control of the individual by the state loses most of its excuse;95 and in a condition of permanent peace the state would be reduced within Jeffersonian bounds, acting only to prevent breaches of equal freedom.
Experience makes obvious that which should have been obvious without experience, that with a universal distribution of votes the larger class will inevitably profit at the expense of the smaller class.. . . Evidently the constitution of the state appropriate to that industrial type of society in which equity is fully realized, must be one in which there is not a representation of individuals but a representation of interests..
he denounces war, and then contends that women should not vote because they do not risk their lives in battle102—a shameful argument for any man to use who has been born of a woman’s suffering.
As Hegel put it: to limit reason by reasoning is like trying to swim without entering the water.
the function of life is to bring about “not the betterment of the majority, who, taken as individuals, are the most worthless types,” but “the creation of genius,” the development and elevation of superior personalities.25
“What is good?. . . To be brave is good.” “What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad (schlecht)? All that comes from weakness.”
Energy, intellect, and pride,—these make the superman. But they must be harmonized: the passions will become powers only when they are selected and unified by some great purpose which moulds a chaos of desires into the power of a personality.
The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph.
Voltaire is “a grand seigneur of the mind”;
It is dangerous to try equality with a woman; she will not be content with that; she will be rather content with subordination if the man is a man. Above all, her perfection and happiness lie in motherhood. “Everything in woman is a riddle, and; everything in woman hath one answer: its name is child–bearing.”
Yet “the perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer.. . . One cannot be gentle enough towards women.”91
The ideal society, then, would be divided into three classes: producers (farmers, prolétaires and business men), officials (soldiers and functionaries), and rulers. The latter would rule, but they would not officiate in government; the actual work of government is a menial task. The rulers will be philosopher–statesmen rather than office–holders. Their power will rest on the control of credit and the army; but they themselves will live more like soldiers than like financiers. They will be Plato’s guardians again; Plato was right—philosophers are the highest men. They will be men of refinement
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and genius has a way of getting born in the most outlandish places. Let us be ruled by all the best. An aristocracy is good only if it is a fluent body of men whose patent to power lies not in birth but in ability,—an aristocracy continually selected and nourished out of a democracy of open and equal opportunity to all.
the origin of new organs and functions, new organisms and species, by the natural selection of favorable variations.
Perhaps the source of most of the innovations in modern mathematics is the rejection of axioms; and Russell delights in men who challenge “self-evident truths” and insist upon the demonstration of the obvious.
“Philosophical propositions. . . must be à priori,” says this strange positivist.
To be useful, reasoning must be about things, and must keep in touch with them at every step. Abstractions have their use as summaries; but as implements of argument they require the running test and commentary of experience.
first, the Principle of Reverence, that “the vitality of individuals and communities is to be promoted as far as possible”; and second, the Principle of Tolerance, that “the growth of one individual or one community is to be as little as possible at the expense of another.”47
Art can only be the flower that grows out of wealth: it cannot be wealth’s substitute. The Medici came before Michelangelo.
subtlety of his thought, and the fragrance of his style, are like the perfume that lingers in a room from which the flowers have been taken away.
“Animal faith” may be faith in a myth, but the; myth is a good myth, since life is better than any syllogism. The fallacy of Hume lay in supposing that by discovering the origin of ideas he had destroyed their validity: “A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one; his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of the French lady who asked if all children were not natural.”
