The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole. Probably all three doctrines must be combined to find a perfect ethics; but can we doubt which of the elements is fundamental?

So, for example, when knowledge attempts to decide whether the world is finite or infinite in space, thought rebels against either supposition: beyond any limit, we are driven to conceive something further, endlessly; and yet infinity is itself inconceivable. Again: did the world have a beginning in time? We cannot conceive eternity; but then, too, we cannot conceive any point in the past without feeling at once that before that, something was.

Churches and dogmas have value only in so far as they assist the moral development of the race.

America, the Negro lands. The Spice Islands, the Cape of Good Hope, etc., on being discovered, were treated as countries that belonged to nobody; for the aboriginal inhabitants were reckoned as nothing... And all this has been done by nations who make a great ado about their piety, and who, while drinking up iniquity like water, would have themselves regarded as the very elect of the orthodox faith.”—The

Kant therefore calls for equality: not of ability, but of opportunity for the development and application of ability; he rejects all prerogatives of birth and class, and traces all hereditary privilege to some violent conquest in the past.

but in the field of social and political affairs every grocer’s boy is an expert, knows the solution, and demands to be heard.

The professed ethic of Europe and America is a pacifistic Christianity; the actual ethic is the militaristic code of the marauding Teutons from whom the ruling strata, almost everywhere in Europe, are derived.

“without music,” he said, “life would be a mistake.”

And yet, in his quiet hours, he knew that Wagner was as right as Nietzsche, that Parsifal’s gentleness was as necessary as Siegfried’s strength, and that in some cosmic way these cruel oppositions merged into wholesome creative unities.

The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimental work-shop where some things in every age succeed, while most things fail;

If the German power of organization could coöperate with the potential resources of Russia, in materials and in men, then would come the age of great politics. “We require an intergrowth of the German and Slav races; and we require, too, the cleverest financiers, the Jews, that we may become the masters of the world... We require an unconditional union with Russia.” The alternative was encirclement and strangulation.

Fascinating "what if" of history

A general who uses up soldiers on the battlefield, where they have the pleasure of dying under the anesthesia of glory, is far nobler than the employer who uses up men in his profit-machine; observe with what relief men leave their factories for the field of slaughter.

Cf. Starship Troopers.... Wanted to be "not just a producing/consuming economic animal but a man."

“Within fifty years these Babel governments” (the democracies of Europe) “will clash in a gigantic war for the markets of the world.” But perhaps out of that madness will come the unification of Europe;—an

World War I, European Union.... Nietzsche was very prescient in a way on this point. Though it doesn't speak to World War I feeding into World War II before a postwar European unification movement should take shape.

the better formula, surely, is a “career open to talent” wherever born; and genius has a way of getting born in the most outlandish places.

Cf. Quote about Einstein's brain. More significant is how many potential Einsteins lived and died in fields or sweatshops

Italy might be described as the land that had a Renaissance, but never a Reformation; it will destroy itself for beauty’s sake, but it is as sceptical as Pilate when it thinks of truth. Perhaps the Italians are wiser than the rest of us, and have found that truth is a mirage, while beauty—however subjective—is a possession and a reality.

The state may be a monster, as Nietzsche called it; a monster of unnecessary size; but its centralized tyranny has the virtue of abolishing the miscellaneous and innumerable petty tyrannies by which life was of old pestered and confined. One master pirate, accepting tribute quietly, is better than a hundred pirates, taking toll without warning and without stint.

Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally proportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption within them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have left the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial abuses.

“That life is worth living,” he says, “is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.

It is useless to say that this chaos in which we live and move is the result of one consistent will; it gives every sign of contradiction and division within itself. Perhaps the ancients were wiser than we, and polytheism may be truer than monotheism to the astonishing diversity of the world.

I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history, the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.

He did not live in his study so much as in the current of life; he was an active worker in a hundred efforts for human betterment; he was always helping somebody, lifting men up with the contagion of his courage.

Why should not every man, rich or poor, give two years of his life to the state, not for the purpose of killing other people, but to conquer the plagues, and drain the marshes, and irrigate the deserts, and dig the canals, and democratically do the physical and social engineering which builds up so slowly and painfully what war so quickly destroys?

“There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it?

The modern era will begin only when the naturalist point of view shall be adopted in every field. This does not mean that mind is reduced to matter, but only that mind and life are to be understood not in theological but in biological terms, as an organ or an organism in an environment, acted upon and reacting, moulded and moulding.

There is no knowable limit to change or growth; and perhaps there is nothing impossible but thinking makes it so.

Imagining an alternate reality in which John Dewey appears in Adidas ads