United States or Brunei ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Men desire pleasure, and they desire to avoid pain. The two seem to be opposed. But men constantly accept pleasures which entail some suffering, and they avoid pains even at the expense of some pleasure. Are, however, pleasures and pains strictly commensurable?
For life is progress, whilst the geometrical method is commensurable only with things. Mr Bergson is aware of this; and his rare merit has been to disengage specific originality from biology, while elevating it to a typical and standard science. But let us come to the heart of the problem. What was Kant's point of departure in the theory of knowledge?
Thus, from the fact that two brains, like that of the ape and that of the man, are very much alike, we cannot conclude that the corresponding consciousnesses are comparable or commensurable. But the two brains may perhaps be less alike than we suppose.
And the whole world for fifty years has been repeating: "Sublime! Grand! Napoleon le Grand!" Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas. * "From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step." And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not commensurable with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness and immeasurable meanness.
The poem is kept closely concrete and strictly commensurable by the very framework of its story: "pure crude fact, Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard, And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since."
The impulse affected Western Christendom for a relatively short period of time, only once or twice producing movements at all commensurable with those which had emanated from Arabia, Asia Minor, and Africa, and leading to no conquests that can rank in magnitude with the caliphates of Bagdad, Cordova, and Cairo. But the Christian Crusade is in one sense more remarkable than the Mohammedan Jehad.
First of all the great legal maxim was proclaimed, that freedom is not a possession commensurable with property, but an eternal right of man, of which the state is entitled judicially to deprive the criminal alone, not the debtor.
It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in these matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty....
The music of "Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this representation.
Their bulk was not in the least commensurable with their number, there were hundreds of them sometimes, for they were written on the thinnest tissue paper to be procured.
Word Of The Day