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The efficient thinker is not only more fertile in ideas and more often productive of the 'right' ideas than the incompetent is; he is also more satisfied by them when he gets them, and more rebellious against the futile and misleading ones. We trust to the laws of cerebral nature to present us spontaneously with the appropriate idea, and also to prefer that idea to others."
It will be quite possible, then, that in remote corners of the world humanity may be honoured in the person of the negro, while in Europe it may be degraded in the person of the thinker. The old principles will remain, but they will adopt the dress of the age, and philosophy will lend its name to an oppression that was formerly authorised by the Church.
Every thought builds a form; if the thought be directed to another person it travels to him; if it be distinctly selfish it remains in the immediate neighbourhood of the thinker; if it belongs to neither of these categories it floats for awhile in space and then slowly disintegrates.
Similarly regarding Plato, the aristocratic Athenian who sat at the feet of Socrates, and through whose writings the teachings of the master found widest currency. Some students of philosophy find in Plato "the greatest thinker and writer of all time."
During the winter of 1844-45, Charles Grun had some long conversations with Proudhon, which determined, very decisively, not the ideas, which belonged exclusively to the bisontin thinker, but the form of the important work on which he labored after 1843, and which was published in 1846 by Guillaumin.
No sooner had Tertius Marrineal formulated his political hopes than there were manifested in the conduct of The Patriot strange symptoms of a hankering after respectability. Essentially Marrineal was not respectable, any more than he was radical. He was simply and singly selfish. A long-distance thinker, Tertius Marrineal.
Other friends the Speddings, the Arnolds at Fox How, the Davys at Ambleside, the Fletchers at Lancrigg formed a delightful circle, all within tolerably easy reach, and affording a haven of kind and nourishing companionship. But, for a thinker upon the practical aspects of political and social science, it was all too far from Labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar.
He seemed always absolutely oblivious of his own great qualities, as simple and kindly in manners as a moujik but with a certain innate dignity and courtliness of demeanour which lifted him above most of those with whom he came in contact. I nourished an almost passionate admiration for Voratin as a thinker and a man, and his writings had gone far to influence me in my Anarchist leanings.
For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road. But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the pessimist.
In the second "lackland" half, it is the instructive history of a scattered people, organically one, in spite of dispersion, by reason of its unshaken ideal traditions; a people accepting misery and hardship with stoic calm, combining the characteristics of the thinker with those of the sufferer, and eking out existence under conditions which no other nation has found adequate, or, indeed, can ever find adequate.
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