United States or Tuvalu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I will now for one indicative moment lock horns with what many Think the greatest thing, the question of art, so-call'd. I have not seen without learning something therefrom, how, with hardly an exception, the poets of this age devote themselves, always mainly, sometimes altogether, to fine rhyme, spicy verbalism, the fabric and cut of the garment, jewelry, concetti, style, art.
I will not weary you with the verbalism, since you will be able to check it; the substance of my proclamation is this: I announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he has given up to me.
Perhaps more than anyone else, the Fabians are responsible for turning English socialist thought from the verbalism of the Marxian disciples to the actualities of English political life. Their appetite for the concrete was enormous; their knowledge of facts overpowering, as the tomes produced by Mr. and Mrs. Webb can testify.
All I mean is that it can receive a reasonable justification, and that no matter how lofty the development it has its basis in the fundamental conditions of associated animal and human life. We may surround the subject with a vague and attractive idealistic verbalism, but we come back to this as a starting point.
He employs a shorthand of names and signs and samples. He has to do this if he is to advance at all, because he cannot carry the whole baggage in every phrase through every step he takes. But if he forgets that he has substituted and simplified, he soon lapses into verbalism, and begins to talk about names regardless of objects.
Meaning, therefore, cannot be depersonalized; if meanings are depersonalized, they cease to be real, and become verbal. Words alone are tolerant of the abstract treatment Formal Logic demands. This 'science, therefore, finally reduces to mere verbalism, distracted by inconsistent relapses into 'psychology.
What is the use of a logic which cannot effect the capital distinction of all thought, that between the true and the false? is debarred by its own principles from considering the meaning of any real assertion? and is thus tossed helplessly from horn to horn of the dilemma 'either verbalism or psychology'? We may select a few examples of this fatal dilemma.
We shall be in accord with idealism by the use of this easy little formula, "If some one had been there," or even by saying, "For a universal consciousness...." The difference of the realist and idealist theory becomes then purely verbal. This amounts to saying that it disappears. But there is always much verbalism in idealism.
It is the medium of the threat of force and the stratagem of cunning, but also it enters human life as the medium of persuasion and conviction. The speech ability, the capacity to use words in attaining purpose, shows as striking variations as any other capacity. Though it can be cultivated, good verbalism is an innate ability, and a most valuable one.
To regard them only as images with a value inhering in their bare essence, is to forfeit their benefits. Verbalism, formalism, mysticism, are given a certain false charm and semblance of self-sufficiency by the cultivation and exercise of the aesthetic interest.
Word Of The Day