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He is the man who denies, to whom art is a silly toy, who detests abstractions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; he believes in nothing; he bows to nothing; he can break, but he cannot bend; he does break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, he retains his invincible pride, and "not cowardly puts off his helmet," and he dies "valiantly vanquished."
It would make prediction wholly vain, and entangle truth in a totality of things which is unique at every instant, and never can recur. The principles of mathematics are as clearly postulates. In Euclidean geometry we assume definitions of 'points, 'lines, 'surfaces, etc., which are never found in nature, but form the most convenient abstractions for measuring things.
Macaulay himself has penned many biographies. Most of them are quite above the pedantry of small facts. Instead, they are crammed with deep philosophy, with abstractions, and with the balancing of antithetical qualities. They are bloodless frameworks, without life or humanity, bundles of peculiarities skilfully grouped, and ticketed with such and such a name. No one sees a man within.
With that whisper went Becky's last breath, but the smile was there, even when her lips were cold. The tutor was from New England, and he was precisely what passes, with Southerners, as typical. He was thin, he wore spectacles, he talked dreamy abstractions, and he looked clerical.
These succeed one another in a certain definite order on all the slips. What, I asked myself, were these drawings meant to represent, letters, numbers, things, or abstractions?
The peculiarities of certain individuals the "cold abstractions" of one, and the rash utterances of another have nothing essentially to do with the case; nor has the hurt they may be thought to do to our Unitarian cause anything to do with the essential truth of things. Nor do I know that extreme Radicalism does us any more harm than extreme Conservatism.
So much is common to all tongues, but Japanese carries its positivism yet further. Not only has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative pronouns nor pronominal adjectives, those convenient keepers of places for the absent. "None" and "nothing" are unknown words in its vocabulary, because the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts, but upon metaphysical abstractions.
They borrowed from the infinite riches of the poet their noble or tender thoughts; but whenever he tried to make them more than abstractions to unite them to the sympathies of his audience or to clothe them in real flesh and blood look at the means he takes listen to the conversations of Miss Juliet and the songs of Ophelia and you will perceive what were the lessons his experience in actual men and women had taught him.
Galsworthy has shown us how stereotyped views, abstractions of the human mind, settle down upon classes and individuals and warp their judgments and their conduct.
As the philosopher of the New Germany, as the chief expositor of the doctrine of force, the inventor of the super-man and of the idea of the beyond-good, Nietzsche seems to stand convicted of furnishing precisely the concepts that have become the German's gospel of war; and since the German is prone to be guided by abstractions, the evidence, even though circumstantial, seems to many to be convincing.
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