Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
We have had saints and sinners, free livers and ascetics, martyrs and money-lenders. Polarity, Graetz calls the self-contradiction which runs through our history.
In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; there are fifty more. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere.
The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency of statement than a washerwoman has for wisps of vapor, which made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at their first encounter in Morningside Park, became at last with constant association the secret of Miss Miniver's growing influence.
The notion of philosophic truth as something to be shared and enjoyed only by a few as what is called 'esoteric' is no longer in vogue and is indeed felt to involve an essential self-contradiction; rather it is conceived as something the value of which is assured and enhanced by being imparted.
It brings us back to the feeling that he is a great man using the fiction form for purposes broader than that of telling a story. Because of this ample personal testimony in his books it should be easy to state his Lebensanschauung, unless the opacity of his manner blocks the way or he indulges in self-contradiction in the manner of a Nietzsche. Such is not the case.
This view is impossible to express without self-contradiction and it does not fit in with our accustomed habits of mind: nevertheless if we do not simply reject it at once as patently absurd but keep it in mind for a while and allow ourselves time to get used to it, it grows steadily more and more convincing: we become less and less able to evade these difficult questions by accepting the common sense account of what we know directly as consisting of a series of qualities which are repeated over and over, and more and more driven to regard it as a process in creative duration which does not admit of repetitions.
It is true that we had to discuss the question of an apparent antithetic, but we found that it was based upon a misconception. There was, then, no real self-contradiction of reason in the propositions: The series of phenomena given in themselves has an absolutely first beginning; and: This series is absolutely and in itself without beginning.
They were obliged to render these replies in prison, unassisted by any advocates, on penalty of being condemned 'in contumaciam'. The questions, awkwardly drawn up as they seemed, were yet tortuously and cunningly arranged with a view of entrapping the prisoners into self-contradiction.
As far as the logic of the affections goes, it was for the sake of this that he held to all the rest; for indeed the deeper Catholic truths are so internetted that he who seizes one, drags all the rest along with it under pain of self-contradiction.
A nature such as we have already traced is, as we cannot but perceive, revolted by the bare idea of violence to the aged and infirm, and recoils as strongly from the one accusation as from the other. 'The prisoner made his statement at the first moment, and has adhered to it in every detail, without confusion or self-contradiction.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking