Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yet it must at least be recognized that consciousness is rigorously subject to the condition of time, the unconscious is not. This difference, not to mention others, is not negligible, and could well arouse other problems. The contemporary theories regarding the nature of the unconscious seem to me reducible to two principal positions one psychological, the other physiological.
If he did not intend them, the most that can be said for them is, that such is the naturalness of Shakspere's representations, that there is room in his plays, as in life, for those wonderful coincidences which are reducible to no law. Perhaps every one of the examples I adduce will be found open to dispute.
In nothing was he more Jewish than in a tendency to dwell upon the One, or what he called God, clinging still to the expression of his forefathers although departing so widely from them. In his ethics and system of life, as well as in his religion, there was the same intolerance of a multiplicity which was not reducible to unity.
His fundamental ideas, his cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two: He wishes to prove that he is "a man," and he experiences what seems to him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life.
After having collected for my own information a large number of these strange peculiarities, it seems to me that they are reducible to two categories: Those inexplicable freaks dependent on the individual constitution, and more often probably also on experiences in life the memory of which has been lost. Schiller, for example, kept rotten apples in his work desk.
But is it possible to go another step further still, and to show that in the same way the whole of the organic world is reducible to one primitive condition of form? Is there among the plants the same primitive form of organisation, and is that identical with that of the animal kingdom? The reply to that question, too, is not uncertain or doubtful.
Now it is possible, of course, to take the view advocated by Professor J. S. Haldane, who contends that physiology is not theoretically reducible to physics and chemistry.* But the weight of opinion among physiologists appears to be against him on this point; and we ought certainly to require very strong evidence before admitting any such breach of continuity as between living and dead matter.
The general result of our investigations might be summed up thus: we found that the multiplicity of the forms of animal life, great as that may be, may be reduced to a comparatively few primitive plans or types of construction; that a further study of the development of those different forms revealed to us that they were again reducible, until we at last brought the infinite diversity of animal, and even vegetable life, down to the primordial form of a single cell.
There may be others in our ancient dramas, of an irregular kind, not reducible to any of these classes; but to exemplify them is not within the scope of this essay: what has been stated may assist the readers of old plays to judge for themselves when they meet with such characters. The practice of retaining fools can be distinctly traced from the remotest times.
The difficulty is, however, often reducible into that of knowing what gives one pleasure, and this, though difficult, is a safer guide and more easily distinguished. In all cases of doubt, the promptings of a kindly disposition are more trustworthy than the conclusions of logic, and sense is better than science. Why I should have been at the pains to write such truisms I know not. God and Life
Word Of The Day