I think that, if we are to feel at home in the world after the present war, we shall have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally. What changes this will bring about, I do not know, but I am convinced that they will be profound and of the greatest importance. 1.
To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: “Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a laborer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.
Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.
There is no ultimate satisfaction in the cultivation of one element of human nature at the expense of all the others, nor in viewing all the world as raw material for the magnificence of one’s own ego.
Memory does not prolong the existence of the past; it is merely one way in which the past has effects.
Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.
In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.
There is no reason, therefore, so far as I am able to perceive, to deny the ultimate and absolute philosophical validity of a theory of geometry which regards space as composed of points, and not as a mere assemblage of relations between non-spatial terms.
Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge – reading and writing, languages and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves.
I do not like mystical language, and yet I hardly know how to express what I mean without employing phrases that sound poetic rather than scientific.
Only the guardians, in Plato’s language, are to think; the rest are to obey, or to follow leaders like a herd of sheep. This doctrine, often unconsciously, has survived the introduction of political democracy, and has radically vitiated all national systems of education.
Our system of education turns young people out of the schools able to read, but for the most part unable to weigh evidence or to form an independent opinion. They are then assailed, throughout the rest of their lives, by statements designed to make them believe all sorts of absurd propositions, such as that Blank’s pills cure all ills, that Spitzbergen is warm and fertile, and that Germans eat corpses.
We cannot admire a social system which allows no scope for individual achievement, and we cannot approve one in which excessive individualism makes the social system unstable.
Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever.
Leibniz used to discourse to Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia concerning the infinitely little, and how she would reply that on that subject she needed no instruction – the behaviour of courtiers had made her thoroughly familiar with it.
One comes across white men occasionally who suffer under the delusion that China is not a civilized country. Such men have forgotten what constitutes civilization.
The pursuit of social success, in the form of prestige or power or both, is the most important obstacle in a competitive society.
But in fact, while some aspects of history can be made more or less scientific, and while it is important to do this wherever it is possible, the material is too complex to be reduced to scientific laws at present, and probably for centuries to come.
Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
The belief in a happy “state of nature” in the remote past is derived partly from the biblical narrative of the age of the patriarchs, partly from the classical myth of the golden age. The general belief in the badness of the remote past only came with the doctrine of evolution.