(1859-1939)
English psychologist, author, scientist, and sex specialist?
he anticipated Jung's ideas about the unconscious.
Echoes Dewey, and predates Rorty's ideas about truth.
From The Dance of Life: (1923)
Dancing: Source of all arts that express themselves inside the person.
Architecture: The beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person.
"...and dancing came first".
Some assorted dancers:
in Europe:
18th century France perfected the ballet as it decayed in Italy.
Mozart was a an accomplished dancer.
It is the dance that socialized man.
Puritanism attacked dancing.
Dancing is the loftiest...of the arts because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; It is life itself
Musical instruments still paricularly associated with the dance were originated in Eygpt:
Guitar, cymbal, tamborine, triangles, amd castanets.
"Our thinking would itself be fluid if it were not that by fiction we obtain imaginary standpoints and boundaries by which to gain control of the flow of reality".
"Imagination is thus a constitutive part of all thinking... there is no sharp distinction between the region of poetry and the region of science. Both alike are not ends in themselves, but means to higher ends".
Montaigne ...so fresh and personal and inventive, we see that its originality lies largely in its vocabulary which... has its novelty in its metaphorical values...
...at the beginning of the 19th century, when an attempt was made to vitalise language once more, and to break the rigid and formal molds the previous century had constructed.
Man has passed through the three stages of magic, religion, and science.
We may not have been individuals before, but we are chips or fragments of a great mass of mind, of spirit, and of life.
...to understand the real relations of science and mysticism, we must return to ages when, on neither side, had any accumulated mass of dead traditions effected an artificial divorce between two great natural instincts.
"The representative world is a system of fictions. Is is a symbol by the help of which we orient ourselves. The business of science is to make the symbol ever more adequate, but it remains a symbol, a means of action, for action is the last end of thinking".
It was only when the Greeks began to absorb Oriental influences, we are inclined to say, that they became genuine mystics, and as they approached mysticism they left science behind.
...we do not 'discover' truth, we invent it.
The Greek was concerned with what he himself felt about his own actions; the Roman was concerned with what they would look like to other people...
Before the active invasion of reason, living had been an art...
...miracles are not things that are performed, but things that are perceived...
The word 'civilisation' is of recent formation. It came from France, but even in France in a Dictionary of 1727 it cannot be found, though the word civiliser existed as far back as 1694, meaning to polish manners, to render sociable, to become urbane, one might say, as a result of becoming urban, of living as a citizen in cities.
It is the preoccupation with possessions more than anything else that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
The average length of a civilisation is 1330 years.
Spoke about Shaftesbuty - "Most of the great European thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were in some measure inspired, or anticipated by him. With his followers Arbuckle and Hutcheson, may be regarded as the founders of aesthetics".
Nietzsche's "And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."
Eckhart's "A man is what he loves".
Lucian's "Dancing is as old as love".
GRIDS is part of
