The Abolition of Man
Published:
- “Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds-making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation— men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”
- “We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’ The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,” of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment— these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebra. man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
- “The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. […] It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger that the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”
- “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.”
- “What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments of the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation… The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.”
- “From within the Tao itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao. This is what Confucius meant when he said ‘With those who follow a different Way it is useless to take counsel’ This is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible. He may be hostile, he cannot be critical: he does not know what is being discussed.“
- “…by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, [the future] are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer.”
“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. […] It is not use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”