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leonbeon
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Protoithikologia:
AN Essay. (Selections from..)
The Philosopher hath a law for the salvation of Time. Let us read as though our current sentence is a subalternant, for it is said that that which happens once is most true, we shall allow that which was said once to become the voice and God of Time. Many art the entrances unto Man's acreage, and as much as we hath proposed inquiries thereunto knowledge so there be as many tracts which lead to it: - Euclid geometries it, and Gabriel beareth it - to the Scholar, the world is an immortal gymnasium; to the Religious it is no lower then the fame of the Deity, and a very temple upon them, and to the Satirist it is a catalog of analogies - a work book of jokes - to the Farmer even is it a way of living, and it be a Son to whom fancieth him selfe a Prophet. Thus the true doctrine which concerneth itselfe with man or of nature needs contain in it somewhat ( AA) expectant. Then let us read our Sententiae, as it where, as a Duty which indwelleth the Deed after which it is confessed. ( Thus Goethe translates "Logos" and "Word" in the bible to Duty. ) Yet I say these injunctions carry the knowledge of Heaven, however plaited they be and seemingly injurious upon the name of truth, for to treat our intellectual constitution(s) so generally where to make Time callable unto us, and we be redeemed of wholly our age within our own histories, or, "personalities". In the language of logic: the class of facts, [in medicine, algebra, chemistry, etc.] is a theory, for under a system of classification general laws may be declared about the theory, the laws thus summarizing the theory in a symbolic form. For all this thus Emerson giveth the proverb, the whole future is at the bottom of the heart.
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One temptation yet the Sphinx hath: - and which the greatest of all Philosophers hath conceived of someday rebelling against- 18 and that is to search out truly the depth and literality of Ethical laws, and that not even a Man canst raise a fraud against the Earth. That Man whom delivereth unto words a deeper sense upon the Ethique; will hath written for the first time - A man - his own testament, will be a Christ. Though every spiritual law, to be understood, must be recognized by it's contradistinction to moral law. Thence when we art forced to defend ourselves from injury- like unto like our enemy - and out of that bear necessity; that spiritual law, lash out at him, to uphold the defense of ourselves [a slight animal jurisprudence being derived from instinct or necessity] we art forced also to overrule a moral law - that not to kill. The question is then; is there such an ethical law that exists, which can be understood without contradistinction to moral law - in other words - is there such an ethical law which is so general, so peremptory, that it canst border - if not fully entail - something instinctual, something spiritual: or is there such a way to generalize the sorts of ethical laws which currently hath been proposed?
Thus with general tenor doth a man's style appeal to minds of the same class as his own - for the preceding flaunteth an evidence to the latter, as it doth to the one man. No physiognomy is to be read ever from the face; though there is *always* some significance to be read in the attire. Exclamation is of the lighter gender -feminine- that is, bringing to attention any single part of something before all the rest - it is a thing of poets. - Thus be careful with style, it is a thing of cunning - though it may be used to some good- it forever shall be of a greater value in the hands of uneasy writers. -
[A true philosophy of Geniture I should think would include a philosophy of the World and Nature- would even be a philosophy of the World and Nature- ] and yet nothing in all of the sciences is as self- identical as a quadratics, or a geodesic: the very conceit to throw upon us, should not any "species isolate" exciteth those who love nature, before any other population of creatures? Or does not the Naturalist commonly appreciate every animal: relict, extinct, familiar, unfamiliar? The classifications of the natural sciences is a prepense. Take the rarer animal amongst a stock of his own and he is lost to another marvel, somewhere else, perhaps in another kingdom. You plagarize the talent of the one breed of dog by breeding it with this one; whereby the miracle is over, so life and the activity of speciation is begun. Though our classifications in biology, botany, zoology; serve very well to inaugurate all the newly discovered species or the functions of our bodies, or a new flora to those persons not so narrow as to specialize upon any one field of study: they art but graces, accentual, temporary in their note. A class is more or less diesis: lower to any actual practice. It is for this which Ideas too, should be called for; the modi significandi of the Modistae, the old Identity theory of Truth, Quine's Indispensability of Mathematics, Philolaus's Method of Archai in the indispensability of numbers- let them all take a seat upon our cabinets; as with the scientist, so do varieties of insects, shells, and bones. The healthful mind so is scalar and progressive, to it these classes of things, these nomenclatures, art but staircases- not humble lodgings to which the whole volume of some kingdom of animals is reduced to a personal research: it forfeits not sight to the opposites of those terms 19 - family and relation. - Otherwise our whole theory is upon an inorganic and lifeless nature.
Man is a God in jest; his mind a circus of ideas - He is blinded in folly, silenced yet in rage. His moral is a balancing act: his philosophies all reconciliation. His friends art all chosen by virtue of a strategy: through them he should desire to feel at home, whenever he is not at home, that is, whenever he must go about the world he bringeth a few with him, to feel at home as long as they be be around him.
From biotaxy to histology; we but count the countless topologies of life - the configuration of anther, petal, stamen: or tooth, carapace, skull. The Thesis is exotic, strange, even inglorious. For a verity can only be unraveled or unweaved- as it goeth it canst not catch itself; the argument hath no ideas, is not an idea(s) - the argument is the procedure for the forming an idea, such that when it is read through, it provoketh thought as well as informeth - these systems of class only informeth - they art not arguments. A true argument, as one can readily find in Montaigne and Plato, is an "anthesis of thought", a testament to the virginity and inexperience of the conscience, which tendeth to evict the truth from themselves rather then demonstrate it - in other words - the true argument leaves all but the truth explicitly framed, the better means to isolate it as a fact and implicate it as a law. Thus in this attempt to "isolate law" the truly philosophical argument reproduces facts as through a wellspring: and interpretations read from this sort of authentic system, constantly fill themselves into the fates of their order - always connected to, expected by, and organized therewith Truth. I call these knowledges; "symplectic" knowledge. Thus the Great Philosophers - Plato and the like, so original in their depth- were all called Prophets and Divines, Half- Gods and the like. The idea of their argument predicted all possible facts connected with the truth which they were professors of, and thus, to this day, they art yet vast and vaster oracles, with a certain Life declaring to all those whom will listen to them.
I am a grim monetarist of Time: the moreso hath I, the more greatly I seek to become educated, the more I read; the less time I hath, the less an impersonate life I should take pains to enjoy. Art and Knowledge art so long; Time so short, and Passion, Feeling fast. The Soul hath it's laic and imp - like tendencies: It is a tropism or a compass. Thus you may doubt as you want: before the season you shall believe. Faith is subject equally to repetition as well as it is to apostate: it too is shaped by new discovery, and time hath his custom with it to sanctify, restore, and discolor it. Faith to one's self is therewith exempt (although). Though if that more general faith were not as I describe; why so would it be a virtue to maintain it? Sainthood is recognized only in Him Who's faith is a perseverance: those whom hibernate in their faith art illegitimate thereunto.
Whosoever shall inspan upon Hell; to collar the ruins of Man; but that you cannot bind the draft. Sometimes the only means to the liberation of or suffering is to volunteer for it: the volunteer to that contract cannot be bound by said contract, he in some sense, hath eluded the imperative, the necessity to act. He hath been temper'd. Thus is man's volition but a security with symbols: [in his iconology] Platonism is not a philosophy- it is a practicality - to be able and to look upon the sphere of nature from a still higher - sphere, in the soul. It requires a drowsy negligence of true life; as if Nature herselfe disdain'd her authorship, and the trees their roots; and that She cannot be certain by the virtue of her own margins. To me, this tradition of observation, this Platonism, - is like paying a visit to some immured spirits, spirits in jail; every being in nature is like some sort of ghost, a wraith or phantom - image, bound to it's loci and place of service by some stranger magic worked upon it by the antic of form, and token. He whom, by this self- tormenting philosophy, seeketh the truth shall hath a Cygnus -death, on a bed of lambskin too shall he sleep - betray'd by music. 21 Remember: There is a little nature in her exhibition, - in the parade of natural science and natural history- a bit in her secretary; that is, the means through which she acts, - her laws and customs - and the most of nature is in her stock and in her capital -that is- in remote history.
It is said that the inquiry of science is begun with a sense of something being "off- taste" yet whereof is that compunction of ours discovered in the contemplation - philosophic and the contemplation - ethic? He who demonstrates this shall have a new ethic: another undiscovered philosophy, the philosophy of regret and, more importantly, how to encourage someone to regret.
He will redeem us, populus mortale genus. [Papinius] Be sorry for your own life; yet enjoy the company of another. Both will be happy, you will be happy in your season whereby you consociate - yet you shall not care to die.
Every Office carries merits which infrequently art canonized on behalf of their true performers. Great lists of services we make of in {formula} called {convention;} [and offices art known for only their conventions. ] We look at an office as but some deeds, in gender; their convention is singular, that is, they art appreciable or not. Men are more vigorous then so: we hate them and we love them.
Time is almost Syriac, 23 calm and steady Eternitie doth lenify me. Eyes art tributaries of life. Vision is a holy sense - holy before all others and most enduring record of the mind. I prey that I may be given eyes the which to see in fruit from the valonia such deserts of seas; to see pageantries in chickpeas. Telescope before armament. 22 Science wanteth of branches and subdivisions; it unloads planets from galaxies, the cell -almost virtual in it's existence - it isolateth from the body, if only to insure the curious habits therein of the many individuals.
The Soul is but a feather, which blowest for the hungrier wind. It gainest priority only before seduction, theft, and grief; otherwise it is excited only by apposition with our experiences of the world, and each other of it's intexture. It's life only canst be proven if the winds break away- there it is lofty in it's stillness. It's true sublimity is in a sort of vaunting of it's pettiness and abjection: besides obedience and subservience, this canst be done with charity and hospitality. Hence the liberty of the Soul of Man is in living within as he would appear without; or in still other words, the surest regulation of the social vinculum, that is, our reputations, is in the learning to be content that you art greater then you {appear} to your fellows to be. The reason why we seek reputations is the same as why we find guilt and shame so very painful: human nature is self - remunerative. Our heart knoweth of what we deserve. Treat your company like a garden to your heart: the purpose of which to ennoble it, and make all it's better qualities stand out - treat those whom with you deal business as the dressing to these virtues; the purpose of which to get respect. Our heart knoweth of what we deserve: Perhaps the only misery greater then having many children and having to resort to forage; that is, not having the means of which to feed them, is in being a Son of Man, and though man hath so much knowledge, he is able to give you only a bit of truth to feed your hungry spirit. This is the Philosopher's woe. The imagination in it's character is highly coadunate though speaketh as by virtue of a dialect, that is, some catch sight of it in places whereof others do not, yet it remains consistent. The heart is govern of the world- mythologic; and conducts all of our imaginations togather; the imagination govern of the world- intellectual. Hence the latter hath been anthologized by the Heart. {Man is always in a hebetic or pubertal state. [I believe this fact should be thought over.] We are at all times opening upon ourselves. Hence our whole life is prone to a strange embarrassment and trauma: we do things and we know not why, just as the body does. The reason always disaffirms the understanding, though the understanding may be now and again recovered by mere acceptance of the reason. }
To take the place of God, do the materials exist to raise such an Idol as that?
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Accusative theology, that is, theology which teaches repentance, is worthy in it's discipline; it attends upon the callow mind and rears it, that it can be made commensurate with the truth, to finally uphold itself. Although {the most difficult problems of life and of philosophy require something more then legerity. } The titles of Kings is faint before the Gospel. Education cometh after Repentance: Repentance maketh us into Men, but it is Education which delighteth the Gods. {Robert Flint in the Baird Lecture of 1876} saith that if a unique moral nature were absent from man, man could never recognize the moral character of God. Man the heav'n - milk'd "polupidax": {tis' an Homeric epithet meaning "to hath many fountains"} to receive to thine self such impressions, it is thine excuse, as from this world yet thou canst effectually resolve; in other words {To thou:} the turtle's meat is given; that you must reap the house he live- in. To get at the heart of knowledge is to infuriate our wisdom and become drunk in our wisdom. Hath thou an education that informeth and teacheth to judge?
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[Ourselves to knoweth, we invaginate man.] The judgments whereby we live our lives art mere attempts to confirm a theoretic propositions, by virture of any theoretic- narrative: in other words, the preterient example of manhood is at the fathom of the heart in isolate: the Great Man is a stock upon which human nature is fram'd. To know yourself as this Man is to glean upon this stock; and bring an indemnification upon the laws of society. It drinketh in individualism. The Traveler's home be even wider then the whole Earth: it is the present case, campaign of the will, he is axial to that vast space of will. The Earth is an untold inventory of languages. Beauty is a confession to this subtle ancestry of tongues: Justice is Beauty's representation - the philosopher is most loving of beauty, for he seeketh justice, to recreate and represent beauty and causeth his thoughts to become beautiful. Earth and Symbol together art as an involuted shell- or under which rotunda our Souls dwell together and make philosophy - @ Earth and Symbol run colinear as upon the sides of our dwelling- space, yet it is with much inconvenience that we resolve as to where the one or the other ends, and where another begins - and together as one they cavort about us. Nature is patient, as she worships fortuity Man is restive: he pleads for discovery. Yet O' planet, ye' men of old, men of the watery- born morrow, thine truths, opinions, thine chances, loves, hath passed through the Man of Men, {this philosopher} and the whole Universe, as it where, hath been passed through his body, like his grain and his meat for his food, and the world is not but grain and meat anymore, but it is the Man himself, naye, seemed e'en the Universe with his own self to hath been impurpled. Across that width of all the arboriculture and timber meek, of the world his wings he whips- and for quite a time we follow thereupon the median of their conference. The Philosopher is plowman of the sands: ample field he hath, his soil poor.
And so the Truth @ is a careful valuation of the world as it standeth: those who seek an immovable truth in spheres beyond the World's reach, seek a nature of apparency and apparition. The goodness of truth is in it's way to guide us in our most insistent decision making, evermore occurring! Those who would be philosophers must treat of truth, as it where, an accommodation. The animals, in their dateless toil, which goeth from there to now, gathering and hunting, art not so over work'd as the Scholar, who's work never ends, who's encyclopedia is always hardly ever begun. Great learning is in proving to oneself that he is incompetent for learning. More books after more books. Ten thousand centuries yet every book is merely an excitant of another book, each one of them likely wind- eggs, no- hatchlings from the Mares of Thrace! Within the pages which he searches for truth, his task becomes no longer "ascititious" to the Truth, but takes the place whereof Truth could never fill- and despising to hath a visitor, and grief, and the like, become his nature. Do not stand drear, that low- passion, for that day most seemingly bankrupt can be good for something.
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Nature herself is polyeidic, insects most honestly represent her. We behold the Spirit of the natural world not without some terror; for it's tendency to self - change we imagine to be awkward and wholly foreign to ourselves. Thus our days we live by means of policy - plans for reading, jobs, etc - and yet still make pains to seize upon the vast nominative, indice, and gnomologic of the whole World. The mountains, the streams, the animals, the plants, the clouds and birds and sunshine - it is all a living hieroglyphics. Thus we at once read from it and find art in it, sense as well as beauty. What is this breviature, this taxeme which we celebrate in nature, but itself the thoughts of a wider poetry; a high tag upon our pandect of World? 24 - to regard Nature as symbolic instead of being govern'd by symbols? The Prophet speaks "epigaeous" and germination: likewise he saith inerrant as that much resistless, the tartly citrus yields his fruit as the prophet is moved by soul to speak, or that the apricot, what Armenian peach, with her white bloom attends upon her stock. All certification is in words, likewise every fact is in a word: and, in a word, all of nature is the fact - and all of thought is merely by subtle nuances set apart from nature, though we strive against we canst not help but to hold her upon herself. And what is literature but a cleavage of the "diarian tenure" and conversation and company the payment for thereof? Do we not read but that we may speak with more dignity for that we hath done? The object of reading is mainly affirmative: though to what kind of purpose is it, that we read according to only our state? There is no true punitive force, no hope of emendation or reform: we cant only trace back whence from we came. There is nothing new for us in a book, except for the digressive, the superficial: the full use of the book is but a pulpit whereby to judge rather or not we, in our present states, art worthy or not, and thereby to moderate our daily lives.
Like children by the shore, with such joy we may cast upon the sand to drawings make, as it where, our own gentle triumphs: and though with more ease of nature we may draw upon the sand then come to make statues in marble, yet more noble shall our figures be in the stone of Paros. When we hath conversation, scare before our friend hath finished speaking, doth our own ideas begin upon the tracks laid by his own. But in character these thoughts be festal and brisk; for seeds we do not keep them: these thoughts, by coming up in ranks, and contracts, art beyond all polishment. They art better kept as like to half- thoughts. Whoever should do well to hear your writing shall hear your writing: that which is justly said is justly sounded. 25
For that we art the gemmifications and flowers of Time, though but of clay and smoke be our ancestors, that soup which by means of a hook you attempt to catch, shall never be eaten, shall never be savored at your lips. So to live for the world we must live for the present; that which was tried yesteryear hath missed the ends of our fingertips: and though the Greeks had such a commodity to entame and direct the Soul, I hath no guilt to show the doctor for that which he hath no cure - it is with gradual wearing away of the exterior rind with which the spiritual child hath been o'erlaid, that she hath been killed, and with pedetentous irresolutions, blinded in her use of Systems. The Greeks had hardy ideals, to catch with claw and fangs and limb, their hunt was in the open, We hath dainty ideals, ideals built upon a great recession of ideals, and tis' a more cunning art become, this philosophizing, and our hunt is forested. We canst no longer merely cast our lures, to catch a sight of true philosophy we must now wander through a desert of centuries, a desert of books. The most recent sight theatricalizes everything purview. But the wise man is his own currency. The air is caused by the thunder to commove, with the ease by which it provides the chirping grasshopper, the squeak of a coypu or tamarin or kangaroo- rat {potoridae} to be heard. To live by wisdom is to live every day ordinarily, and without a consciousness to the distinction of circumstances. Rather nature is but a shoreless ocean of likenesses, as it where, herself willingly and with charity inhumed to the eyes of man, that in themselves include no life, no vision, who's eyes that in themselves be even less then life and vision - even less then death - yea, the thirsting for life and vision, or if she be an annectent of Idealism, or rather is a particular cremation of the mind, a conversion of dead symbol and sign unto facts and truth, bereft of that I know not; rather she be God or imp or sprite - though so long as I consider myself along with her, in a second thought I relive my confidence in her, and seeing me unchanged, she herself hath been changed.
The vennation of time considereth no balm, whylest felicity and grief divideth her curriclum: for because every sensation be it's own desinence (terminus) or expiry, sense tolerateth no brachium, and sorrows art their own apocalypses or shendeth us. How different is the life of mind from life of body: for what is the life of body but a calefaction and diffluence upon a mass of clay, and the life of mind but working under the colder principle of classifications and self- sectioning, a kind of sterility or even abortion? (Whylest) Organic life is wholly prototypical: the glochidia of cacti, the bodies of worms and annelids, the quills of birds, the fingers of man, and the spear all follow the principles of extension or of stability, and inherit their forms from the stem; the opisthoma and prosthoma of the Arachnids, the lepidotrichia of the bony- fishes, the scutate of reptiles, the shells of turtles, the hands of man, and shields all follow the principle of the leaf- structure or pinnulae, and the fish itselfe is but a swimming- leaf.
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