2. Neo-idealism (q.v.) in Italy introduce a second type of concrete universal whose element^ lack the character of dialectical opposition and logical abstractness. -- W.L.
6.001 "education" /siks dub*l oh wun/, /dub*l oh wun/ or rarely /siks dub*l oh fun/ {MIT}'s introductory computer class for majors, known for its intensity. Developed by {Gerald Sussman} and {Hal Abelson}, the course is taught in {Scheme} and introduces {recursion}, {higher-order functions}, {object-oriented programming} and much more. Students who grasp the {meta}circular {interpreter} gain entry into the {Knights of the Lambda-Calculus}. 6.001 has been exported to several other colleges, sometimes successfully. The textbook, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", written with Julie Sussman is a classic that can be found on the shelves of many computer scientists, whether they took the course or not. Legendary characters from the class, problem sets, and book include the wise Alyssa P. Hacker, Ben Bitdiddle, Lem E. Tweakit and Eva Lu Ator, the careless Louis Reasoner and {Captain Abstraction}. (1994-11-22)
ab- ::: --> A prefix in many words of Latin origin. It signifies from, away , separating, or departure, as in abduct, abstract, abscond. See A-(6).
abbreviature ::: n. --> An abbreviation; an abbreviated state or form.
An abridgment; a compendium or abstract.
ABC 1. "computer" {Atanasoff-Berry Computer}. 2. "language" An {imperative language} and programming environment from {CWI}, Netherlands. It is interactive, structured, high-level, and easy to learn and use. It is a general-purpose language which you might use instead of {BASIC}, {Pascal} or {AWK}. It is not a systems-programming language but is good for teaching or prototyping. ABC has only five data types that can easily be combined; {strong typing}, yet without declarations; data limited only by memory; refinements to support top-down programming; nesting by indentation. Programs are typically around a quarter the size of the equivalent {Pascal} or {C} program, and more readable. ABC includes a programming environment with {syntax-directed} editing, {suggestions}, {persistent variables} and multiple workspaces and {infinite precision} arithmetic. An example function words to collect the set of all words in a document: HOW TO RETURN words document: PUT {} IN collection FOR line in document: FOR word IN split line: IF word not.in collection: INSERT word IN collection RETURN collection {Interpreter}/{compiler}, version 1.04.01, by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, Steven Pemberton "Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl". ABC has been ported to {Unix}, {MS-DOS}, {Atari}, {Macintosh}. {(http://cwi.nl/cwi/projects/abc.html)}. {FTP eu.net (ftp://ftp.eu.net/programming/languages/abc)}, {FTP nluug.nl (ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/programming/languages/abc)}, {FTP uunet (ftp://ftp.uu.net/languages/abc)}. Mailing list: "abc-list-request@cwi.nl". E-mail: "abc@cwi.nl". ["The ABC Programmer's Handbook" by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens and Steven Pemberton, published by Prentice-Hall (ISBN 0-13-000027-2)]. ["An Alternative Simple Language and Environment for PCs" by Steven Pemberton, IEEE Software, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1987, pp. 56-64.] (1995-02-09) 2. "language" Argument, Basic value, C?. An {abstract machine} for implementation of {functional languages} and its intermediate code. [P. Koopman, "Functional Programs as Executable Specifications", 1990]. (1995-02-09)
A bound variable, or apparent variable, in a given formula, is distinguished from a free variable by the fact that the meaning of the formula does not depend on giving the variable a particular value. (The same variable may be allowed, if desired, to have both bound occurrences and free occurrences in the same formula, and in this case the meaning of the formula depends on giving a value to the variable only at the places where it is free.) For examples, see Abstraction, and Logic, formal, § 3.
absence ::: n. --> A state of being absent or withdrawn from a place or from companionship; -- opposed to presence.
Want; destitution; withdrawal.
Inattention to things present; abstraction (of mind); as, absence of mind.
absently ::: adv. --> In an absent or abstracted manner.
absent-minded ::: a. --> Absent in mind; abstracted; preoccupied.
Absolute: (Lat. absolvere to release or set free) Of this term Stephanus Chauvin in the Lexicon Philosophicum, 1713, p2 observes: "Because one thing is said to be free from another in many ways, so also the word absolute is taken by the philosophers in many senses." In Medieval Scholasticism this term was variously used, for example: freed or abstracted from material conditions, hence from contingency; hence applicable to all being; without limitations or restrictions; simply; totally; independent; unconditionally; uncaused; free from mental reservation.
Abstract: A partial aspect or quality considered in isolation from an object as a whole.
Abstracta: Such neutral, purely denotative entities as qualities, numbers, relations, logical concepts, appearing neither directly nor literally in time. (Broad) -- H.H.
Abstractio imaginationis: According to the Scholastics a degree of abstraction below that of reason and above that of the senses, which do abstract from matter, but not from the presence of matter, whereas the imagination abstracts even from the presence of matter, but not from its appendices, or sensible qualities. -- J.J.R.
Abstractio intellectus seu rationis: According to the Scholastics the highest degree of abstraction is that of reason which abstracts not only matter and its presence, but also from its appendices, that is, its sensible conditions and properties, considering essence or quiddity alone. -- J.J.R.
ABSTRACTION, DESCRIPTIONS (see articles of those titles):
Abstractionism: (Lat. ab, from + trahere, to draw) The illegitimate use of abstraction, and especially the tendency to mistake abstractions for concrete realities. Cf. W. James, The Meaning of Truth, ch XIII. Equivalent to A. N. Whitehead's "Fallacy of misplaced concreteness." -- L.W.
Abstraction: (Lat. ab, from + trahere, to draw) The process of ideally separating a partial aspect or quality from a total object. Also the result or product of mental abstraction. Abstraction, which concentrates its attention on a single aspect, differs from analysis which considers all aspects on a par. -- L.W.
Abstractive: That meaning of cognition which lacks one of the two requisites for intuitive knowledge: for in abstrictive cogniti n either we know things through other things, and not through their proper images -- or we know th'ngs that are not present: e.g., the knowledge we now have of God, through creatures -- or the knowledge we have of Adam, a being not present to us.
Abstract: (Lat. ab, from + trahere, to draw) A designation applied to a partial aspect or quality considered in isolation from a total object, which is, in contrast, designated concrete. -- L.W.
Abstract Machine Notation "language" (AMN) A language for specifying {abstract machines} in the {B-Method}, based on the mathematical theory of {Generalised Substitutions}. (1995-03-13)
Abstract Syntax Notation 1 "language, standard, protocol" (ASN.1, X.208, X.680) An {ISO}/{ITU-T} {standard} for transmitting structured {data} on {networks}, originally defined in 1984 as part of {CCITT X.409} '84. ASN.1 moved to its own standard, X.208, in 1988 due to wide applicability. The substantially revised 1995 version is covered by the X.680 series. ASN.1 defines the {abstract syntax} of {information} but does not restrict the way the information is encoded. Various ASN.1 encoding rules provide the {transfer syntax} (a {concrete} representation) of the data values whose {abstract syntax} is described in ASN.1. The standard ASN.1 encoding rules include {BER} (Basic Encoding Rules - X.209), {CER} (Canonical Encoding Rules), {DER} (Distinguished Encoding Rules) and {PER} (Packed Encoding Rules). ASN.1 together with specific ASN.1 encoding rules facilitates the exchange of structured data especially between {application programs} over networks by describing data structures in a way that is independent of machine architecture and implementation language. {OSI} {Application layer} {protocols} such as {X.400} {MHS} {electronic mail}, {X.500} directory services and {SNMP} use ASN.1 to describe the {PDU}s they exchange. Documents describing the ASN.1 notations: {ITU-T} Rec. X.680, {ISO} 8824-1; {ITU-T} Rec. X.681, {ISO} 8824-2; {ITU-T} Rec. X.682, {ISO} 8824-3; {ITU-T} Rec. X.683, {ISO} 8824-4 Documents describing the ASN.1 encoding rules: {ITU-T} Rec. X.690, {ISO} 8825-1; {ITU-T} Rec. X.691, {ISO} 8825-2. [M. Sample et al, "Implementing Efficient Encoders and Decoders for Network Data Representations", IEEE Infocom 93 Proc, v.3, pp. 1143-1153, Mar 1993. Available from Logica, UK]. See also {snacc}. (2005-07-03)
Abstract-Type and Scheme-Definition Language "language" (ASDL) A language developed as part of {Esprit} project {GRASPIN}, as a basis for generating {language-based editors} and environments. It combines an {object-oriented} type system, syntax-directed translation schemes and a target-language interface. ["ASDL - An Object-Oriented Specification Language for Syntax-Directed Environments", M.L. Christ-Neumann et al, European Software Eng Conf, Strasbourg, Sept 1987, pp.77-85]. (1996-02-19)
Abstractum (pl. abstracta): (Lat ab + trahere, to draw) An abstractum, in contrast to a concretum or existent is a quality or a relation envisaged by an abstract concept (e.g. redness, equality, truth etc.). The abstractum may be conceived either as an ideal object or as a real, subsistent universal. -- L.W. Ab
Abstract Windowing Toolkit {Abstract Window Toolkit}
Abstract Window Toolkit "graphics" (AWT) {Java}'s {platform}-independent {windowing}, graphics, and user-interface {toolkit}. The AWT is part of the {Java Foundation Classes} (JFC) - the standard {API} for providing a {graphical user interface} (GUI) for a Java program. Compare: {SWING}. ["Java in a Nutshell", O'Reilly]. {(http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/awt/)}. (2000-07-26)
Ada 95 "language" A revision and extension of {Ada} (Ada 83) begun in 1988 and completed on 1994-12-01 by a team lead by Tucker Taft of {Intermetrics}. Chris Anderson was the Project Manager. The printed standard was expected to be available around 1995-02-15. Additions include {object-orientation} ({tagged types}, {abstract types} and {class-wide types}), hierarchical libraries and synchronisation with shared data (protected types) similar to {Orca}. It lacks {multiple inheritance} but supports the construction of multiple inheritance type hierarchies through the use of {generics} and {type composition}. {GNAT} aims to be a free implementation of Ada 95. You can get the standard from the {Ada Joint Program Office (http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/languages/ada/ajpo/index.shtml)}. ["Introducing Ada 9X", J.G.P. Barnes, Feb 1993]. (1999-12-02)
Ada "language" (After {Ada Lovelace}) A {Pascal}-descended language, designed by Jean Ichbiah's team at {CII Honeywell} in 1979, made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. The original language was standardised as "Ada 83", the latest is "{Ada 95}". Ada is a large, complex, {block-structured} language aimed primarily at {embedded} applications. It has facilities for {real-time} response, {concurrency}, hardware access and reliable run-time error handling. In support of large-scale {software engineering}, it emphasises {strong typing}, {data abstraction} and {encapsulation}. The type system uses {name equivalence} and includes both {subtypes} and {derived types}. Both fixed and {floating-point} numerical types are supported. {Control flow} is fully bracketed: if-then-elsif-end if, case-is-when-end case, loop-exit-end loop, goto. Subprogram parameters are in, out, or inout. Variables imported from other packages may be hidden or directly visible. Operators may be {overloaded} and so may {enumeration} literals. There are user-defined {exceptions} and {exception handlers}. An Ada program consists of a set of packages encapsulating data objects and their related operations. A package has a separately compilable body and interface. Ada permits {generic packages} and subroutines, possibly parametrised. Ada support {single inheritance}, using "tagged types" which are types that can be extended via {inheritance}. Ada programming places a heavy emphasis on {multitasking}. Tasks are synchronised by the {rendezvous}, in which a task waits for one of its subroutines to be executed by another. The conditional entry makes it possible for a task to test whether an entry is ready. The selective wait waits for either of two entries or waits for a limited time. Ada is often criticised, especially for its size and complexity, and this is attributed to its having been designed by committee. In fact, both Ada 83 and Ada 95 were designed by small design teams to be internally consistent and tightly integrated. By contrast, two possible competitors, {Fortran 90} and {C++} have both become products designed by large and disparate volunteer committees. See also {Ada/Ed}, {Toy/Ada}. {Home of the Brave Ada Programmers (http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/)}. {Ada FAQs (http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/FAQ/)} (hypertext), {text only (ftp://lglftp.epfl.ch/pub/Ada/FAQ)}. {(http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/languages/ada/)}, {(ftp://ajpo.sei.cmu.edu/)}, {(ftp://stars.rosslyn.unisys.com/pub/ACE_8.0)}. E-mail: "adainfo@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu". {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.ada}. {An Ada grammar (ftp://primost.cs.wisc.edu/)} including a lex scanner and yacc parser is available. E-mail: "masticol@dumas.rutgers.edu". {Another yacc grammar and parser for Ada by Herman Fischer (ftp://wsmr-simtel20.army.mil/PD2:"ADA.EXTERNAL-TOOLS"GRAM2.SRC)}. An {LR parser} and {pretty-printer} for {Ada} from NASA is available from the {Ada Software Repository}. {Adamakegen} generates {makefiles} for {Ada} programs. ["Reference Manual for the Ada Programming Language", ANSI/MIL STD 1815A, US DoD (Jan 1983)]. Earlier draft versions appeared in July 1980 and July 1982. ISO 1987. [{Jargon File}] (2000-08-12)
ADT {abstract data type}
Aesthetics. Any system or program of fine art emphasizing the ideal (s.) is Aesthetic Idealism. The view that the goal of fine art is an embodiment or reflection of the perfections of archetypal Ideas or timeless essences (Platonism). The view of art which emphasizes feeling, sentiment, and idealization (as opposed to "literal reproduction" of fact). The view of art which emphasizes cognitive content (as opposed to abstract feeling, primitive intuition, formal line or structure, mere color or tone). Psychology. The doctrine that ideas or judgments are causes of thought and behavior, and not mere effects or epiphenomena, is Psychological Idealism.
A formula of the pure functional calculus of first order which contains no free individual variables is said to be satisfiable if it is possible to determine the underlying non-empty domain of individuals and to give meanings to the propositional and functional variables contained -- namely to each propositional variable a meaning as a particular proposition and to each n-adic functional variable a meaning as an n-adic propositional function of individuals (of the domain in question) -- in such a way that (under the accepted meanings of the sentential connectives, the quantifiers, and application of function to argument) the formula becomes true. The meaning of the last word, even for abstract, not excluding infinite, domains, must be presupposed -- a respect in which this definition differs sharply from most others made in this article.
Alan Turing "person" Alan M. Turing, 1912-06-22/3? - 1954-06-07. A British mathematician, inventor of the {Turing Machine}. Turing also proposed the {Turing test}. Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science. Turing was a student and fellow of {King's College Cambridge} and was a graduate student at {Princeton University} from 1936 to 1938. While at Princeton Turing published "On Computable Numbers", a paper in which he conceived an {abstract machine}, now called a {Turing Machine}. Turing returned to England in 1938 and during World War II, he worked in the British Foreign Office. He masterminded operations at {Bletchley Park}, UK which were highly successful in cracking the Nazis "Enigma" codes during World War II. Some of his early advances in computer design were inspired by the need to perform many repetitive symbolic manipulations quickly. Before the building of the {Colossus} computer this work was done by a roomful of women. In 1945 he joined the {National Physical Laboratory} in London and worked on the design and construction of a large computer, named {Automatic Computing Engine} (ACE). In 1949 Turing became deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at Manchester where the {Manchester Automatic Digital Machine}, the worlds largest memory computer, was being built. He also worked on theories of {artificial intelligence}, and on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms. Turing was gay, and died rather young under mysterious circumstances. He was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952. He died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but it is now thought by some to have been an accident. There is an excellent biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges, subtitled "The Enigma of Intelligence" and a play based on it called "Breaking the Code". There was also a popular summary of his work in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach". {(http://AlanTuring.net/)}. (2001-10-09)
Alex "language" 1. A {polymorphic} language being developed by Stephen Crawley "sxc@itd.dtso.oz.au" of Defence Science & Tech Org, Australia. Alex has {abstract data types}, {type inference} and {inheritance}. 2. "language" An {ISWIM}-like language with {exception handling}. ["An Exception Handling Construct for Functional Languages", M. Brez et al, in Proc ESOP88, LNCS 300, Springer 1988]. 3. "tool" A {scanner generator}. {Alexis} is its input language. ["Alex: A Simple and Efficient Scanner Generator", H. Mossenbock, SIGPLAN Notices 21(5), May 1986]. (1994-12-15)
algebraic data type "programming" (Or "sum of products type") In {functional programming}, new types can be defined, each of which has one or more {constructors}. Such a type is known as an algebraic data type. E.g. in {Haskell} we can define a new type, "Tree": data Tree = Empty | Leaf Int | Node Tree Tree with constructors "Empty", "Leaf" and "Node". The constructors can be used much like functions in that they can be (partially) applied to arguments of the appropriate type. For example, the Leaf constructor has the functional type Int -" Tree. A constructor application cannot be reduced (evaluated) like a function application though since it is already in {normal form}. Functions which operate on algebraic data types can be defined using {pattern matching}: depth :: Tree -" Int depth Empty = 0 depth (Leaf n) = 1 depth (Node l r) = 1 + max (depth l) (depth r) The most common algebraic data type is the list which has constructors Nil and Cons, written in Haskell using the special syntax "[]" for Nil and infix ":" for Cons. Special cases of algebraic types are {product types} (only one constructor) and {enumeration types} (many constructors with no arguments). Algebraic types are one kind of {constructed type} (i.e. a type formed by combining other types). An algebraic data type may also be an {abstract data type} (ADT) if it is exported from a {module} without its constructors. Objects of such a type can only be manipulated using functions defined in the same {module} as the type itself. In {set theory} the equivalent of an algebraic data type is a {discriminated union} - a set whose elements consist of a tag (equivalent to a constructor) and an object of a type corresponding to the tag (equivalent to the constructor arguments). (1994-11-23)
Algebraic Logic Functional language "language" (ALF) A language by Rudolf Opalla "opalla@julien.informatik.uni-dortmund.de" which combines {functional programming} and {logic programming} techniques. ALF is based on {Horn clause} logic with equality which consists of {predicates} and Horn clauses for {logic programming}, and functions and equations for {functional programming}. Any functional expression can be used in a {goal} literal and arbitrary predicates can occur in conditions of equations. ALF uses {narrowing} and {rewriting}. ALF includes a compiler to {Warren Abstract Machine} code and {run-time support}. {(ftp://ftp.germany.eu.net/pub/programming/languages/LogicFunctional)}. ["The Implementation of the Functional-Logic Language ALF", M. Hanus and A. Schwab]. (1992-10-08)
Algebraic Specification Language 1. "language" (ASL) ["Structured Algebraic Specifications: A Kernel Language", M. Wirsing, Theor Comput Sci 42, pp.123-249, Elsevier 1986]. 2. "language" (ASF) A language for equational specification of {abstract data types}. ["Algebraic Specification", J.A. Bergstra et al, A-W 1989]. (1995-12-13)
Algebra of Communicating Processes "theory" (ACP) Compare {CCS}. ["Algebra of Communicating Processes with Abstraction", J.A. Bergstra & J.W. Klop, Theor Comp Sci 37(1):77-121 1985]. [Summary?] (1994-11-08)
ALGOL 68 "language" An extensive revision of {ALGOL 60} by Adriaan van Wijngaarden et al. ALGOL 68 was discussed from 1963 by Working Group 2.1 of {IFIP}. Its definition was accepted in December 1968. ALGOL 68 was the first, and still one of very few, programming languages for which a complete formal specification was created before its implementation. However, this specification was hard to understand due to its formality, the fact that it used an unfamiliar {metasyntax} notation (not {BNF}) and its unconventional terminology. One of the singular features of ALGOL 68 was its {orthogonal} design, making for freedom from arbitrary rules (such as restrictions in other languages that arrays could only be used as parameters but not as results). It also allowed {user defined data types}, then an unheard-of feature. It featured {structural equivalence}; automatic type conversion ("{coercion}") including {dereferencing}; {flexible arrays}; generalised loops (for-from-by-to-while-do-od), if-then-else-elif-fi, an integer case statement with an 'out' clause (case-in-out-esac); {skip} and {goto} statements; {blocks}; {procedures}; user-defined {operators}; {procedure parameters}; {concurrent} execution (par-begin-end); {semaphores}; generators "heap" and "loc" for {dynamic allocation}. It had no {abstract data types} or {separate compilation}. {(http://www.bookrags.com/research/algol-68-wcs/)}. (2007-04-24)
All Indian doctrines orient themselves by the Vedas, accepting or rejecting their authority. In ranging from materialism to acosmism and nihilism, from physiologism to spiritualism, realism to idealism, monism to pluralism, atheism and pantheism, Hindus believe they have exhausted all possible philosophic attitudes (cf. darsana), which they feel supplement rather than exclude each other. A unnersal feature is the fusion of religion, metaphysics, ethics and psychology, due to the universal acceptance of a psycho-physicalism, further exemplified in the typical doctrines of karma and samsara (q.v.). Rigorous logic is nevertheless applied in theology where metaphvsics passes into eschatology (cf., e.g., is) and the generally accepted belief in the cyclic nature of the cosmos oscillating between srsti ("throwing out") and pralaya (dissolution) of the absolute reality (cf. abhasa), and in psychology, where epistemology seeks practical outlets in Yoga (q.v.). With a genius for abstraction, thinkers were and are almost invariably hedonistically motivated by the desire to overcome the evils of existence in the hope of attaining liberation (cf. moksa) and everlasting bliss (cf. ananda, nirvana). -- K.F.L.
alpha conversion "theory" In {lambda-calculus} and {reduction}, the renaming of a {formal parameter} in a {lambda abstraction}. This does not change the meaning of the abstraction. For example: \ x . x+1 "--" \ y . y+1 If the {actual argument} to a lambda abstraction contains instances of the abstraction's formal parameter then it is necessary to rename the parameter before applying the abstraction to avoid {name capture}. (1995-05-10)
Alphard "language" (Named after the brightest star in Hydra) A {Pascal}-like language developed by Wulf, Shaw and London of {CMU} in 1974. Alphard supports {data abstraction} using the 'form', which combines a specification and an implementation. ["Abstraction and Verification in Alphard: Defining and Specifying Iteration and Generators", Mary Shaw, CACM 20(8):553-563, Aug 1977]. (1995-05-10)
Among his most important works the following must be mentioned: Paz en la Guerra, 1897; De la Ensenanza Superior en Espana, 1899; En Torno al Casticismo, 1902; Amor y Pedagogia, 1902; Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, 1905; Mi Religion y Otros Ensayos, 1910; Soliloquios y Conversaciones, 1912; Contra Esto y Aquello, 1912; Ensayos, 7 vols., 1916-1920; Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida en los Hombres y en los Pueblos, 1914; Niebla, 1914; La Agonia del Cristianismo, 1930; etc. Unamuno conceives of everv individual man as an end in himself and not a means. Civilization has an individual responsibility towards each man. Man lives in society, but society as such is an abstraction. The concrete fact is the individual man "of flesh and blood". This doctrine of man constitutes the first principle of his entire philosophy. He develops it throughout his writings by way of a soliloquy in which he attacks the concepts of "man", "Society", "Humanity", etc. as mere abstractions of the philosophers, and argues for the "Concrete", "experiential" facts of the individual living man. On his doctrine of man as an individual fact ontologically valid, Unamuno roots the second principle of his philosophy, namely, his theory of Immortality. Faith in immortality grows out, not from the realm of reason, but from the realm of facts which lie beyond the boundaries of reason. In fact, reason as such, that is, as a logical function is absolutely disowned bv Unamuno, as useless and unjustified. The third principle of his philosophy is his theory of the Logos which has to do with man's intuition of the world and his immediate response in language and action. -- J.A.F.
anhydride ::: n. --> An oxide of a nonmetallic body or an organic radical, capable of forming an acid by uniting with the elements of water; -- so called because it may be formed from an acid by the abstraction of water.
aphorism ::: n. --> A comprehensive maxim or principle expressed in a few words; a sharply defined sentence relating to abstract truth rather than to practical matters.
Application Program Interface "programming" (API, or "application programming interface") The interface (calling conventions) by which an {application program} accesses {operating system} and other services. An API is defined at {source code} level and provides a level of {abstraction} between the application and the {kernel} (or other privileged utilities) to ensure the {portability} of the code. An API can also provide an interface between a {high level language} and lower level utilities and services which were written without consideration for the {calling conventions} supported by compiled languages. In this case, the API's main task may be the translation of parameter lists from one format to another and the interpretation of {call-by-value} and {call-by-reference} arguments in one or both directions. (1995-02-15)
Application Service Element "networking" (ASE) Software in the {presentation layer} of the {OSI} seven layer model which provides an abstracted interface layer to service {application protocol data units} (APDU). Because {applications} and {networks} vary, ASEs are split into common services and specific services. Examples of services provided by the {common application service element} (CASE) include remote operations (ROSE) and {database} {concurrency control and recovery} (CCR). The {specific application service element} (SASE) provides more specialised services such as file transfer, database access, and order entry. {Csico docs (http://cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ito_doc/osi_prot.htm)}. (2003-09-27)
Application Software Installation Server "product" (ASIS) A service once offered by {CERN}'s IT division that included a {repository} containing CERN and HEP {software} and tools in the form of {compressed} {source} and {documentation}. As of 2014-11-13, the service appears to be dead. {(http://consult.cern.ch/writeup/Abstracts/asis.html)} (2014-11-13)
ASDL {Abstract-Type and Scheme-Definition Language}
ASL+ "language, specification" An {algebraic specification language} by David Aspinall of the {University of Edinburgh}. ASL+ has rules for proving the satisfaction of specifications. It can also be viewed as a {type theory} with {subtyping}, featuring {contravariant refinement} for {Pi-abstracted} specifications and a notion of {stratified equality} for {higher-order objects}. (1994-09-14)
A
ASN.1 {Abstract Syntax Notation 1}
ASpecT "language" Algebraic specification of {abstract data types}. A {strict} {functional language} that compiles to {C}. Versions of ASpecT are available for {Sun}, {Ultrix}, {NeXT}, {Macintosh}, {OS/2} 2.0, {Linux}, {RS/6000}, {Atari}, {Amiga}. {(ftp://wowbagger.uni-bremen.de/pub/programming/languages)}. (1996-03-25)
aspect-oriented programming "programming" (AOP) A style of programming that attempts to abstract out features common to many parts of the code beyond simple functional modules and thereby improve the {quality} of software. Mechanisms for defining and composing {abstractions} are essential elements of programming languages. The design style supported by the abstraction mechanisms of most current languages is one of breaking a system down into parameterised components that can be called upon to perform a function. But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align with the system's functional components, such as failure handling, {persistence}, communication, replication, coordination, {memory management}, or {real-time} constraints, and tend to cut across groups of functional components. While they can be thought about and analysed relatively separately from the basic functionality, programming them using current {component-oriented languages} tends to result in these aspects being spread throughout the code. The {source code} becomes a tangled mess of instructions for different purposes. This "tangling" phenomenon is at the heart of much needless complexity in existing software systems. A number of researchers have begun working on approaches to this problem that allow programmers to express each of a system's aspects of concern in a separate and natural form, and then automatically combine those separate descriptions into a final executable form. These approaches have been called aspect-oriented programming. {Xerox AOP homepage (http://parc.xerox.com/csl/projects/aop/)}. {AspectJ (http://AspectJ.org/)}. {ECOOPP'99 AOP workshop (http://wwwtrese.cs.utwente.nl/aop-ecoop99/)}. (1999-11-21)
Atman(Sanskrit) ::: The root of atman is hardly known; its origin is uncertain, but the general meaning is that of"self." The highest part of man -- self, pure consciousness per se. The essential and radical power orfaculty in man which gives to him, and indeed to every other entity or thing, its knowledge or sentientconsciousness of selfhood. This is not the ego.This principle (atman) is a universal one; but during incarnations its lowest parts take on attributes,because it is linked with the buddhi, as the buddhi is linked with the manas, as the manas is linked to thekama, and so on down the scale.Atman is also sometimes used of the universal self or spirit which is called in the Sanskrit writingsBrahman (neuter), and the Brahman or universal spirit is also called the paramatman.Man is rooted in the kosmos surrounding him by three principles, which can hardly be said to be abovethe first or atman, but are, so to say, that same atman's highest and most glorious parts.The inmost link with the Unutterable was called in ancient India by the term ``self,'' which has often beenmistranslated "soul." The Sanskrit word is atman and applies, in psychology, to the human entity. Theupper end of the link, so to speak, was called paramatman, or the ``self beyond,'' i.e., the permanentSELF -- words which describe neatly and clearly to those who have studied this wonderful philosophy,somewhat of the nature and essence of the being which man is, and the source from which, inbeginningless and endless duration, he sprang. Child of earth and child of heaven, he contains both inhimself.We say that the atman is universal, and so it is. It is the universal selfhood, that feeling or consciousnessof selfhood which is the same in every human being, and even in all the inferior beings of the hierarchy,even in those of the beast kingdom under us, and dimly perceptible in the plant world, and which is latenteven in the minerals. This is the pure cognition, the abstract idea, of self. It differs not at all throughoutthe hierarchy, except in degree of self-recognition. Though universal, it belongs (so far as we areconcerned in our present stage of evolution) to the fourth kosmic plane, though it is our seventh principlecounting upwards.
Aufklärung: In general, this German word and its English equivalent Enlightenment denote the self-emancipation of man from mere authority, prejudice, convention and tradition, with an insistence on freer thinking about problems uncritically referred to these other agencies. According to Kant's famous definition "Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority, which is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is caused when its source lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another" (Was ist Aufklärung? 1784). In its historical perspective, the Aufklärung refers to the cultural atmosphere and contrlbutions of the 18th century, especially in Germany, France and England [which affected also American thought with B. Franklin, T. Paine and the leaders of the Revolution]. It crystallized tendencies emphasized by the Renaissance, and quickened by modern scepticism and empiricism, and by the great scientific discoveries of the 17th century. This movement, which was represented by men of varying tendencies, gave an impetus to general learning, a more popular philosophy, empirical science, scriptural criticism, social and political thought. More especially, the word Aufklärung is applied to the German contributions to 18th century culture. In philosophy, its principal representatives are G. E. Lessing (1729-81) who believed in free speech and in a methodical criticism of religion, without being a free-thinker; H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) who expounded a naturalistic philosophy and denied the supernatural origin of Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who endeavoured to mitigate prejudices and developed a popular common-sense philosophy; Chr. Wolff (1679-1754), J. A. Eberhard (1739-1809) who followed the Leibnizian rationalism and criticized unsuccessfully Kant and Fichte; and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) who was best as an interpreter of others, but whose intuitional suggestions have borne fruit in the organic correlation of the sciences, and in questions of language in relation to human nature and to national character. The works of Kant and Goethe mark the culmination of the German Enlightenment. Cf. J. G. Hibben, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. --T.G. Augustinianism: The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, and of his followers. Born in 354 at Tagaste in N. Africa, A. studied rhetoric in Carthage, taught that subject there and in Rome and Milan. Attracted successively to Manicheanism, Scepticism, and Neo-Platontsm, A. eventually found intellectual and moral peace with his conversion to Christianity in his thirty-fourth year. Returning to Africa, he established numerous monasteries, became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo in 395. Augustine wrote much: On Free Choice, Confessions, Literal Commentary on Genesis, On the Trinity, and City of God, are his most noted works. He died in 430. St. Augustine's characteristic method, an inward empiricism which has little in common with later variants, starts from things without, proceeds within to the self, and moves upwards to God. These three poles of the Augustinian dialectic are polarized by his doctrine of moderate illuminism. An ontological illumination is required to explain the metaphysical structure of things. The truth of judgment demands a noetic illumination. A moral illumination is necessary in the order of willing; and so, too, an lllumination of art in the aesthetic order. Other illuminations which transcend the natural order do not come within the scope of philosophy; they provide the wisdoms of theology and mysticism. Every being is illuminated ontologically by number, form, unity and its derivatives, and order. A thing is what it is, in so far as it is more or less flooded by the light of these ontological constituents. Sensation is necessary in order to know material substances. There is certainly an action of the external object on the body and a corresponding passion of the body, but, as the soul is superior to the body and can suffer nothing from its inferior, sensation must be an action, not a passion, of the soul. Sensation takes place only when the observing soul, dynamically on guard throughout the body, is vitally attentive to the changes suffered by the body. However, an adequate basis for the knowledge of intellectual truth is not found in sensation alone. In order to know, for example, that a body is multiple, the idea of unity must be present already, otherwise its multiplicity could not be recognized. If numbers are not drawn in by the bodily senses which perceive only the contingent and passing, is the mind the source of the unchanging and necessary truth of numbers? The mind of man is also contingent and mutable, and cannot give what it does not possess. As ideas are not innate, nor remembered from a previous existence of the soul, they can be accounted for only by an immutable source higher than the soul. In so far as man is endowed with an intellect, he is a being naturally illuminated by God, Who may be compared to an intelligible sun. The human intellect does not create the laws of thought; it finds them and submits to them. The immediate intuition of these normative rules does not carry any content, thus any trace of ontologism is avoided. Things have forms because they have numbers, and they have being in so far as they possess form. The sufficient explanation of all formable, and hence changeable, things is an immutable and eternal form which is unrestricted in time and space. The forms or ideas of all things actually existing in the world are in the things themselves (as rationes seminales) and in the Divine Mind (as rationes aeternae). Nothing could exist without unity, for to be is no other than to be one. There is a unity proper to each level of being, a unity of the material individual and species, of the soul, and of that union of souls in the love of the same good, which union constitutes the city. Order, also, is ontologically imbibed by all beings. To tend to being is to tend to order; order secures being, disorder leads to non-being. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal each to its own place and integrates an ensemble of parts in accordance with an end. Hence, peace is defined as the tranquillity of order. Just as things have their being from their forms, the order of parts, and their numerical relations, so too their beauty is not something superadded, but the shining out of all their intelligible co-ingredients. S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Migne, PL 32-47; (a critical edition of some works will be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna). Gilson, E., Introd. a l'etude de s. Augustin, (Paris, 1931) contains very good bibliography up to 1927, pp. 309-331. Pope, H., St. Augustine of Hippo, (London, 1937). Chapman, E., St. Augustine's Philos. of Beauty, (N. Y., 1939). Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God", (London, 1921). --E.C. Authenticity: In a general sense, genuineness, truth according to its title. It involves sometimes a direct and personal characteristic (Whitehead speaks of "authentic feelings"). This word also refers to problems of fundamental criticism involving title, tradition, authorship and evidence. These problems are vital in theology, and basic in scholarship with regard to the interpretation of texts and doctrines. --T.G. Authoritarianism: That theory of knowledge which maintains that the truth of any proposition is determined by the fact of its having been asserted by a certain esteemed individual or group of individuals. Cf. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent; C. S. Peirce, "Fixation of Belief," in Chance, Love and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen. --A.C.B. Autistic thinking: Absorption in fanciful or wishful thinking without proper control by objective or factual material; day dreaming; undisciplined imagination. --A.C.B. Automaton Theory: Theory that a living organism may be considered a mere machine. See Automatism. Automatism: (Gr. automatos, self-moving) (a) In metaphysics: Theory that animal and human organisms are automata, that is to say, are machines governed by the laws of physics and mechanics. Automatism, as propounded by Descartes, considered the lower animals to be pure automata (Letter to Henry More, 1649) and man a machine controlled by a rational soul (Treatise on Man). Pure automatism for man as well as animals is advocated by La Mettrie (Man, a Machine, 1748). During the Nineteenth century, automatism, combined with epiphenomenalism, was advanced by Hodgson, Huxley and Clifford. (Cf. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, ch. V.) Behaviorism, of the extreme sort, is the most recent version of automatism (See Behaviorism). (b) In psychology: Psychological automatism is the performance of apparently purposeful actions, like automatic writing without the superintendence of the conscious mind. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, N. Y., 1941. --L.W. Automatism, Conscious: The automatism of Hodgson, Huxley, and Clifford which considers man a machine to which mind or consciousness is superadded; the mind of man is, however, causally ineffectual. See Automatism; Epiphenomenalism. --L.W. Autonomy: (Gr. autonomia, independence) Freedom consisting in self-determination and independence of all external constraint. See Freedom. Kant defines autonomy of the will as subjection of the will to its own law, the categorical imperative, in contrast to heteronomy, its subjection to a law or end outside the rational will. (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, § 2.) --L.W. Autonomy of ethics: A doctrine, usually propounded by intuitionists, that ethics is not a part of, and cannot be derived from, either metaphysics or any of the natural or social sciences. See Intuitionism, Metaphysical ethics, Naturalistic ethics. --W.K.F. Autonomy of the will: (in Kant's ethics) The freedom of the rational will to legislate to itself, which constitutes the basis for the autonomy of the moral law. --P.A.S. Autonymy: In the terminology introduced by Carnap, a word (phrase, symbol, expression) is autonymous if it is used as a name for itself --for the geometric shape, sound, etc. which it exemplifies, or for the word as a historical and grammatical unit. Autonymy is thus the same as the Scholastic suppositio matertalis (q. v.), although the viewpoint is different. --A.C. Autotelic: (from Gr. autos, self, and telos, end) Said of any absorbing activity engaged in for its own sake (cf. German Selbstzweck), such as higher mathematics, chess, etc. In aesthetics, applied to creative art and play which lack any conscious reference to the accomplishment of something useful. In the view of some, it may constitute something beneficent in itself of which the person following his art impulse (q.v.) or playing is unaware, thus approaching a heterotelic (q.v.) conception. --K.F.L. Avenarius, Richard: (1843-1896) German philosopher who expressed his thought in an elaborate and novel terminology in the hope of constructing a symbolic language for philosophy, like that of mathematics --the consequence of his Spinoza studies. As the most influential apostle of pure experience, the posltivistic motive reaches in him an extreme position. Insisting on the biologic and economic function of thought, he thought the true method of science is to cure speculative excesses by a return to pure experience devoid of all assumptions. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Its task is to expel all extraneous elements in the given. His uncritical use of the category of the given and the nominalistic view that logical relations are created rather than discovered by thought, leads him to banish not only animism but also all of the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. Explaining the evolution and devolution of the problematization and deproblematization of numerous ideas, and aiming to give the natural history of problems, Avenarius sought to show physiologically, psychologically and historically under what conditions they emerge, are challenged and are solved. He hypothesized a System C, a bodily and central nervous system upon which consciousness depends. R-values are the stimuli received from the world of objects. E-values are the statements of experience. The brain changes that continually oscillate about an ideal point of balance are termed Vitalerhaltungsmaximum. The E-values are differentiated into elements, to which the sense-perceptions or the content of experience belong, and characters, to which belongs everything which psychology describes as feelings and attitudes. Avenarius describes in symbolic form a series of states from balance to balance, termed vital series, all describing a series of changes in System C. Inequalities in the vital balance give rise to vital differences. According to his theory there are two vital series. It assumes a series of brain changes because parallel series of conscious states can be observed. The independent vital series are physical, and the dependent vital series are psychological. The two together are practically covariants. In the case of a process as a dependent vital series three stages can be noted: first, the appearance of the problem, expressed as strain, restlessness, desire, fear, doubt, pain, repentance, delusion; the second, the continued effort and struggle to solve the problem; and finally, the appearance of the solution, characterized by abating anxiety, a feeling of triumph and enjoyment. Corresponding to these three stages of the dependent series are three stages of the independent series: the appearance of the vital difference and a departure from balance in the System C, the continuance with an approximate vital difference, and lastly, the reduction of the vital difference to zero, the return to stability. By making room for dependent and independent experiences, he showed that physics regards experience as independent of the experiencing indlvidual, and psychology views experience as dependent upon the individual. He greatly influenced Mach and James (q.v.). See Avenarius, Empirio-criticism, Experience, pure. Main works: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff. --H.H. Averroes: (Mohammed ibn Roshd) Known to the Scholastics as The Commentator, and mentioned as the author of il gran commento by Dante (Inf. IV. 68) he was born 1126 at Cordova (Spain), studied theology, law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, became after having been judge in Sevilla and Cordova, physician to the khalifah Jaqub Jusuf, and charged with writing a commentary on the works of Aristotle. Al-mansur, Jusuf's successor, deprived him of his place because of accusations of unorthodoxy. He died 1198 in Morocco. Averroes is not so much an original philosopher as the author of a minute commentary on the whole works of Aristotle. His procedure was imitated later by Aquinas. In his interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics Averroes teaches the coeternity of a universe created ex nihilo. This doctrine formed together with the notion of a numerical unity of the active intellect became one of the controversial points in the discussions between the followers of Albert-Thomas and the Latin Averroists. Averroes assumed that man possesses only a disposition for receiving the intellect coming from without; he identifies this disposition with the possible intellect which thus is not truly intellectual by nature. The notion of one intellect common to all men does away with the doctrine of personal immortality. Another doctrine which probably was emphasized more by the Latin Averroists (and by the adversaries among Averroes' contemporaries) is the famous statement about "two-fold truth", viz. that a proposition may be theologically true and philosophically false and vice versa. Averroes taught that religion expresses the (higher) philosophical truth by means of religious imagery; the "two-truth notion" came apparently into the Latin text through a misinterpretation on the part of the translators. The works of Averroes were one of the main sources of medieval Aristotelianlsm, before and even after the original texts had been translated. The interpretation the Latin Averroists found in their texts of the "Commentator" spread in spite of opposition and condemnation. See Averroism, Latin. Averroes, Opera, Venetiis, 1553. M. Horten, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, 1912. P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin, 2d ed., Louvain, 1911. --R.A. Averroism, Latin: The commentaries on Aristotle written by Averroes (Ibn Roshd) in the 12th century became known to the Western scholars in translations by Michael Scottus, Hermannus Alemannus, and others at the beginning of the 13th century. Many works of Aristotle were also known first by such translations from Arabian texts, though there existed translations from the Greek originals at the same time (Grabmann). The Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle was held to be the true one by many; but already Albert the Great pointed out several notions which he felt to be incompatible with the principles of Christian philosophy, although he relied for the rest on the "Commentator" and apparently hardly used any other text. Aquinas, basing his studies mostly on a translation from the Greek texts, procured for him by William of Moerbecke, criticized the Averroistic interpretation in many points. But the teachings of the Commentator became the foundation for a whole school of philosophers, represented first by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. The most prominent of these scholars was Siger of Brabant. The philosophy of these men was condemned on March 7th, 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, after a first condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1210 had gradually come to be neglected. The 219 theses condemned in 1277, however, contain also some of Aquinas which later were generally recognized an orthodox. The Averroistic propositions which aroused the criticism of the ecclesiastic authorities and which had been opposed with great energy by Albert and Thomas refer mostly to the following points: The co-eternity of the created word; the numerical identity of the intellect in all men, the so-called two-fold-truth theory stating that a proposition may be philosophically true although theologically false. Regarding the first point Thomas argued that there is no philosophical proof, either for the co-eternity or against it; creation is an article of faith. The unity of intellect was rejected as incompatible with the true notion of person and with personal immortality. It is doubtful whether Averroes himself held the two-truths theory; it was, however, taught by the Latin Averroists who, notwithstanding the opposition of the Church and the Thomistic philosophers, gained a great influence and soon dominated many universities, especially in Italy. Thomas and his followers were convinced that they interpreted Aristotle correctly and that the Averroists were wrong; one has, however, to admit that certain passages in Aristotle allow for the Averroistic interpretation, especially in regard to the theory of intellect. Lit.: P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siecle, 2d. ed. Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotelesübersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster 1916 (Beitr. z. Gesch. Phil. d. MA. Vol. 17, H. 5-6). --R.A. Avesta: See Zendavesta. Avicehron: (or Avencebrol, Salomon ibn Gabirol) The first Jewish philosopher in Spain, born in Malaga 1020, died about 1070, poet, philosopher, and moralist. His main work, Fons vitae, became influential and was much quoted by the Scholastics. It has been preserved only in the Latin translation by Gundissalinus. His doctrine of a spiritual substance individualizing also the pure spirits or separate forms was opposed by Aquinas already in his first treatise De ente, but found favor with the medieval Augustinians also later in the 13th century. He also teaches the necessity of a mediator between God and the created world; such a mediator he finds in the Divine Will proceeding from God and creating, conserving, and moving the world. His cosmogony shows a definitely Neo-Platonic shade and assumes a series of emanations. Cl. Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons vitae. Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Philos. d. MA. 1892-1895, Vol. I. Joh. Wittman, Die Stellung des hl. Thomas von Aquino zu Avencebrol, ibid. 1900. Vol. III. --R.A. Avicenna: (Abu Ali al Hosain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) Born 980 in the country of Bocchara, began to write in young years, left more than 100 works, taught in Ispahan, was physician to several Persian princes, and died at Hamadan in 1037. His fame as physician survived his influence as philosopher in the Occident. His medical works were printed still in the 17th century. His philosophy is contained in 18 vols. of a comprehensive encyclopedia, following the tradition of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Logic, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics form the parts of this work. His philosophy is Aristotelian with noticeable Neo-Platonic influences. His doctrine of the universal existing ante res in God, in rebus as the universal nature of the particulars, and post res in the human mind by way of abstraction became a fundamental thesis of medieval Aristotelianism. He sharply distinguished between the logical and the ontological universal, denying to the latter the true nature of form in the composite. The principle of individuation is matter, eternally existent. Latin translations attributed to Avicenna the notion that existence is an accident to essence (see e.g. Guilelmus Parisiensis, De Universo). The process adopted by Avicenna was one of paraphrasis of the Aristotelian texts with many original thoughts interspersed. His works were translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus (Gondisalvi) with the assistance of Avendeath ibn Daud. This translation started, when it became more generally known, the "revival of Aristotle" at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Albert the Great and Aquinas professed, notwithstanding their critical attitude, a great admiration for Avicenna whom the Arabs used to call the "third Aristotle". But in the Orient, Avicenna's influence declined soon, overcome by the opposition of the orthodox theologians. Avicenna, Opera, Venetiis, 1495; l508; 1546. M. Horten, Das Buch der Genesung der Seele, eine philosophische Enzyklopaedie Avicenna's; XIII. Teil: Die Metaphysik. Halle a. S. 1907-1909. R. de Vaux, Notes et textes sur l'Avicennisme Latin, Bibl. Thomiste XX, Paris, 1934. --R.A. Avidya: (Skr.) Nescience; ignorance; the state of mind unaware of true reality; an equivalent of maya (q.v.); also a condition of pure awareness prior to the universal process of evolution through gradual differentiation into the elements and factors of knowledge. --K.F.L. Avyakta: (Skr.) "Unmanifest", descriptive of or standing for brahman (q.v.) in one of its or "his" aspects, symbolizing the superabundance of the creative principle, or designating the condition of the universe not yet become phenomenal (aja, unborn). --K.F.L. Awareness: Consciousness considered in its aspect of act; an act of attentive awareness such as the sensing of a color patch or the feeling of pain is distinguished from the content attended to, the sensed color patch, the felt pain. The psychologlcal theory of intentional act was advanced by F. Brentano (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) and received its epistemological development by Meinong, Husserl, Moore, Laird and Broad. See Intentionalism. --L.W. Axiological: (Ger. axiologisch) In Husserl: Of or pertaining to value or theory of value (the latter term understood as including disvalue and value-indifference). --D.C. Axiological ethics: Any ethics which makes the theory of obligation entirely dependent on the theory of value, by making the determination of the rightness of an action wholly dependent on a consideration of the value or goodness of something, e.g. the action itself, its motive, or its consequences, actual or probable. Opposed to deontological ethics. See also teleological ethics. --W.K.F. Axiologic Realism: In metaphysics, theory that value as well as logic, qualities as well as relations, have their being and exist external to the mind and independently of it. Applicable to the philosophy of many though not all realists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to G. E. Moore, A. N. Whitehead, and N, Hartmann. --J.K.F. Axiology: (Gr. axios, of like value, worthy, and logos, account, reason, theory). Modern term for theory of value (the desired, preferred, good), investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. Had its rise in Plato's theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good); was developed in Aristotle's Organon, Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). Stoics and Epicureans investigated the summum bonum. Christian philosophy (St. Thomas) built on Aristotle's identification of highest value with final cause in God as "a living being, eternal, most good." In modern thought, apart from scholasticism and the system of Spinoza (Ethica, 1677), in which values are metaphysically grounded, the various values were investigated in separate sciences, until Kant's Critiques, in which the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values were examined. In Hegel's idealism, morality, art, religion, and philosophy were made the capstone of his dialectic. R. H. Lotze "sought in that which should be the ground of that which is" (Metaphysik, 1879). Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics subjected value experience to empirical analysis, and stress was again laid on the diversity and relativity of value phenomena rather than on their unity and metaphysical nature. F. Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) aroused new interest in the nature of value. F. Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), identified value with love. In the twentieth century the term axiology was apparently first applied by Paul Lapie (Logique de la volonte, 1902) and E. von Hartmann (Grundriss der Axiologie, 1908). Stimulated by Ehrenfels (System der Werttheorie, 1897), Meinong (Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie, 1894-1899), and Simmel (Philosophie des Geldes, 1900). W. M. Urban wrote the first systematic treatment of axiology in English (Valuation, 1909), phenomenological in method under J. M. Baldwin's influence. Meanwhile H. Münsterberg wrote a neo-Fichtean system of values (The Eternal Values, 1909). Among important recent contributions are: B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912), a free reinterpretation of Hegelianism; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918, 1921), defending a metaphysical theism; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), realistic and naturalistic; N. Hartmann, Ethik (1926), detailed analysis of types and laws of value; R. B. Perry's magnum opus, General Theory of Value (1926), "its meaning and basic principles construed in terms of interest"; and J. Laird, The Idea of Value (1929), noteworthy for historical exposition. A naturalistic theory has been developed by J. Dewey (Theory of Valuation, 1939), for which "not only is science itself a value . . . but it is the supreme means of the valid determination of all valuations." A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) expounds the view of logical positivism that value is "nonsense." J. Hessen, Wertphilosophie (1937), provides an account of recent German axiology from a neo-scholastic standpoint. The problems of axiology fall into four main groups, namely, those concerning (1) the nature of value, (2) the types of value, (3) the criterion of value, and (4) the metaphysical status of value. (1) The nature of value experience. Is valuation fulfillment of desire (voluntarism: Spinoza, Ehrenfels), pleasure (hedonism: Epicurus, Bentham, Meinong), interest (Perry), preference (Martineau), pure rational will (formalism: Stoics, Kant, Royce), apprehension of tertiary qualities (Santayana), synoptic experience of the unity of personality (personalism: T. H. Green, Bowne), any experience that contributes to enhanced life (evolutionism: Nietzsche), or "the relation of things as means to the end or consequence actually reached" (pragmatism, instrumentalism: Dewey). (2) The types of value. Most axiologists distinguish between intrinsic (consummatory) values (ends), prized for their own sake, and instrumental (contributory) values (means), which are causes (whether as economic goods or as natural events) of intrinsic values. Most intrinsic values are also instrumental to further value experience; some instrumental values are neutral or even disvaluable intrinsically. Commonly recognized as intrinsic values are the (morally) good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Values of play, of work, of association, and of bodily well-being are also acknowledged. Some (with Montague) question whether the true is properly to be regarded as a value, since some truth is disvaluable, some neutral; but love of truth, regardless of consequences, seems to establish the value of truth. There is disagreement about whether the holy (religious value) is a unique type (Schleiermacher, Otto), or an attitude toward other values (Kant, Höffding), or a combination of the two (Hocking). There is also disagreement about whether the variety of values is irreducible (pluralism) or whether all values are rationally related in a hierarchy or system (Plato, Hegel, Sorley), in which values interpenetrate or coalesce into a total experience. (3) The criterion of value. The standard for testing values is influenced by both psychological and logical theory. Hedonists find the standard in the quantity of pleasure derived by the individual (Aristippus) or society (Bentham). Intuitionists appeal to an ultimate insight into preference (Martineau, Brentano). Some idealists recognize an objective system of rational norms or ideals as criterion (Plato, Windelband), while others lay more stress on rational wholeness and coherence (Hegel, Bosanquet, Paton) or inclusiveness (T. H. Green). Naturalists find biological survival or adjustment (Dewey) to be the standard. Despite differences, there is much in common in the results of the application of these criteria. (4) The metaphysical status of value. What is the relation of values to the facts investigated by natural science (Koehler), of Sein to Sollen (Lotze, Rickert), of human experience of value to reality independent of man (Hegel, Pringle-Pattlson, Spaulding)? There are three main answers: subjectivism (value is entirely dependent on and relative to human experience of it: so most hedonists, naturalists, positivists); logical objectivism (values are logical essences or subsistences, independent of their being known, yet with no existential status or action in reality); metaphysical objectivism (values --or norms or ideals --are integral, objective, and active constituents of the metaphysically real: so theists, absolutists, and certain realists and naturalists like S. Alexander and Wieman). --E.S.B. Axiom: See Mathematics. Axiomatic method: That method of constructing a deductive system consisting of deducing by specified rules all statements of the system save a given few from those given few, which are regarded as axioms or postulates of the system. See Mathematics. --C.A.B. Ayam atma brahma: (Skr.) "This self is brahman", famous quotation from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.5.19, one of many alluding to the central theme of the Upanishads, i.e., the identity of the human and divine or cosmic. --K.F.L.
A word coined by Sri Aurobindo. The suffix ity is used to form abstract nouns expressing state or condition. Hence, cosmicity refers to a cosmic state or condition.
AWT {Abstract Window Toolkit}
abstract ::: adj. 1. Withdrawn or separated from matter, from material embodiment, from practice, or from particular examples; theoretical. 2. In the fine arts, characterized by lack of or freedom from representational qualities. n. 3. Something that concentrates in itself the essential qualities of anything more extensive or more general, or of several things; essence.
abstract ::: a. --> Withdraw; separate.
Considered apart from any application to a particular object; separated from matter; existing in the mind only; as, abstract truth, abstract numbers. Hence: ideal; abstruse; difficult.
Expressing a particular property of an object viewed apart from the other properties which constitute it; -- opposed to concrete; as, honesty is an abstract word.
Resulting from the mental faculty of abstraction; general
abstract class "programming" In {object-oriented programming}, a {class} designed only as a parent from which sub-classes may be derived, but which is not itself suitable for instantiation. Often used to "abstract out" incomplete sets of features which may then be shared by a group of sibling sub-classes which add different variations of the missing pieces. (1994-11-08)
abstract data type "programming" (ADT) A kind of {data abstraction} where a type's internal form is hidden behind a set of {access functions}. Values of the type are created and inspected only by calls to the access functions. This allows the implementation of the type to be changed without requiring any changes outside the {module} in which it is defined. {Objects} and ADTs are both forms of data abstraction, but objects are not ADTs. Objects use procedural abstraction (methods), not type abstraction. A classic example of an ADT is a {stack} data type for which functions might be provided to create an empty stack, to {push} values onto a stack and to {pop} values from a stack. {Reynolds paper (http://cis.upenn.edu/~gunter/publications/documents/taoop94.html)}. {Cook paper "OOP vs ADTs" (http://wcook.org/papers/OOPvsADT/CookOOPvsADT90.pdf)}. (2003-07-03)
abstracted ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Abstract ::: a. --> Separated or disconnected; withdrawn; removed; apart.
Separated from matter; abstract; ideal.
Abstract; abstruse; difficult.
Inattentive to surrounding objects; absent in mind.
abstractedly ::: adv. --> In an abstracted manner; separately; with absence of mind.
abstractedness ::: n. --> The state of being abstracted; abstract character.
abstracter ::: n. --> One who abstracts, or makes an abstract.
abstracting ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Abstract
abstract interpretation "theory" A partial execution of a program which gains information about its {semantics} (e.g. control structure, flow of information) without performing all the calculations. Abstract interpretation is typically used by compilers to analyse programs in order to decide whether certain optimisations or transformations are applicable. The objects manipulated by the program (typically values and functions) are represented by points in some {domain}. Each abstract domain point represents some set of real ("{concrete}") values. For example, we may take the abstract points "+", "0" and "-" to represent positive, zero and negative numbers and then define an abstract version of the multiplication operator, *
abstraction 1. Generalisation; ignoring or hiding details to capture some kind of commonality between different instances. Examples are {abstract data types} (the representation details are hidden), {abstract syntax} (the details of the {concrete syntax} are ignored), {abstract interpretation} (details are ignored to analyse specific properties). 2. "programming" Parameterisation, making something a function of something else. Examples are {lambda abstractions} (making a term into a function of some variable), {higher-order functions} (parameters are functions), {bracket abstraction} (making a term into a function of a variable). Opposite of {concretisation}. (1998-06-04)
abstractional ::: a. --> Pertaining to abstraction.
abstraction ::: a. --> The act of abstracting, separating, or withdrawing, or the state of being withdrawn; withdrawal.
The act process of leaving out of consideration one or more properties of a complex object so as to attend to others; analysis. Thus, when the mind considers the form of a tree by itself, or the color of the leaves as separate from their size or figure, the act is called abstraction. So, also, when it considers whiteness, softness, virtue, existence, as separate from any particular objects.
abstractionist ::: n. --> An idealist.
abstractions ::: things which have no independent existence, which exist only in idea; visionary and unrealistic.
abstractitious ::: a. --> Obtained from plants by distillation.
abstractive ::: a. --> Having the power of abstracting; of an abstracting nature.
abstractively ::: adv. --> In a abstract manner; separately; in or by itself.
abstractiveness ::: n. --> The quality of being abstractive; abstractive property.
abstractly ::: adv. --> In an abstract state or manner; separately; absolutely; by itself; as, matter abstractly considered.
abstract machine 1. "language" A processor design which is not intended to be implemented as {hardware}, but which is the notional executor of a particular {intermediate language} (abstract machine language) used in a {compiler} or {interpreter}. An abstract machine has an {instruction set}, a {register set} and a model of memory. It may provide instructions which are closer to the language being compiled than any physical computer or it may be used to make the language implementation easier to {port} to other {platforms}. A {virtual machine} is an abstract machine for which an {interpreter} exists. Examples: {ABC}, {Abstract Machine Notation}, {ALF}, {CAML}, {F-code}, {FP/M}, {Hermes}, {LOWL}, {Christmas}, {SDL}, {S-K reduction machine}, {SECD}, {Tbl}, {Tcode}, {TL0}, {WAM}. 2. "theory" A procedure for executing a set of instructions in some formal language, possibly also taking in input data and producing output. Such abstract machines are not intended to be constructed as {hardware} but are used in thought experiments about {computability}. Examples: {Finite State Machine}, {Turing Machine}. (1995-03-13)
abstractness ::: n. --> The quality of being abstract.
abstract "philosophy" A description of a concept that leaves out some information or details in order to simplify it in some useful way. Abstraction is a powerful technique that is applied in many areas of computing and elsewhere. For example: {abstract class}, {data abstraction}, {abstract interpretation}, {abstract syntax}, {Hardware Abstraction Layer}. (2009-12-09)
abstract syntax "language, data" A form of representation of data that is independent of machine-oriented structures and encodings and also of the physical representation of the data. Abstract syntax is used to give a high-level description of programs being compiled or messages passing over a communications link. A {compiler}'s internal representation of a program will typically be an {abstract syntax tree}. The abstract syntax specifies the tree's structure is specified in terms of categories such as "statement", "expression" and "{identifier}". This is independent of the source syntax ({concrete syntax}) of the language being compiled (though it will often be very similar). A {parse tree} is similar to an abstract syntax tree but it will typically also contain features such as parentheses which are syntactically significant but which are implicit in the structure of the {abstract syntax tree}. (1998-05-26)
abstract syntax tree "compiler" (AST) A data structure representing something which has been {parsed}, often used as a {compiler} or {interpreter}'s internal representation of a program while it is being optimised and from which {code generation} is performed. The range of all possible such structures is described by the {abstract syntax}. (1994-11-08)
bankruptcy ::: 1. A state of complete lack of some abstract property; "spiritual bankruptcy”; "moral bankruptcy”; "intellectual bankruptcy”. 2. Depleted of valuable qualities or characteristics.
Barbara Liskov "person" Professor Barbara Liskov was the first US woman to be awarded a PhD in computing, and her innovations can be found in every modern programming language. She currently (2009) heads the Programming Methodology Group at the {Massachusetts Institute of Technology}. Professor Liskov's design innovations have, over the decades, made software more reliable and easier to maintain. She has invented two computer progamming languages: {CLU}, an {object-oriented language}, and {Argus}, a {distributed programming language}. Liskov's research forms the basis of modern programming languages such as {Java}, {C
beta abstraction [{lambda-calculus}] The conversion of an expression to an {application} of a {lambda abstraction} to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --" (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is {beta reduction}. These are the two kinds of {beta conversion}.
beta conversion "theory" A term from {lambda-calculus} for {beta reduction} or {beta abstraction}. (1999-01-15)
BETA Kristensen, Madsen "olmadsen@daimi.aau.dk", Moller-Pedersen & Nygaard, 1983. Object-oriented language with block structure, coroutines, concurrency, {strong typing}, part objects, separate objects and classless objects. Central feature is a single abstraction mechanism called "patterns", a generalisation of classes, providing instantiation and hierarchical inheritance for all objects including procedures and processes. Mjolner Informatics ApS, Aarhus, implementations for Mac, Sun, HP, Apollo. E-mail: "info@mjolner.dk". Mailing list: "usergroup@mjolner.dk". ["Object-Oriented Programming in the BETA Programming Language", Ole Lehrmann et al, A-W June 1993, ISBN 0-201-62430-3]. [{Jargon File}] (1995-10-31)
beta reduction [{lambda-calculus}] The {application} of a {lambda abstraction} to an argument expression. A copy of the body of the lambda abstraction is made and occurrences of the {bound variable} being replaced by the argument. E.g. (\ x . x+1) 4 --" 4+1 Beta reduction is the only kind of {reduction} in the {pure lambda-calculus}. The opposite of beta reduction is {beta abstraction}. These are the two kinds of {beta conversion}. See also {name capture}.
beyond ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads *
Beyond ::: “The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads
bhava ::: becoming; state of being (sometimes added to an adjective to bhava form an abstract noun and translatable by a suffix such as "-ness", as in br.hadbhava, the state of being br.hat [wide], i.e., wideness); condition of consciousness; subjectivity; state of mind and feeling; physical indication of a psychological state; content, meaning (of rūpa); spiritual experience, realisation; emotion, "moved spiritualised state of the affective nature"; (madhura bhava, etc.) any of several types of relation between the jiva and the isvara, each being a way in which "the transcendent and universal person of the Divine conforms itself to our individualised personality and accepts a personal relation with us, at once identified with us as our supreme Self and yet close and different as our Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher"; attitude; mood; temperament; aspect; internal manifestation of the Goddess (devi), in . her total divine Nature (daivi prakr.ti or devibhava) or in the "more seizable because more defined and limited temperament" of any of her aspects, as in Mahakali bhava; a similar manifestation of any personality or combination of personalities of the deva or fourfold isvara, as in Indrabhava or Aniruddha bhava; in the vision of Reality (brahmadarsana), any of the "many aspects of the Infinite" which "disclose themselves, separate, combine, fuse, are unified together" until "there shines through it all the supreme integral Reality"; especially, the various "states of perception" in which the divine personality (purus.a) is seen in the impersonality of the brahman, ranging from the "general personality" of sagun.a brahman to the "vivid personality" of Kr.s.n.akali. bh bhavasamrddhi
Bhuta: (Skr. become) The "has-become", or the ultimate element or concrete thing as it has en oh ed from the abstract, metaphysical unity through a process of infinite particularization and limitation. -- K.F.L.
black box "jargon" An {abstraction} of a device or system in which only its externally visible behaviour is considered and not its implementation or "inner workings". See also {functional testing}. (1997-07-03)
block-structured "language" Any programming language in which sections of {source code} contained within pairs of matching {delimiters} such as "{" and "}" (e.g. in {C}) or "begin" and "end" (e.g. {Algol}) are executed as a single unit. A block of code may be the body of a {subroutine} or {function}, or it may be controlled by conditional execution ({if statement}) or repeated execution ({while statement}, {for statement}, etc.). In all but the most primitive block structured languages a {variable}'s {scope} can be limited to the block in which it is declared. Block-structured languages support {structured programming} where each block can be written without detailed knowledge of the inner workings of other blocks, thus allowing a {top-down design} approach. See also {abstract data type}, {module}. (2004-09-29)
BMASF Basic Module Algebra Specification Language? "Design of a Specification Language by Abstract Syntax Engineering", J.C.M. Baeten et al, in LNCS 490, pp.363-394.
B-Method "programming, tool" A system for rigorous or formal development of software using the notion of {Abstract Machines} to specify and design software systems. The B-Method is supported by the {B-Toolkit}. Abstract Machines are specified using the Abstract Machine Notation (AMN) which is in turn based on the mathematical theory of {Generalised Substitutions}. (1995-03-13)
bottom-up implementation "programming" The opposite of {top-down design}. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to *build* things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. [{Jargon File}] (1996-05-10)
bound variable 1. A bound variable or {formal argument} in a function definition is replaced by the {actual argument} when the function is applied. In the {lambda abstraction} \ x . M x is the bound variable. However, x is a {free variable} of the term M when M is considered on its own. M is the {scope} of the binding of x. 2. In logic a bound variable is a quantified variable. See {quantifier}.
bracket abstraction "compiler" An {algorithm} which turns a term into a function of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on T with respect to variable v, written as [v]T, is a term containing no occurrences of v and denoting a function f such that f v = T. This defines the function f = (\ v . T). Using bracket abstraction and {currying} we can define a language without {bound variables} in which the only operation is {monadic} function application. See {combinator}. (1995-03-07)
Brentano, Franz: (1838-1917) Who had originally been a Roman Catholic priest may be described as an unorthodox neo-scholastic. According to him the only three forms of psychic activity, representation, judgment and "phenomena of love and hate", are just three modes of "intentionality", i.e., of referring to an object intended. Judgments may be self-evident and thereby characterized as true and in an analogous way love and hate may be characterized as "right". It is on these characterizations that a dogmatic theory of truth and value may be based. In any mental experience the content is merely a "physical phenomenon" (real or imaginary) intended to be referred to, what is psychic is merely the "act" of representing, judging (viz. affirming or denying) and valuing (i.e. loving or hating). Since such "acts" are evidently immaterial, the soul by which they are performed may be proved to be a purely spiritual and imperishable substance and from these and other considerations the existence, spirituality, as also the infinite wisdom, goodness and justice of God may also be demonstrated. It is most of all by his classification of psychic phenomena, his psychology of "acts" and "intentions" and by his doctrine concerning self-evident truths and values that Brentano, who considered himself an Aristotelian, exercised a profound influence on subsequent German philosophers: not only on those who accepted his entire system (such as A. Marty and C. Stumpf) but also those who were somewhat more independent and original and whom he influenced either directly (as A. Meinong and E. Husserl) or indirectly (as M. Scheler and Nik. Hartmann). Main works: Psychologie des Aristoteles, 1867; Vom Dasein Gottes, 1868; Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874; Vom Ursprung sittliches Erkenntnis, 1884; Ueber die Zukunft der Philosophie, 1893; Die vier Phasen der Philos., 1895. -- H.Go. Broad, C.D.: (1887) As a realistic critical thinker Broad takes over from the sciences the methods that are fruitful there, classifies the various propositions used in all the sciences, and defines basic scientific concepts. In going beyond science, he seeks to reach a total view of the world by bringing in the facts and principles of aesthetic, religious, ethical and political experience. In trying to work out a much more general method which attacks the problem of the connection between mathematical concepts and sense-data better than the method of analysis in situ, he gives a simple exposition of the method of extensive abstraction, which applies the mutual relations of objects, first recognized in pure mathematics, to physics. Moreover, a great deal can be learned from Broad on the relation of the principle of relativity to measurement.
brute force "programming" A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavy-handed, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction (see also {brute force and ignorance}). The {canonical} example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the "{travelling salesman problem}" (TSP), a classical {NP-hard} problem: Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should the cities be visited in order to minimise the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N = 1000 - well, see {bignum}). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no better general solution than brute force. See also {NP-complete}. A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front. Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take to develop a more "intelligent" algorithm. Additionally, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement. When applied to {cryptography}, it is usually known as {brute force attack}. {Ken Thompson}, co-inventor of {Unix}, is reported to have uttered the epigram "When in doubt, use brute force". He probably intended this as a {ha ha only serious}, but the original {Unix} {kernel}'s preference for simple, robust and portable {algorithms} over {brittle} "smart" ones does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that {operating system}. Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate aesthetic judgment. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-14)
CAML "language" 1. A language for preparation of animated movies. 1976. (1994-11-09) 2. {Categorical Abstract Machine Language}. (2000-07-06)
Captain Abstraction The champion of the principles of {abstraction} and modularity, who protects unwary students on {MIT}'s course {6.001} from the nefarious designs of Sergeant Spaghetticode and his vile {concrete} programming practices. See also {spaghetti code}. (1994-11-22)
Cardinal number: Two classes are equivalent if there exists a one-to-one correspondence between them (see One-one). Cardinal numbers are obtained by abstraction (q. v.) with respect to equivalence, so that two classes have the same cardinal number if and only if they are equivalent. This may be formulated more exactly, following Frege, by defining the cardinal number of a class to be the class of classes equivalent to it.
CAT Common Abstract Tree Language. R. Voeller & Uwe Schmidt, U Kiel, Germany 1983. Universal intermediate language, used by Norsk Data in their family of compilers. "A Multi-Language Compiler System with Automatically Generated Codegenerators, U. Schmidt et al, SIGPLAN Notices 19(6):202-2121 (June 1984). [{Jargon File}]
Categorical Abstract Machine Language "language" (Originally "CAML" - Categorical Abstract Machine Language) A version of {ML} by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel Mauny and others of {INRIA} and {ENS}. CAML is intermediate between {LCF ML} and {SML} [in what sense?]. It has {first-class} functions, {static type inference} with {polymorphic} types, user-defined {variant types} and {product types}, and {pattern matching}. It is built on a proprietary run-time system. The CAML V3.1 implementation added {lazy} and {mutable} data structures, a "{grammar}" mechanism for interfacing with the {Yacc} {parser generator}, {pretty-printing} tools, high-performance {arbitrary-precision} arithmetic, and a complete library. CAML V3 is often nicknamed "heavy CAML", because of its heavy memory and CPU requirements compared to {Caml Light}. in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new implementation called {Caml Light}, freeing the previous implementation from too many experimental high-level features, and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end. Following the addition of a {native-code} compiler and a powerful {module} system in 1995 and of the {object} and {class} layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to {Objective Caml}. ["The CAML Reference Manual", P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS, 1989]. (2003-04-12)
Charles Babbage "person" The British inventor known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his {Analytical Engine}. His previous {Difference Engine} was a special purpose device intended for the production of mathematical tables. Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA from Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government. In 1827 he published a table of {logarithms} from 1 to 108000. In 1828 he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 he founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery". In 1833 he began work on the Analytical Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London. He died in 1871 in London. Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking. [Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September 1994]. Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of {abstraction}, fell into a trap familiar to {toolsmiths} since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord Moulton: "One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my {Analytical Machine}, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.'" "After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.' Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but I am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart." "When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to any useful purpose." [Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and growth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorial volume" (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage "Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994), p. 34]. Compare: {uninteresting}, {Ninety-Ninety Rule}. (1996-02-22)
Circulations of the Kosmos ::: Also Circulations of the Universe. This is a term used in the ancient wisdom or esoteric philosophy tosignify the network, marvelously intricate and builded of the channels or canals or paths or roadsfollowed by peregrinating or migrating entities as these latter pass from sphere to sphere or from realm torealm or from plane to plane. The pilgrim monads, however far advanced or however little advanced intheir evolution, inevitably and ineluctably follow these circulations. They can do nothing else, for theyare simply the spiritual, psychomagnetic, astral, and physical pathways along which the forces of theuniverse flow; and consequently, all entities whatsoever being indeed imbodiments of forces must ofnecessity follow the same routes or pathways that the abstract forces themselves use.These circulations of the kosmos are a veritable network between planet and planet, and planet and sun,and between sun and sun, and between sun and universe, and between universe and universe.Furthermore, the circulations of the kosmos are not restricted to the material or astral spheres, but are ofthe very fabric and structure of the entire universal kosmos, inner as well as outer. It is one of the mostmystical and suggestive doctrines of theosophy.
C++ "language" One of the most used {object-oriented} languages, a superset of {C} developed primarily by {Bjarne Stroustrup} "bs@alice.att.com" at {AT&T} {Bell Laboratories} in 1986. In C++ a {class} is a user-defined {type}, syntactically a {struct} with {member functions}. {Constructors} and {destructors} are member functions called to create or destroy {instances}. A {friend} is a nonmember function that is allowed to access the private portion of a class. C++ allows {implicit type conversion}, {function inlining}, {overloading} of operators and function names, and {default function arguments}. It has {streams} for I/O and {references}. C++ 2.0 (May 1989) introduced {multiple inheritance}, {type-safe linkage}, pointers to members, and {abstract classes}. C++ 2.1 was introduced in ["Annotated C++ Reference Manual", B. Stroustrup et al, A-W 1990]. {MS-DOS (ftp://grape.ecs.clarkson.edu/pub/msdos/djgpp/djgpp.zip)}, {Unix ANSI C++ (ftp://gnu.org/pub/gnu/g++-1.39.0.tar.Z)} - X3J16 committee. (They're workin' on it). See also {cfront}, {LEDA}, {uC++}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.c++}. ["The C++ Programming Language", Bjarne Stroustrup, A-W, 1986]. (1996-06-06)
class 1. "programming" The prototype for an {object} in an {object-oriented language}; analogous to a {derived type} in a {procedural language}. A class may also be considered to be a set of objects which share a common structure and behaviour. The structure of a class is determined by the {class variables} which represent the {state} of an object of that class and the behaviour is given by a set of {methods} associated with the class. Classes are related in a {class hierarchy}. One class may be a specialisation (a "{subclass}") of another (one of its "{superclasses}") or it may be composed of other classes or it may use other classes in a {client-server} relationship. A class may be an {abstract class} or a {concrete class}. See also {signature}. 2. "programming" See {type class}. 3. "networking" One of three types of {Internet addresses} distinguished by their most significant bits. 3. "language" A language developed by the {Andrew Project}. It was one of the first attempts to add {object-oriented} features to {C}. (1995-05-01)
Clean "language" A {lazy} {higher-order} {purely functional language} from the {University of Nijmegen}. Clean was originally a subset of {Lean}, designed to be an experimental {intermediate language} and used to study the {graph rewriting} model. To help focus on the essential implementation issues it deliberately lacked all {syntactic sugar}, even {infix} expressions or {complex lists}, As it was used more and more to construct all kinds of applications it was eventually turned into a general purpose functional programming language, first released in May 1995. The new language is {strongly typed} (Milner/Mycroft type system), provides {modules} and {functional I/O} (including a {WIMP} interface), and supports {parallel processing} and {distributed processing} on {loosely coupled} parallel architectures. Parallel execution was originally based on the {PABC} {abstract machine}. It is one of the fastest implementations of functional languages available, partly aided by programmer {annotations} to influence evaluation order. Although the two variants of Clean are rather different, the name Clean can be used to denote either of them. To distinguish, the old version can be referred to as Clean 0.8, and the new as Clean 1.0 or Concurrent Clean. The current release of Clean (1.0) includes a compiler, producing code for the {ABC} {abstract machine}, a {code generator}, compiling the ABC code into either {object-code} or {assembly language} (depending on the {platform}), I/O libraries, a {development environment} (not all platforms), and {documentation}. It is supported (or will soon be supported) under {Mac OS}, {Linux}, {OS/2}, {Windows 95}, {SunOS}, and {Solaris}. {(http://cs.kun.nl/~clean/)}. E-mail: "clean@cs.kun.nl". Mailing list: "clean-request@cs.kun.nl". ["Clean - A Language for Functional Graph Rewriting", T. Brus et al, IR 95, U Nijmegen, Feb 1987]. ["Concurrent Clean", M.C. van Eekelen et al, TR 89-18, U Nijmegen, Netherlands, 1989]. [{Jargon File}] (1995-11-08)
Closely related to the process of functional abstraction is the process of forming a class by abstraction from a suitable formula A relative to a particular variable, say x. The formula A must be such that (under the given system of interpretation for the notations appearing in A) λx[A] denotes a propositional function. Then x∋(A) (Peano), or xˆ (A) (Russell), denotes the class, determined by this propositional function. Frege's ε (A) also belongs here, when the function corresponding to A (relatively to the variable ε) is a propositional function.
CLP* "language, logic programming" A derivative of {Constraint Logic Programming} (CLP). ["CLP* and Constraint Abstraction", T. Hickey, 16th POPL, pp. 125-133, 1989]. [Difference?] (1994-11-01)
CLU "language" (CLUster) An {object-oriented} programming language developed at {MIT} by {Liskov} et al in 1974-1975. CLU is an {object-oriented} language of the {Pascal} family designed to support {data abstraction}, similar to {Alphard}. It introduced the {iterator}: a {coroutine} yielding the elements of a data object, to be used as the sequence of values in a {for loop}. A CLU program consists of separately compilable {procedures}, {clusters} and iterators, no nesting. A cluster is a module naming an {abstract type} and its operations, its internal representation and implementation. Clusters and iterators may be generic. Supplying actual constant values for the {parameters} instantiates the {module}. There are no {implicit type conversions}. In a cluster, the explicit type conversions 'up' and 'down' change between the abstract type and the representation. There is a universal type 'any', and a procedure force[] to check that an object is a certain type. Objects may be mutable or {immutable}. {Exceptions} are raised using 'signal' and handled with 'except'. {Assignment} is by sharing, similar to the sharing of data objects in {Lisp}. Arguments are passed by {call-by-sharing}, similar to {call-by-value}, except that the arguments are objects and can be changed only if they are mutable. CLU has {own variables} and multiple assignment. CLU was one of {Kamin's interpreters}. {clu2c} compiled CLU to {C}. {Concurrent CLU} was an extension designed to support parallel proceses. ["CLU Reference Manual", Barbara Liskov et al, LNCS 114, Springer 1981]. E-mail: Paul R. Johnson "prj@pm-prj.lcs.mit.edu". {Versions for Sun and VAX/VMS (ftp://pion.lcs.mit.edu/pub/clu/)}. {Portable version (ftp://mintaka.lcs.mit.edu/pub/dcurtis/)}. (1994-12-16)
Cognitive Meaning, Cognitive Sentence: See Meaning, Kinds of, 1. Cognoscendum: (pl. cognoscenda) (Lat. cognoscere, to know) The object of a cognition. Cognoscenda may be real and existent e.g. in veridical perception and memory; abstract and ideal e.g. in conception and valuation; fictitious, e.g. in imagination and hallucination. See Object, Objective. -- L.W.
compendium ::: 1. A brief treatment or account of a subject, esp. an extensive subject; concise treatise. 2. A short, complete summary; an abstract.
complete theory "logic" An abstract logical {theory} in which all true statements have formal {proofs} within the theory. (1998-07-05)
comprehension ::: n. --> The act of comprehending, containing, or comprising; inclusion.
That which is comprehended or inclosed within narrow limits; a summary; an epitome.
The capacity of the mind to perceive and understand; the power, act, or process of grasping with the intellect; perception; understanding; as, a comprehension of abstract principles.
The complement of attributes which make up the
concept ::: 1. An idea, esp. an abstract idea or notion. 2. An idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct. 3. A directly conceived or intuited object of thought. concept"s, concept-maps.
Conception: (Lat. concipere, to take together) Cognition of abstracta or universals as distinguished from cognition of concreta or particulars. (See Abstractum.) Conception, as a mode of cognition, may or may not posit real or subsistent universals corresponding to the concepts of the mind. See Conceptualism; Conceptual Realism. -- L.W.
concept ::: n. --> An abstract general conception; a notion; a universal.
conceptualisation "artificial intelligence" The process or result of listing the types of objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them. A conceptualisation is an {abstract}, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent. For example, we may conceptualise a family as the set of names, sexes and the relationships of the family members. Choosing a conceptualisation is the first stage of {knowledge representation}. A conceptualisation is a high-level {data model}. Every {knowledge base}, {knowledge-based system}, or {knowledge-level agent} is committed to some conceptualisation, explicitly or implicitly. (2013-04-17)
Conceptualism: A solution of the problem of universals which seeks a compromise between extreme nominalism (generic concepts are signs which apply indifferently to a number of particulars) and extreme realism (generic concepts refer to subsistent universals). Conceptualism offers various interpretations of conceptual objectivity: the generic concept refers to a class of resembling particulars, the object of a concept is a universal essence pervading the particulars, but having; no reality apart from them, concepts refer to abstracta, that is to say, to ideal objects envisaged by the mind but having no metaphysical status. -- L.W.
concrete ::: 1. Formed by the coalescence of separate particles or parts into one mass; solid. 2. Made real, tangible, or particular as opposed to abstract.
Concrete: Anything that is specific or individual. The term is opposed to "general" or to "abstract", terms which stress common characteristics or qualities considered apart from their specific setting. -- V.F.
concrete ::: a. --> United in growth; hence, formed by coalition of separate particles into one mass; united in a solid form.
Standing for an object as it exists in nature, invested with all its qualities, as distinguished from standing for an attribute of an object; -- opposed to abstract.
Applied to a specific object; special; particular; -- opposed to general. See Abstract, 3.
concrete class "programming" In {object-oriented programming}, a {class} suitable to be instantiated, as opposed to an {abstract class}. (1995-05-01)
Concrete Data Structure "theory" (CDS) A model of programming language terms developed in the context of constructing fully {abstract semantics} for {sequential} languages. A CDS is a 4-tuple (C,V,E,|-) where C is a cell, V is a value, E is an event and |- is an "enabling relation". An event is a cell and a value. A cell C is "enabled" by a set of events S if S |- C. A state is a set of events which are consistent in that the values they give for any cell are all equal. Every cell in a state is enabled. [G. Berry, P.-L. Curien, "Theory and practice of sequential algorithms: the kernel of applicative language CDS", Algebraic methods in semantics, CUP 1985]. (1994-11-30)
Concrete Operational Stage ::: According to Piaget, the stage of cognitive development where a child between the ages of 7 and 12 begins thinking more globally and outside of the self but is still deficient in abstract thought.
concrete syntax "language, data" The {syntax} of a language including all the features visible in the {source code} such as {parentheses} and {delimiters}. The concrete syntax is used when {parsing} the program or other input, during which it is usually converted into some kind of {abstract syntax tree} (conforming to an {abstract syntax}). In communications, concrete syntax is called {transfer syntax}. (1997-07-21)
Concrete Universal: In Hegel's system a category is concrete when it possesses the basic character of the real, i.e. tension, change dialectical opposition. Such a universal comprises a synthesis of two opposite abstractions; and with one exception, it in turn becomes an abstract member of a piir of logical opposites united or "sublated" in a higher category. The lowest of such dynamic or concrete universals is Becoming, which is a dialectical synthesis of Being and Not-Being. The only absolutely concrete universal, however, is Reality itself, the World Whole, conceived as an all-inclusive, organic svstem of self-thinking Thought.
Concurrent CLU "language" A {programming language} extending {CLU} for {concurrent} processes, developed by by Hamilton in 1984. ["Preserving Abstraction in Concurrent Programming", R.C.B. Cooper, K.G. Hamilton, IEEE Trans Soft Eng SE-14(2):258-263, Feb 1988].1 (2013-09-28)
Concurrent ML "language" (CML) A {concurrent} extension of {SML/NJ} written by J. Reppy at {Cornell University} in 1990. CML supports dynamic {thread} creation and synchronous {message passing} on typed channels. Threads are implemented using first-class {continuations}. First-class synchronous operations allow users to tailor their synchronisation abstractions for their application. CML also supports both {stream I/O} and low-level I/O in an integrated fashion. {(ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/)}. E-mail: "sml-bugs@research.att.com" (bugs). ["CML: A Higher-Order Concurrent Language", John H. Reppy, SIGPLAN Notices 26(6):293-305, June 1991]. (2000-08-09)
congelation ::: n. --> The act or process of passing, or causing to pass, from a fluid to a solid state, as by the abstraction of heat; the act or process of freezing.
The state of being congealed.
That which is congealed.
Conjunction: See Logic, formal, § 1. Connexity: A dyadic relation R is cilled connected if, for every two different members x, y of its field, at least one of xRy, yRx holds. Connotation: The sum of the constitutive notes of the essence of a concept as it is in itself and not as it is for us. This logical property is thus measured by the sum of the notes of the concept, of the higher genera it implies, of the various essential attributes of its nature as such. This term is synonymous with intension and comprehension; yet, the distinctions between them have been the object of controversies. J. S. Mill identifies connotation with signification and meaning, and includes in it much less than under comprehension or intension. The connotation of a general term (singular terms except descriptions are non-connotative) is the aggregate of all the other general terms necessarily implied by it is an abstract possibility and apart from exemplification in the actual world. It cannot be determined by denotation because necessity does not always refer to singular facts. Logicians who adopt this view distinguish connotation from comprehension by including in the latter contingent characters which do not enter in the former. Comprehension is thus the intensional reference of the concept, or the reference to universals of both general and singular terms. The determination of the comprehension of a concept is helped by its denotation, considering that reference is made also to singular, contingent, or particular objects exhibiting certain characteristics. In short, the connotation of a concept is its intensional reference determined intensionally; while its comprehension is its intensional reference extensionally determined. It may be observed that such a distinction and the view that the connotation of a concept contains only the notes which serve to define it, involves the nominalist principle that a concept may be reduced to what we are actually and explicitely thinking about the several notes we use to define it. Thus the connotation of a concept is much poorer than its actual content. Though the value of the concept seems to be saved by the recognition of its comprehension, it may be argued that the artificial introduction into the comprehension of both necessary and contingent notes, that is of actual and potential characteristics, confuses and perverts the notion of connotation as a logical property of our ideas. See Intension. -- T.G.
constant applicative form "functional programming" (CAF) A {supercombinator} which is not a {lambda abstraction}. This includes truly constant expressions such as 12, (+ 1 2), [1, 2, 3] as well as partially applied functions such as (+ 4). Note that this last example is equivalent under {eta abstraction} to \ x . + 4 x which is not a CAF. Since a CAF is a supercombinator, it contains no free variables. Moreover, since it is not a lambda abstraction it contains no variables at all. It may however contain identifiers which refer to other CAFs, e.g. c 3 where c = (* 2). A CAF can always be lifted to the top level of the program. It can either be compiled to a piece of graph which will be shared by all uses or to some shared code which will overwrite itself with some graph the first time it is evaluated. A CAF such as ints = from 1 where from n = n : from (n+1) can grow without bound but may only be accessible from within the code of one or more functions. In order for the {garbage collector} to be able to reclaim such structures, we associate with each function a list of the CAFs to which it refers. When garbage collecting a reference to the function we collect the CAFs on its list. [{The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages, Simon Peyton Jones (http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/papers/slpj-book-1987/PAGES/224.HTM)}]. (2006-10-12)
constructive proof "mathematics" A proof that something exists that provides an example or a method for actually constructing it. For example, for any pair of finite real numbers n " 0 and p " 0, there exists a real number 0 " k " 1 such that f(k) = (1-k)*n + k*p = 0. A constructive proof would proceed by rearranging the above to derive an equation for k: k = 1/(1-n/p) From this and the constraints on n and p, we can show that 0 " k " 1. A few mathematicians actually reject *all* non-constructive arguments as invalid; this means, for instance, that the law of the {excluded middle} (either P or not-P must hold, whatever P is) has to go; this makes {proof by contradiction} invalid. See {intuitionistic logic}. Constructive proofs are popular in theoretical computer science, both because computer scientists are less given to abstraction than mathematicians and because {intuitionistic logic} turns out to be an appropriate theoretical treatment of the foundations of computer science. (2014-08-24)
Contemporary ideas concerning the abstract nature of mathematics (q. v.) and the status of applied geometry have important historical roots in the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries. -- A.C.
conventional ::: a. --> Formed by agreement or compact; stipulated.
Growing out of, or depending on, custom or tacit agreement; sanctioned by general concurrence or usage; formal.
Based upon tradition, whether religious and historical or of artistic rules.
Abstracted; removed from close representation of nature by the deliberate selection of what is to be represented and what is to be rejected; as, a conventional flower; a conventional
cosmicity ("s) ::: a word coined by Sri Aurobindo. The suffix ity is used to form abstract nouns expressing state or condition. Hence, cosmicity refers to a cosmic state or condition.
Cosmogony: (Gr. cosmos a. gonia, producing or creating the world) Is a pictorial treatment of the way in which the world or the universe came into being. In contrast to the most primitive civilizations, the great ethnic stocks of mankind have originated cosmogonies. The basal principles common to all mythological cosmogonies are: They deduce the creation of the world either from the fewest possible elements or from a single material principle such as water, ocean, earth, air, mud of river, slime, two halves of an egg, body of a giant, or from a spiritual or abstract principle such as an anthropomorphic god, deities, chaos, time, night, That. The genesis being a slow development characterized by an orderly sequence of periods, the creation process is variously divided into definite periods of specified units of years. The process of creation being self-originating, in its final stages the genealogy and origin of deities is a large admixture. There is no apparent ethical import attached to the cosmogonies. Few of them assume the idea of design as underlying the creation. They hold that the world had a beginning in time. The process of creation from less perfect to more perfect, from an original chaos to the final creation of man, the predominance of water in the original condition of the earth, the evolution of a spiritual or luminous principle reacting on the primeval water and the emphasis upon the godlike origin of man or his immediate relation to the deity, are all permeating threads of cosmogonic myths. In dualistic religions the world originates as a result of a hostile conflict of two opposing principles, or as a result of the parallel development of two opposing forces. The conception of creation ex nihilo was almost universally unknown in antiquity. -- H.H.
Cosmos ::: Whenever a theosophist speaks of the cosmos or the universe, he by no means refers only to the physicalsphere or world or cross section of the boundless All in which we humans live, but more particularly tothe invisible worlds and planes and spheres inhabited by their countless hosts of vitalized or animatebeings. In order to avoid redundancy of words and often confusing repetitions in the midst of anexplanation dealing with other matters, since H. P. Blavatsky's time it has been customary among carefultheosophical writers to draw a distinction of fact between cosmos and kosmos. The solar universe orsolar system is frequently referred to as cosmos or solar cosmos; and the galactic universe or our ownhome-universe it has been customary to refer to as the kosmos. This distinction, however, does notalways hold, because sometimes in dealing with abstract questions where the application of the thoughtcan be indifferently made either to the galactic or to the solar universe, the two forms of spelling may beused interchangeably. (See also Kosmos, Kosmic Life)
cppp "tool" A compiler {front-end} for {C++} by Tony Davis "ted@cs.brown.edu" with complete semantic processing. cppp is based on {Yacc} and outputs an {abstract syntax graph}. Version: 1.14. {(ftp://wilma.cs.brown.edu/pub/cppp.tar.Z)}. (1993-05-26)
curried function "mathematics, programming" A {function} of N {arguments} that is considered as a function of one argument which returns another function of N-1 arguments. E.g. in {Haskell} we can define: average :: Int -" (Int -" Int) (The parentheses are optional). A {partial application} of average, to one Int, e.g. (average 4), returns a function of type (Int -" Int) which averages its argument with 4. In uncurried languages a function must always be applied to all its arguments but a {partial application} can be represented using a {lambda abstraction}: \ x -" average(4,x) Currying is necessary if {full laziness} is to be applied to functional sub-expressions. It was named after the logician {Haskell Curry} but the 19th-century logician, {Gottlob Frege} was the first to propose it and it was first referred to in ["Uber die Bausteine der mathematischen Logik", M. Schoenfinkel, Mathematische Annalen. Vol 92 (1924)]. {David Turner} said he got the term from {Christopher Strachey} who invented the term "currying" and used it in his lecture notes on programming languages written circa 1967. Strachey also remarked that it ought really to be called "Schoenfinkeling". Stefan Kahrs "smk@dcs.ed.ac.uk" reported hearing somebody in Germany trying to introduce "scho"nen" for currying and "finkeln" for "uncurrying". The verb "scho"nen" means "to beautify"; "finkeln" isn't a German word, but it suggests "to fiddle". ["Some philosophical aspects of combinatory logic", H. B. Curry, The Kleene Symposium, Eds. J. Barwise, J. Keisler, K. Kunen, North Holland, 1980, pp. 85-101] (2002-07-24)
C with Classes Short-lived predecessor to C++. ["Classes: An Abstract Data Type Facility for the C Language", B. Stroustrup, CSTR-84 Bell Labs, Apr 1980]. Also in [SIGPLAN Notices (Jan 1982)].
cybernetics "robotics" /si:`b*-net'iks/ The study of control and communication in living and man-made systems. The term was first proposed by {Norbert Wiener} in the book referenced below. Originally, cybernetics drew upon electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology to study and describe actions, feedback, and response in systems of all kinds. It aims to understand the similarities and differences in internal workings of organic and machine processes and, by formulating abstract concepts common to all systems, to understand their behaviour. Modern "second-order cybernetics" places emphasis on how the process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by those very systems, hence an elegant definition - "applied epistemology". Related recent developments (often referred to as {sciences of complexity}) that are distinguished as separate disciplines are {artificial intelligence}, {neural networks}, {systems theory}, and {chaos theory}, but the boundaries between those and cybernetics proper are not precise. See also {robot}. {The Cybernetics Society (http://cybsoc.org)} of the UK. {American Society for Cybernetics (http://asc-cybernetics.org/)}. {IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (http://isye.gatech.edu/ieee-smc/)}. {International project "Principia Cybernetica" (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html)}. ["Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine", N. Wiener, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948] (2002-01-01)
Darwin 1. "operating system" An {operating system} based on the {FreeBSD} version of {Unix}, running on top of a {microkernel} ({Mach} 3.0 with darwin 1.02) that offers advanced networking, services such as the {Apache} {web server}, and support for both {Macintosh} and Unix {file systems}. Darwin was originally released in March 1999. It currently runs on {PowerPC} based Macintosh computers, and, in October 2000, was being ported to {Intel} processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community. 2. "programming, tool" A general purpose structuring tool of use in building complex {distributed systems} from diverse components and diverse component interaction mechanisms. Darwin is being developed by the Distributed Software Engineering Section of the Department of Computing at {Imperial College}. It is in essence a {declarative} binding language which can be used to define hierarchic compositions of interconnected components. Distribution is dealt with orthogonally to system structuring. The language allows the specification of both static structures and dynamic structures which evolve during execution. The central abstractions managed by Darwin are components and services. Bindings are formed by manipulating references to services. The {operational semantics} of Darwin is described in terms of the {Pi-calculus}, {Milner}'s calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment of names in the Pi-calculus and the management of service references in Darwin leads to an elegant and concise Pi-calculus model of Darwin's {operational semantics}. The model has proved useful in arguing the correctness of Darwin implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour. {Distributed Software Engineering Section (http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/)}. {Darwin publications (http://scorch.doc.ic.ac.uk/dse-papers/darwin/)}. E-mail: Jeff Magee "jnm@doc.ic.ac.uk", Naranker Dulay "nd@doc.ic.ac.uk". 3. {Core War}. (2003-08-08)
data abstraction "data" Any representation of data in which the implementation details are hidden (abstracted). {Abstract data types} and {objects} are the two primary forms of data abstraction. [Other forms?]. (2003-07-03)
defalcation ::: n. --> A lopping off; a diminution; abatement; deficit. Specifically: Reduction of a claim by deducting a counterclaim; set- off.
That which is lopped off, diminished, or abated.
An abstraction of money, etc., by an officer or agent having it in trust; an embezzlement.
defiliation ::: n. --> Abstraction of a child from its parents.
definitional constraint programming "language" (DCP) A declarative, programming paradigm which integrates {concurrent constraint programming}, {constraint logic programming} and {functional programming}. In this setting a concurrent constraint language becomes a coordination system that organises the concurrent interaction of parallel functional computations. The language is also a generalisation of parallel {functional programming} languages, such as {Id}, where {constraints} and constraint abstractions are reused to define new constraints, as the means of programming logical variables for parallel coordination. {Goffin} is a DCP language. (1995-03-28)
denominate ::: v. t. --> To give a name to; to characterize by an epithet; to entitle; to name; to designate. ::: a. --> Having a specific name or denomination; specified in the concrete as opposed to abstract; thus, 7 feet is a denominate quantity, while 7 is mere abstract quantity or number. See Compound
Descriptions: Where a formula A containing a free variable -- say, for example, x -- means a true proposition (is true) for one and only one value of x, the notation (iota;x)A is used to mean thit value of x. The approximately equivalent English phraseology is "the x such that A" -- or simply 'the F," where F denotes the concept (monadic propositional function) obtained from A by abstraction (q. v.) with respect to x. This notation, or its sense in the sense of Frege, is called a description.
Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada "language" (DIANA) A formerly {de facto standard} {intermediate language} for {Ada} programs, developed by Goos and Wulf at {CMU} in January 1981. DIANA is an {attributed tree} representation, with an abstract interface defined in {Interface Description Language} (Nestor, Lamb and Wulf, CMU, 1981; Snodgrass(?), 1989(?)). DIANA resulted from a merger of {AIDA} and {TCOL.Ada}. At the present (2001) it is no longer used by the major ADA compilers ["DIANA - An Intermediate Language for Ada", G.T. Goos et al, LNCS 161, Springer 1983]. (2001-09-15)
Designate: A word, symbol, or expression may be said to designate that object (abstract or concrete) to which it refers, or of which it is a name or sign. See Name relation. -- A.C.
design pattern "programming" A description of an {object-oriented design} technique which names, abstracts and identifies aspects of a design structure that are useful for creating an object-oriented design. The design pattern identifies {classes} and {instances}, their roles, collaborations and responsibilities. Each design pattern focuses on a particular object-oriented design problem or issue. It describes when it applies, whether it can be applied in the presence of other design constraints, and the consequences and trade-offs of its use. {Home (http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/patterns/patterns.html)}. ["Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software", Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides]. (1997-07-21)
design recovery "process" A subtask of {reverse engineering} in which domain knowledge, external information, and deduction of fuzzy reasoning are added to the observations of the subject system to identify meaningful higher level abstractions beyond those obtained directly by examining the system itself. In other words, design recovery aims to work out what a system or component was designed to do rather than just examining its subcomponents and their interrelationships. (1996-12-08)
detachment ::: n. --> The act of detaching or separating, or the state of being detached.
That which is detached; especially, a body of troops or part of a fleet sent from the main body on special service.
Abstraction from worldly objects; renunciation.
Dissociated Press [Play on "Associated Press"; perhaps inspired by a reference in the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up, Doc?"] An algorithm for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage even more efficiently than by passing it through a {marketroid}. The algorithm starts by printing any N consecutive words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step it searches for any random occurrence in the original text of the last N words (or letters) already printed and then prints the next word or letter. {Emacs} has a handy command for this. Here is a short example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to an earlier version of the {Jargon File}: wart: A small, crocky {feature} that sticks out of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to be not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to the same source: window sysIWYG: A bit was named aften /bee't*/ prefer to use the other guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speech makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem! A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press to a random body of text and {vgrep} the output in hopes of finding an interesting new word. (In the preceding example, "window sysIWYG" and "informash" show some promise.) Iterated applications of Dissociated Press usually yield better results. Similar techniques called "travesty generators" have been employed with considerable satirical effect to the utterances of {Usenet} flamers; see {pseudo}. [{Jargon File}]
distrait ::: a. --> Absent-minded; lost in thought; abstracted.
doctrinaire ::: n. --> One who would apply to political or other practical concerns the abstract doctrines or the theories of his own philosophical system; a propounder of a new set of opinions; a dogmatic theorist. Used also adjectively; as, doctrinaire notions.
Domain Analysis "systems analysis" 1. Determining the operations, data objects, properties and {abstractions} appropriate for designing solutions to problems in a given {domain}. 2. The {domain engineering} activity in which domain knowledge is studied and formalised as a domain definition and a domain specification. A {software reuse} approach that involves combining software components, subsystems, etc., into a single application system. 3. The process of identifying, collecting organising, analysing and representing a {domain model} and software architecture from the study of existing systems, underlying theory, emerging technology and development histories within the domain of interest. 4. The analysis of systems within a domain to discover commonalities and differences among them. (1997-12-26)
domain theory "theory" A branch of mathematics introduced by Dana Scott in 1970 as a mathematical theory of programming languages, and for nearly a quarter of a century developed almost exclusively in connection with {denotational semantics} in computer science. In {denotational semantics} of programming languages, the meaning of a program is taken to be an element of a domain. A domain is a mathematical structure consisting of a set of values (or "points") and an ordering relation, "= on those values. Domain theory is the study of such structures. (""=" is written in {LaTeX} as {\subseteq}) Different domains correspond to the different types of object with which a program deals. In a language containing functions, we might have a domain X -" Y which is the set of functions from domain X to domain Y with the ordering f "= g iff for all x in X, f x "= g x. In the {pure lambda-calculus} all objects are functions or {applications} of functions to other functions. To represent the meaning of such programs, we must solve the {recursive} equation over domains, D = D -" D which states that domain D is ({isomorphic} to) some {function space} from D to itself. I.e. it is a {fixed point} D = F(D) for some operator F that takes a domain D to D -" D. The equivalent equation has no non-trivial solution in {set theory}. There are many definitions of domains, with different properties and suitable for different purposes. One commonly used definition is that of Scott domains, often simply called domains, which are {omega-algebraic}, {consistently complete} {CPOs}. There are domain-theoretic computational models in other branches of mathematics including {dynamical systems}, {fractals}, {measure theory}, {integration theory}, {probability theory}, and {stochastic processes}. See also {abstract interpretation}, {bottom}, {pointed domain}. (1999-12-09)
Dyadic: (Gr. duas, two) Term meaning duality. Human experience is said to be dyadic, i.e. man's nature is dual in conflicts between good intentions and bad accomplishments, in oppositional strains and stresses. The personality of God is held to be dyadic in the confronting of difficulties or frustrations to his good will. Reality is spoken of as dyadic when it is said to be characteristically dual, e.g. both One and Many, static and dynamic, free and determined, abstract and concrete, universal and particular. -- V.F.
Eiffel "language" An {object-oriented} language produced by {Bertrand Meyer} in 1985. Eiffel has {classes} with {multiple inheritance} and {repeated inheritance}, {deferred class}es (like {Smalltalk}'s {abstract class}), and {clusters} of classes. Objects can have both {static types} and {dynamic types}. The dynamic type must be a descendant of the static (declared) type. {Dynamic binding} resolves {multiple inheritance} clashes. It has flattened forms of classes, in which all of the inherited features are added at the same level and {generic class}es parametrised by type. Other features are {persistent objects}, {garbage collection}, {exception} handling, {foreign language interface}. Classes may be equipped with {assertions} (routine preconditions and postconditions, class {invariants}) implementing the theory of "{Design by Contract}" and helping produce more reliable software. Eiffel is compiled to {C}. It comes with libraries containing several hundred classes: data structures and {algorithms} (EiffelBase), graphics and user interfaces (EiffelVision) and language analysis (EiffelLex, EiffelParse). The first release of Eiffel was release 1.4, introduced at the first {OOPSLA} in October 1986. The language proper was first described in a University of California, Santa Barbara report dated September 1985. Eiffel is available, with different libraries, from several sources including {Interactive Software Engineering}, USA (ISE Eiffel version 3.3); Sig Computer GmbH, Germany (Eiffel/S); and {Tower, Inc.}, Austin (Tower Eiffel). The language definition is administered by an open organisation, the Nonprofit International Consortium for Eiffel (NICE). There is a standard kernel library. An {Eiffel source checker} and compiler {front-end} is available. See also {Sather}, {Distributed Eiffel}, {Lace}, {shelf}. E-mail: "queries@eiffel.com". ["Eiffel: The Language", Bertrand Meyer, P-H 1992]. (1998-11-15)
Eiffel source checker A compiler {front-end} for {Eiffel} 3 by Olaf Langmack "langmack@inf.fu-berlin.de" and Burghardt Groeber. It was generated automatically with the {Karlsruhe toolbox} for compiler construction according to the most recent public language definition. The {parser} derives an easy-to-use {abstract syntax tree}, supports elementary error recovery and provides a precise source code indication of errors. It performs a strict syntax check and analyses 4000 lines of source code per second on a {Sun} {SPARC} {workstation}. {(ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/heron/ep.tar.Z)}. (1992-12-14)
eikon ::: n. --> An image or effigy; -- used rather in an abstract sense, and rarely for a work of art.
embody ::: 1. To invest (a spiritual entity) with a body or with bodily form; render incarnate; make corporeal. 2. To give a tangible, bodily, or concrete form to (an abstract concept) or to be an example of or express (an idea, principle, etc. embodies, embodied, embodying, self-embodying.
Emerald An {object-oriented} distributed programming language and environment developed at the {University of Washington} in the early 1980s. Emeral was the successor to {EPL}. It is {strongly typed} and uses {signatures} and {prototypes} rather than {inheritance}. ["Distribution and Abstract Types in Emerald", A. Black et al, IEEE Trans Soft Eng SE-13(1):65-76 (Jan 1987)]. (1994-11-09)
emotion ::: 1. An affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness. Also abstract ‘feeling" as distinguished from the other classes of mental phenomena. 2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance. **emotion"s, emotions.
entitative ::: a. --> Considered as pure entity; abstracted from all circumstances.
eta abstraction {eta conversion}
eta conversion "theory" In {lambda-calculus}, the eta conversion rule states \ x . f x "--" f provided x does not occur as a {free variable} in f and f is a function. Left to right is eta reduction, right to left is eta abstraction (or eta expansion). This conversion is only valid if {bottom} and \ x . bottom are equivalent in all contexts. They are certainly equivalent when applied to some argument - they both fail to terminate. If we are allowed to force the evaluation of an expression in any other way, e.g. using {seq} in {Miranda} or returning a function as the overall result of a program, then bottom and \ x . bottom will not be equivalent. See also {observational equivalence}, {reduction}.
Every conscious process intends its objects as in a context with others, some intended as presented, others intended as to become presented if intended future consciousness takes a particular course. In other words, consciousness is always an intentional predelineating of processes in which objects will be intended, as the same or different within an all inclusive objective context: the world. A pure phenomenology should therefore describe not only paiticular intended objects but also the intended world, as intended -- as part of the "noematic-objective" sense belonging to consciousness by virtue of the latter's intrinsic intentionality. To be sure, in such noematic-objective description the phenomenologist must still disregard the actual relations of the described subjective processes to other entities in the world. But, Husserl contended, when one disregards everything except the intrinsic nature of subjective processes, one still can see their intentionality; therefore all the entities and relations from which one has abstracted can -- and should -- reappear as noematic-intentional objects, within one's isolated field. In particular, the disregarded status of the observed stream of consciousness itself, its status as related to other entities in the world, reappears -- as a noematic-objective sense which the observed consciousness intends. Moreover, as purely eidetic, phenomenology finds that the intrinsic character of any actual consciousness, as intending a world and itself as in that world, is an essentially necessary determination of any possible consciousness.
Expressive Meaning: See Meaning, Kinds of, 4. Extension: (Lat. ex + tendere, to stretch) Physical space, considered as a single concrete, continuum as contrasted with the abstract conceptual space of mathematics. The distinction between extension and "space" in the abstract sense is clearly drawn by Descartes (1596-1650) in The Principles of Philosophy, part II, Princ. IV-XV. -- L.W.
Extended Concurrent Prolog "language" (ECP) {Concurrent Prolog} with {OR parallelism}, {set abstraction} and {meta-inference} features. ["AND-OR Queuing in Extended Concurrent Prolog", J. Tanaka et al, Proc Logic Prog Conf '85, LNCS 193, Springer 1985]. (1994-12-01)
extract ::: v. t. --> To draw out or forth; to pull out; to remove forcibly from a fixed position, as by traction or suction, etc.; as, to extract a tooth from its socket, a stump from the earth, a splinter from the finger.
To withdraw by expression, distillation, or other mechanical or chemical process; as, to extract an essence. Cf. Abstract, v. t., 6.
To take by selection; to choose out; to cite or quote,
Factual: See Meaning, Kinds of, 2. Faculty: (Scholastic) Medieval psychology distinguishes several faculties of the soul which are said to be really distinct from each other and from the substance of the soul. According to Aquinas the distinction is based on objects and operations. The faculties are conceived as accidents of the soul's substance, but as pertaining essentially to its nature, therefore "proper accidents". The soul operates by means of the faculties. Much misunderstood and deteriorated, this theory remained alive until recent times and is still maintained, in its original and pure form, by Neo-Scholasticism. A certain rapprochement to the older notion may he observed in the modern theory of "general factors". Most of the criticisms directed against the faculty-psychology are based on modern experimental and nominalistic approaches. The faculties listed by Aquinas are: The sensory faculties, which to operate need a bodily organ; The external senses, The internal senses, sensus communis, memory, imagination, vis aestimativa (in animals) or cogitativa (in man), The sensory appetites, subdivided in the concupiscible appetite aiming at the attainable good or fleeing the avoidable evil, the irascible appetite related to good and evil whose attainment or avoidance encounters obstacles. The vegetative faculties, comprising the achievements of nutrition, growth and procreation. While the sensory appetites are common sto man and animals, the vegetative are observed also in plants. The locomotive faculty, characteristic of animals and, therefore, also of man. The rational faculties, found with man alone; Intellect, whose proper object is the universal nature of things and whose achievements are abstraction, reasoning, judging, syllogistic thought, Rational Will, directed towards the good as such and relying in its operation on particulars on the co-operation of the appetites, just as intellect needs for the formation of its abstract notions the phantasm, derived from sense impressions and presented to the intellect by imagination. The vis cogitativa forms a link between rational universal will and particular strivings; it is therefore also called ratio particularis. Ch. A. Hart, The Thomisttc Theory of Mental Faculties, Washington, D. C, 1930. -- R.A.
FALSE A small, compiled extensible language with {lambda abstractions} by W. van Oortmerssen. {For Amiga (ftp://ftp.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/amiga/fish/ff885)}.
F-code The code for the {FP/M} {abstract machine}. ["FP/M Abstract Syntax Description", Roger Bailey, Dept Computing, Imperial College, U London, 1985]1w. (1994-12-01)
Fichte conceives the ultimate Ich as an absolute, unconditioned, simple ego which "posits" itself and its not-self in a series of intellectual acts. He emphasizes the dynamic, creative powers of the ego, its capacity for self-determination, the act in which the absolute subject creates the I. Self and not-self are products of the original activity of the conscious subject. Schelling conceives the I as a creation of the Absolute Idea. Hegel, however, treats the Ich as thought conceived as subject, as thinking, abstracted from all things perceived, willed or felt -- in short abstracted from all experience. As such it is universal abstract freedom, an ideal unity.
Finite State Machine "mathematics, algorithm, theory" (FSM or "Finite State Automaton", "transducer") An {abstract machine} consisting of a set of {states} (including the initial state), a set of input events, a set of output events, and a state transition function. The function takes the current state and an input event and returns the new set of output events and the next state. Some states may be designated as "terminal states". The state machine can also be viewed as a function which maps an ordered sequence of input events into a corresponding sequence of (sets of) output events. A {deterministic} FSM (DFA) is one where the next state is uniquely determinied by a single input event. The next state of a {nondeterministic} FSM (NFA) depends not only on the current input event, but also on an arbitrary number of subsequent input events. Until these subsequent events occur it is not possible to determine which state the machine is in. It is possible to automatically translate any nondeterministic FSM into a deterministic one which will produce the same output given the same input. Each state in the DFA represents the set of states the NFA might be in at a given time. In a probabilistic FSM [proper name?], there is a predetermined {probability} of each next state given the current state and input (compare {Markov chain}). The terms "acceptor" and "transducer" are used particularly in language theory where automata are often considered as {abstract machines} capable of recognising a language (certain sequences of input events). An acceptor has a single {Boolean} output and accepts or rejects the input sequence by outputting true or false respectively, whereas a transducer translates the input into a sequence of output events. FSMs are used in {computability theory} and in some practical applications such as {regular expressions} and digital logic design. See also {state transition diagram}, {Turing Machine}. [J.H. Conway, "regular algebra and finite machines", 1971, Eds Chapman & Hall]. [S.C. Kleene, "Representation of events in nerve nets and finite automata", 1956, Automata Studies. Princeton]. [Hopcroft & Ullman, 1979, "Introduction to automata theory, languages and computations", Addison-Wesley]. [M. Crochemore "tranducters and repetitions", Theoritical. Comp. Sc. 46, 1986]. (2001-09-22)
fix 1. "mathematics" The {fixed point} {combinator}. Called Y in {combinatory logic}. Fix is a {higher-order function} which returns a fixed point of its argument (which is a function). fix :: (a -" a) -" a fix f = f (fix f) Which satisfies the equation fix f = x such that f x = x. Somewhat surprisingly, fix can be defined as the non-recursive {lambda abstraction}: fix = \ h . (\ x . h (x x)) (\ x . h (x x)) Since this involves self-application, it has an {infinite type}. A function defined by f x1 .. xN = E can be expressed as f = fix (\ f . \ x1 ... \ xN . E) = (\ f . \ x1 ... \xN . E) (fix (\ f . \ x1 ... \ xN . E)) = let f = (fix (\ f . \ x1 ... \ xN . E)) in \ x1 ... \xN . E If f does not occur {free} in E (i.e. it is not {recursive}) then this reduces to simply f = \ x1 ... \ xN . E In the case where N = 0 and f is free in E, this defines an infinite data object, e.g. ones = fix (\ ones . 1 : ones) = (\ ones . 1 : ones) (fix (\ ones . 1 : ones)) = 1 : (fix (\ ones . 1 : ones)) = 1 : 1 : ... Fix f is also sometimes written as mu f where mu is the Greek letter or alternatively, if f = \ x . E, written as mu x . E. Compare {quine}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-13) 2. {bug fix}. (1998-06-25)
FLUB "language" The {abstract machine} for {bootstrapping} {STAGE2}. [Mentioned in Machine Oriented Higher Level Languages, W. van der Poel, N-H 1974, p. 271]. (1995-03-13)
fontology ({XEROX PARC}) The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new {fonts} (e.g. for window systems and typesetting software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny. Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to "files" and "folders" - ESR [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-01)
Formal Description Technique "specification, protocol" (FDT) A {formal method} for developing telecomunications services and {protocols}. FDTs range from abstract to implementation-oriented descriptions. All FDTs offer the means for producing unambiguous descriptions of {OSI} services and {protocols} in a more precise and comprehensive way than {natural language} descriptions. They provide a foundation for analysis and verification of a description. The target of analysis and verification may vary from abstract properties to concrete properties. Natural language descriptions remain an essential adjunct to formal description, enabling an unfarmiliar reader to gain rapid insight into the structure and function of services and protocols. Examples of FDTs are {LOTOS}, {Z}, {SDL}, and {Estelle}. [ISO/IEC DTR10167: "Guidelines for the application of {Estelle}, {LOTOS} and {SDL}"]. (1994-12-06)
Formalization: (Ger. Formalisierung) In Husserl: 1. (objective) Ideational "abstraction" from the determination of an object as belonging in some material region. The residuum is a pure eidetic form. 2. (noematic) Substitution, in a noematic-objective sense, e.g., the sense signified by a sentence, of the moment "what you please" for every materially determinate core of sense, while retaining all the moments of categorial form. Noematic formalization reduces a determinate objective sense to a materially indeterminate categorial sense-form. See Algebraization, Generalization, and Ideation. -- DC.
Formal Operational Stage ::: Pavlov&
FORMAT-Fortran {Fortran Matrix Abstraction Technique Fortran}
::: "For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
“For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Fortran Matrix Abstraction Technique Fortran "language" (FORMAT-Fortran) A language for manipulation, printing and plotting of large matrices. ["FORMAT-FORTRAN Matrix Abstraction Technique (Vol. V)" AFFDL-TR-66-207, Douglas Aircraft Co. Oct 1968]. (1996-09-29)
forward engineering "process" The traditional process of moving from high-level abstractions and logical, implementation-independent designs to the physical implementation of a system. Contrast {reverse engineering}. (1996-10-02)
FP/M "programming" An {abstract machine} and intermediate language for {functional languages}, used to implement {Hope}. FP/M is an optimisation of the {SECD machine}. ["The Compilation of FP/M Programs into Conventional Machine Code", A.J. Field, Imperial College, London, 1985]. ["Functional Programming", A.J. Field & P.G. Harrison, A-W 1988]. (1994-10-20)
framework In {object-oriented} systems, a set of {class}es that embodies an abstract design for solutions to a number of related problems. (1995-01-30)
freeze ::: n. --> A frieze.
The act of congealing, or the state of being congealed. ::: v. i. --> To become congealed by cold; to be changed from a liquid to a solid state by the abstraction of heat; to be hardened into ice or a like solid body.
fully lazy lambda lifting John Hughes's optimisation of {lambda lifting} to give {full laziness}. {Maximal free expressions} are shared to minimise the amount of recalculation. Each inner sub-expression is replaced by a function of its maximal free expressions (expressions not containing any {bound variable}) applied to those expressions. E.g. f = \ x . (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) ((+) (sqrt x)) is a maximal free expression in (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) so this inner {abstraction} is replaced with (\ g . \ y . g y) ((+) (sqrt x)) Now, if a {partial application} of f is shared, the result of evaluating (sqrt x) will also be shared rather than re-evaluated on each application of f. As Chin notes, the same benefit could be achieved without introducing the new {higher-order function}, g, if we just extracted out (sqrt x). This is similar to the {code motion} optimisation in {procedural languages} where constant expressions are moved outside a loop or procedure. (1994-12-01)
Fun A {typed lambda-calculus}, similar to {SOL}[2]. "On Understanding Types, Data Abstractions and Polymorphism", L. Cardelli et al, ACM Comp Surveys 17(4) (Dec 1985).
G 1. "unit" The abbreviated form of {giga-}. 2. "language" ["G: A Functional Language with Generic Abstract Data Types", P.A.G. Bailes, Computer Langs 12(2):69-94, 1987]. 3. "language" A language developed at {Oregon State University} in 1988 which combines {functional programming}, {object-oriented programming}, relational, {imperative programming} and {logic programming} (you name it we got it). ["The Multiparadigm Language G", J. Placer, Computer Langs 16:235-258, 1991]. [{Jargon File}] (1996-08-12)
Geometry: Originally abstracted from the measurement of, and the study of relations of position among, material objects, geometry received in Euclid's Elements (c. 300 B.C.) a treatment which (despite, of course, certain defects by modern standards) became the historical model for the abstract deductive development of a mathematical discipline. The general nature of the subject of geometry may be illustrated by reference to the synthetic geometry of Euclid, and the analytic geometry which resulted from the introduction of coordinates into Euclidean geometry by Descartes (1637) (q.v.). In the mathematical usage of today the name geometry is given to any abstract mathematical discipline of a certain general type, as thus illustrated, without any requirement of applicability to spatial relations among physical objects or the like.
Given a formula A containing a free variable, say x, the process of forming a corresponding monadic function (q.v.) -- defined by the rule that the value of the function for an argument b is that which A denotes if the variable x is taken as denoting b -- is also called abstraction, or functional abstraction. In this sense, abstraction is an operation upon a formula A yielding a function, and is relative to a particular system of interpretation for the notations appearing in the formula, and to a particular variable, as x. The requirement that A shall contain x as a free variable is not essential: when A does not contain x as a free variable, the function obtained by abstraction relative to x may be taken to be the function whose value, the same for all arguments, is denoted by A.
GMD Toolbox for Compiler Construction (Or Cocktail) A huge set of compiler building tools for {MS-DOS}, {Unix} and {OS/2}. parser generator (LALR -" C, Modula-2), documentation, parser generator (LL(1) -" C, Modula-2), tests, scanner generator (-" C, Modula-2), tests translator (Extended BNF -" BNF), translator (Modula-2 -" C), translator (BNF (yacc) -" Extended BNF), examples abstract syntax tree generator, attribute-evaluator generator, code generator The {MS-DOS} version requires DJ Delorie's DOS extender ({go32}) and the {OS/2} version requires the {emx} programming environment. {(ftp://ftp.karlsruhe.gmd.de/pub/cocktail/dos)}. {OS/2 FTP (ftp://ftp.eb.ele.tue.nl/pub/src/cocktail/dos-os2.zoo)}. Mailing list: listserv@eb.ele.tue.nl (subscribe to Cocktail). E-mail: Josef Grosch "grosch@karlsruhe.gmd.de", Willem Jan Withagen "wjw@eb.ele.tue.nl" (OS/2). (1992-01-01)
God: In metaphysical thinking a name for the highest, ultimate being, assumed by theology on the basis of authority, revelation, or the evidence of faith as absolutely necessary, but demonstrated as such by a number of philosophical systems, notably idealistic, monistic and dualistic ones. Proofs of the existence of God fall apart into those that are based on facts of experience (desire or need for perfection, dependence, love, salvation, etc.), facts of religious history (consensus gentium, etc.)), postulates of morality (belief in ultimate justice, instinct for an absolute good, conscience, the categorical imperative, sense of duty, need of an objective foundation of morality, etc.)), postulates of reason (cosmological, physico-theological, teleological, and ontological arguments), and the inconceivableness of the opposite. As to the nature of God, the great variety of opinions are best characterized by their several conceptions of the attributes of God which are either of a non-personal (pantheistic, etc.) or personal (theistic, etc.) kind, representing concepts known from experience raised to a superlative degree ("omniscient", "eternal", etc.). The reality, God, may be conceived as absolute or as relative to human values, as being an all-inclusive one, a duality, or a plurality. Concepts of God calling for unquestioning faith, belief in miracles, and worship or representing biographical and descriptive sketches of God and his creation, are rather theological than metaphysical, philosophers, on the whole, utilizing the idea of God or its linguistic equivalents in other languages, despite popular and church implications, in order not to lose the feeling-contact with the rather abstract world-ground. See Religion, Philosophy of. -- K.F.L.
Gods ::: The old pantheons were builded upon an ancient and esoteric wisdom which taught, under the guise of apublic mythology, profound secrets of the structure and operations of the universe which surrounds us.The entire human race has believed in gods, has believed in beings superior to men; the ancients all saidthat men are the "children" of these gods, and that from these superior beings, existent in the azurespaces, men draw all that in them is; and, furthermore, that men themselves, as children of the gods, arein their inmost essence divine beings linked forever with the boundless universe of which each humanbeing, just as is the case with every other entity everywhere, is an inseparable part. This is a truly sublimeconception.One should not think of human forms when the theosophist speaks of the gods; we mean the arupa -- the"formless" -- entities, beings of pure intelligence and understanding, relatively pure essences, relativelypure spirits, formless as we physical humans conceive form. The gods are the higher inhabitants ofnature. They are intrinsic portions of nature itself, for they are its informing principles. They are as muchsubject to the wills and energies of still higher beings -- call these wills and energies the "laws" of higherbeings, if you will -- as we are, and as are the kingdoms of nature below us.The ancients put realities, living beings, in the place of laws which, as Occidentals use the term, are onlyabstractions -- an expression for the action of entities in nature; the ancients did not cheat themselves soeasily with words. They called them gods, spiritual entities. Not one single great thinker of the ancients,until the Christian era, ever talked about laws of nature, as if these laws were living entities, as if theseabstractions were actual entities which did things. Did the laws of navigation ever navigate a ship? Doesthe law of gravity pull the planets together? Does it unite or pull the atoms together? This word laws issimply a mental abstraction signifying unerring action of conscious and semi-conscious energies innature.
Graphical Kernel System "graphics, standard" (GKS) The widely recognised standard {ANSI} X3.124 for graphical input/output. GKS is worked on by the {ISO}/{IEC} group {JTC1/SC24}. It provides applications programmers with standard methods of creating, manipulating, and displaying or printing computer graphics on different types of computer graphics {output devices}. It provides an abstraction to save programmers from dealing with the detailed capabilities and interfaces of specific hardware. GKS defines a basic two-dimensional graphics system with: uniform input and output {primitives}; a uniform interface to and from a {GKS metafile} for storing and transferring graphics information. It supports a wide range of graphics output devices including such as {printers}, {plotters}, {vector graphics} devices, {storage tubes}, {refresh displays}, {raster displays}, and {microfilm recorders}. (1999-04-01)
greek 1. "text, graphics" To display text as abstract dots and lines in order to give a preview of layout without actually being legible. This is faster than drawing the characters correctly which may require scaling or other transformations. Greeking is particularly useful when displaying a reduced image of a document where the text would be too small to be legible on the display anyway. A related technique is {lorem ipsum}. (2006-09-18)
HAL 1. "computer" HAL 9000, the murdering computer on the spaceship in the science fiction classic "2001, A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clark. "HAL" is "{IBM}" with each letter changed to the one before and there is an unconfirmed rumour that 9000 is the sum of the various IBM computer numbers that were in service at the time. However, in the sequel "2010", Clarke emphatically denies that HAL's name is supposed to be "one step ahead of IBM". It is, rather, short for "heuristic algorithm". 2. "operating system" {Hardware Abstraction Layer}. (1995-11-09)
Hardware Abstraction Layer "operating system" (HAL) The layer of {Microsoft} {Windows NT} where they have isolated their {assembly language} code. (1995-04-17)
Head Normal Form "theory, reduction" (HNF) A term describing a {lambda expression} whose top level is either a variable, a data value, a built-in function applied to too few arguments, or a {lambda abstraction} whose body is not reducible. I.e. the top level is neither a {redex} nor a lambda abstraction with a reducible body. An expression in HNF may contain redexes in argument postions whereas a {normal form} may not. Compare {Weak Head Normal Form}. (2003-01-08)
headnote ::: n. --> A note at the head of a page or chapter; in law reports, an abstract of a case, showing the principles involved and the opinion of the court.
Hermes "language" An experimental, very high level, integrated language and system from the {IBM} {Watson Research Centre}, produced in June 1990. It is designed for implementation of large systems and distributed applications, as well as for general-purpose programming. It is an {imperative language}, {strongly typed} and is a {process-oriented} successor to {NIL}. Hermes hides distribution and heterogeneity from the programmer. The programmer sees a single {abstract machine} containing processes that communicate using calls or sends. The {compiler}, not the programmer, deals with the complexity of data structure layout, local and remote communication, and interaction with the {operating system}. As a result, Hermes programs are portable and easy to write. Because the programming paradigm is simple and high level, there are many opportunities for optimisation which are not present in languages which give the programmer more direct control over the machine. Hermes features {threads}, {relational tables}Hermes is, {typestate} checking, {capability}-based access and {dynamic configuration}. Version 0.8alpha patchlevel 01 runs on {RS/6000}, {Sun-4}, {NeXT}, {IBM-RT}/{BSD4.3} and includes a {bytecode compiler}, a bytecode-"C compiler and {run-time support}. {0.7alpha for Unix (ftp://software.watson.ibm.com/pub/hermes)}. E-mail: "hermes-request@watson.ibm.com", Andy Lowry "lowry@watson.ibm.com". {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.hermes}. ["Hermes: A Language for Distributed Computing". Strom, Bacon, Goldberg, Lowry, Yellin, Yemini. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 1991. ISBN: O-13-389537-8]. (1992-03-22)
Hierarchical Design Methodology "programming" (HDM) A method for specifying {software} and systems using hierarchies of {abstract machines}, developed by Larry Robinson at SRI International circa 1975-1976. The specifications were written in {SPECIAL}. (2012-07-08)
high-level language (HLL) A programming language which provides some level of abstraction above {assembly language}. These normally use statements consisting of English-like keywords such as "FOR", "PRINT" or "GOTO", where each statement corresponds to several {machine language} instructions. It is much easier to program in a high-level language than in {assembly language} though the efficiency of execution depends on how good the {compiler} or {interpreter} is at optimising the program. Rarely, the variants "{VHLL}" and "{MLL}" are found. See also {languages of choice}, {generation}. (1994-12-07)
hole 1. "electronics" In the {hole model} of current flow, the absence of an {electron}, e.g. in a {semiconductor} material. In the {electron model}, a hole can be thought of as an incomplete outer electron shell in a doping substance. Considering holes as positive charge carriers is a useful abstraction. 2. "security" A security {vulnerability}, particularly one which allows an attacker to gain unauthorised access to a system (by analogy with a hole in a wall). (2014-10-25)
Hope+ "language, functional programming" An extension of {Hope} implemented in the Alvey {Flagship} project at {Imperial College}. Hope+ has vectors, real numbers, best fit {pattern matching}, lazy data constructors, absolute {set abstractions} and {constraints}. It has a {continuation}-based I/O system with {referential transparency} and is capable of handling all common I/O tasks such as terminal and file I/O, {signal} handling and interprocess communications. It has {modules} and {separate compilation}. See also {Hope+C}, {Massey Hope}, {Concurrent Massey Hope}. ["Hope+", N. Perry, Imperial College, IC/FPR/LANG/2.5.1/7, 1988.] (1999-08-24)
Hume, David: Born 1711, Edinburgh; died at Edinburgh, 1776. Author of A Treatise of Human Nature, Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Enquiry Concerning the Passions, Enquiry Concerning Morals, Natural History of Religion, Dialogues on Natural Religion, History of England, and many essays on letters, economics, etc. Hume's intellectual heritage is divided between the Cartesian Occasionalists and Locke and Berkeley. From the former, he obtained some of his arguments against the alleged discernment or demonstrability of causal connections, and from the latter his psychological opinions. Hume finds the source of cognition in impressions of sensation and reflection. All simple ideas are derived from and are copies of simple impressions. Complex ideas may be copies of complex impressions or may result from the imaginative combination of simple ideas. Knowledge results from the comparison of ideas, and consists solely of the intrinsic resemblance between ideas. As resemblance is nothing over and above the resembling ideas, there are no abstract general ideas: the generality of ideas is determined by their habitual use as representatives of all ideas and impressions similar to the representative ideas. As knowledge consists of relations of ideas in virtue of resemblance, and as the only relation which involves the connection of different existences and the inference of one existent from another is that of cause and effect, and as there is no resemblance necessary between cause and effect, causal inference is in no case experientially or formally certifiable. As the succession and spatio-temporal contiguity of cause and effect suggests no necessary connection and as the constancy of this relation, being mere repetition, adds no new idea (which follows from Hume's nominalistic view), the necessity of causal connection must be explained psychologically. Thus the impression of reflection, i.e., the felt force of association, subsequent to frequent repetitions of conjoined impressions is the source of the idea of necessity. Habit or custom sufficently accounts for the feeling that everything which begins must have a cause and that similar causes must have similar effects. The arguments which Hume adduced to show that no logically necessary connection between distinct existences can be intuited or demonstrated are among his most signal contributions to philosophy, and were of great importance in influencing the speculation of Kant. Hume explained belief in external existence (bodies) in terms of the propensity to feign the independent and continued existence of perceptual complexes during the interruptions of perception. This propensity is determined by the constancy and coherence which some perceptual complexes exhibit and by the transitive power of the imagination to go beyond the limits afforded by knowledge and ordinary causal belief. The sceptical principles of his epistemology were carried over into his views on ethics and religion. Because there are no logically compelling arguments for moral and religious propositions, the principles of morality and religion must be explained naturalistically in terms of human mental habits and social customs. Morality thus depends on such fundamental aspects of human nature as self-interest and altruistic sympathy. Hume's views on religion are difficult to determine from his Dialogues, but a reasonable opinion is that he is totally sceptical concerning the possibility of proving the existence or the nature of deity. It is certain that he found no connection between the nature of deity and the rules of morality. -- J.R.W.
Husserl noted, however, that even when one's analyses are thus pure, both abstractively and eidetically, one naturally takes it for granted that possible consciousness is possible in some (otherwise indefinite) possible world. That is to say, besides finding "the world" as part of the intentional objective sense posited in the consciousness under investigation, the investigator continues to apprehend this consciousness as essentially worldly, even though he successfully disregards even its possible relations to other worldly objects. At this point, what Husserl considered as the philosophically decisive change in his concept of phenomenology ensues.
Idealists regard such an equalization of physical laws and psychological, historical laws as untenable. The "tvpical case" with which physics or chemistry analyzes is a result of logical abstraction; the object of history, however, is not a unit with universal traits but something individual, in a singular space and at a particular time, never repeatable under the same circumstances. Therefore no physical laws can be formed about it. What makes it a fact worthy of historical interest, is iust the fullness of live activity in it; it is a "value", not a "thing". Granted that historical events are exposed to influences from biological, geological, racial and traditional sources, they aie always carried by a human being whose singularity of character has assimilated the forces of his environment and surmounted them There is a reciprocal action between man and society, but it is always personal initiative and free productivity of the individual which account for history. Denying, therefore, the logical primacy of physical laws in history, does not mean lawlessness, and that is the standpoint of the logic of history in more recent times. Windelband and H. Rickert established another kind of historical order of laws. On their view, to understand history one must see the facts in their relation to a universally applicable and transcendental system of values. Values "are" not, they "hold"; they are not facts but realities of our reason, they are not developed but discovered. According to Max Weber historical facts form an ideally typical, transcendental whole which, although seen, can never be fully explained. G, Simmel went further into metaphysics: "life" is declared an historical category, it is the indefinable, last reality ascending to central values which shaped cultural epochs, such as the medieval idea of God, or the Renaissance-idea of Nature, only to be tragically disappointed, whereupon other values rise up, as humanity, liberty, technique, evolution and others.
Ideal Utilitarianism: See Utilitarianism. Idealization: In art, the process of generalizing and abstracting from specifically similar individuals, in order to depict the perfect type of which they are examples, the search for real character or structural form, to the neglect of external qualities and aspects. Also, any work of art in which such form or character is exhibited; i.e. any adequate expression of the perfected essence inadequately manifested by the physical particular. In classical theory, the object so discovered and described is a Form or Idea; in modern theory, it is a product of imagination. -- I.J.
If the psychologist, having isolated some instance of subjectivity, considers it only as a purely possible example of subjectivity in some possible world, he is effecting a further, so-called eidetic, reduction of the psychic and is in the position to develop an eidetically pure phenomenological psychology or (as Husserl also called it) an eidetic psychological phenomenology. He can discover, not merely empirical types but essential psychic possibilities, impossibilities, and necessities, in any possible world. Moieover, eidetic reduction can be performed, not only on the psychic but also on any other abstractive region of the world, e.g., the physical, the concretely psychophysical, the cultural. We can develop purely eidetic sciences of every material region (material ontologies), an eidetic science of the formally universal region, "something or other" (formal ontology, the formal logic of possible being), and finally in all-embracing science of the essential (formal and material) compossibilities and non-compossibilities in any possible concrete world. An eidetic psychological phenomenology would thus become coordinated in a universal eidetic science of worldly being.
In articles herein by the present writer, the notation λx[A] will be employed for the function obtained from A by abstraction relative to (or, as we may also say, with respect to) x. Russell, and Whitehead and Russell in Principia Mathematica, employ for this purpose the formula A with a circumflex ˆ placed over each (free) occurrence of x -- but only for propositional functions. Frege (1893) uses a Greek vowel, say ε, as the variable relative to which abstraction is made, and employs the notation ε(A) to denote what is essentially the function in extension (the "Werthverlauf" in his terminology) obtained from A by abstraction relative to ε.
inabstracted ::: a. --> Not abstracted.
Incomplete symbol: A symbol (or expression) which has no meaning in isolation but which may occur as a constituent part in, and contribute to the meaning of, an expression which does have a meaning. Thus -- as ordinarily employed -- a terminal parenthesis ) is an incomplete symbol, likewise the letter λ which appears in the notation for functional abstraction (q. v.), etc.
inconscient ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come in collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass.” *Letters on Savitri
". . . in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient — the Inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe — or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat.” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it — ‘an inert Soul with a somnambulist Force".” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient is the last resort of the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
"The body, we have said, is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga :::
"The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the conscient a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the superconscious where all darkness of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal.” The Life Divine
"Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built; they think that these words are only abstract metaphysical jargon flung about by the philosophers in their clouds or laboured out in long and wearisome books like The Life Divine. Letters on Savitri :::
"Is it really a fact that even the ordinary reader would not be able to see any difference between the Inconscient and Ignorance unless the difference is expressly explained to him? This is not a matter of philosophical terminology but of common sense and the understood meaning of English words. One would say ‘even the inconscient stone" but one would not say, as one might of a child, ‘the ignorant stone". One must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. What is true is that the ordinary reader might not be familiar with the philosophical content of the word Inconscient and might not be familiar with the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. But I don"t see how I can acquaint him with these things in a single line, even with the most. illuminating image or symbol. He might wonder, if he were Johnsonianly minded, how an Inconscient could be teased or how it could wake Ignorance. I am afraid, in the absence of a miracle of inspired poetical exegesis flashing through my mind, he will have to be left wondering.” Letters on Savitri
**inconscient, Inconscient"s.**
Induction, complete or mathematical: See Recursion. In esse, in intellects in re: Medieval Latin expressions of which the first signifies, in being, in existence, the second, in the intellect, especially as a general idea formed by the process of abstraction, the third, in a really existing thing outside the mind. One may add that in the matter of is the commonly known signification of the third. -- J.J.R.
Infinite ::: A term meaning that which is not finite. The expression is used sometimes with almost absurdinaccuracy, and is one which in all probability representing as it does imperfect understanding couldnever be found in any of the great religious or philosophical systems of the ancients. Occidental writersof the past and present often use the word infinite as applying to beings or entities, such as in theexpression "an infinite personal deity" -- a ludicrous joining of contradictory and disparate words. Theancients rejected the phantom idea that this term involves, and used instead expressions such as theBoundless, or the Frontierless, or the Endless, whether speaking of abstract space or abstract time -- thelatter more properly called unending duration. (See also Absolute)
In Kant: In the strict sense, any generic or class term, exclusive or relational terms or categories. Sometimes, loosely, any general or abstract representation. -- O.F.K.
In logic: Given a relation R which is transitive, symmetric, and reflexive, we may introduce or postulate "new elements corresponding to the members of the field of R, in such a way that the same new element corresponds to two members x and y of the field of R if and only if xRy (see the article relation). These new elements are then said to be obtained by abstraction with respect to R. Peano calls this a method or kind of definition, and speaks, e.g., of cardinal numbers (q.v.) as obtained from classes by abstraction with respect to the relation of equivalence -- two classes having the same cardinal number if and only if they are equivalent.
In Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920, p. 156), Dewey states "When the claim or pretension or plan is acted upon it guides us truly or falsely; it leads us to our end or away from it. Its active, dynamic function is the all-important thing about it, and in the quality of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity. The hypothesis that works is the true one, and truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection of cases, actual, foreseen and desired, that receive confirmation in their work and consequences". The needs and desires which truth must satisfy, however, are not conceived as personal and emotional (as with James) but rather as "public" in some not altogether explicit sense. Although Dewey emphasizes the functional role of propositions and laws (and even of sensations, facts and objects), and describes these materials of knowledge as means, tools, instruments or operations for the transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one in the process of inquiry (Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, N. Y., 1938), he does not clearly deny that they have a strictly cognitive role as well, and he once states that "the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to conceive of both knowledge and practice as means of making goods -- excellencies of all kinds -- secure in experienced existence". (The Quest for Certainty, N. Y., 1929, p. 37.) Indeed, in his Logic (p. 345), he quotes with approval Peirce's definition "truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless inquiry would tend to bring scientific belief, . . ." Here truth seems to be represented as progressive approximation to reality, but usually it is interpreted as efficacy, verification or practical expediency.
In Scholasticism: Until the revival of Aristotelianism in the 13th century, universals were considered by most of the Schoolmen as real "second substances." This medieval Realism (see Realism), of those who legebant in re, found but little opposition from early Nominalists, legentes in voce, like Roscellin. The latter went to the othei extreme by declaring universal names to be nothing but the breath of the voice -- flatus vocis. Extreme realism as represented by William of Champeaux, crumbled under the attacks of Abelard who taught a modified nominalism, distinguishing, howevei, sharply between the mere word, vox, as a physical phenomenon, and the meaningful word, sermo.. His interests being much more in logic than in ontology, he did not arrive at a definite solution of the problem. Aquinas summarized and synthetisized the ideas of his predecessors by stating that the universal had real existence only as creative idea in God, ante rem, whereas it existed within experienced reality only in the individual things, in re, and as a mental fact when abstracted from the particulars in the human mind, post rem. A view much like this had been proposed previously by Avicenna to whom Aquinas seems to be indebted. Later Middle-Ages saw a rebirth of nominalistic conceptions. The new school of Terminists, as they called themselves, less crude in its ideas than Roscellin, asserted that universals are only class names. Occam is usually considered as the most prominent of the Terminists. To Aquinas, the universal was still more than a mere name; it corresponded to an ontologicil fact; the definition of the universal reproduces the essence of the things. The universals are with Occam indeed natural signs which the mind cannot help forming, whereas the terms are arbitiary, signa ad placitum. But the universal is only a sign and does not correspond to anything ontological. -- R.A.
Intellect: (Lat. intellects from intellegere, to understand) The cognitive faculty of the mind as it operates at higher abstract and conceptual levels. -- L.W.
Intellect: The cognitive faculty of the mind as it operates at higher abstract and conceptual levels.
Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics (IGPL) A body of 700 researchers in various aspects of {logic} (symbolic, mathematical, computational, philosophical, etc.) from all over the world. The group's main rôle is as a research and information clearing house. The group also: supports exchange of information about research problems, references and common interest among group members; helps to obtain photocopies of papers; supplies review copies of books through the Journals on which some members are editors; organises exchange visits and workshops; advises on papers for publication; edits and distributes a Newsletter and an electronic Bulletin; keeps an {FTP archive} of papers, abstracts; obtains reductions on group purchases of logic books from publishers. {(http://theory.doc.ic.ac.uk/tfm/igpl.html)}. E-mail: "igpl-request@doc.ic.ac.uk". (1995-02-10)
Intermediate Programming Language "language" A very early attempt by Arthur W. Burks to express machine language at a higher level of abstraction. Like {Plankalkul}, it used a right-handed style of {assignment}, in which the location appears on the right. (1995-05-09)
internationalisation "programming" (i18n, globalisation, enabling, software enabling) The process and philosophy of making software portable to other {locales}. For successful {localisation}, products must be technically and culturally neutral. Effective internationalisation reduces the time and resources required for localisation, improving time-to-market abroad and allowing {simultaneous shipment}. In orther words, internationalisation abstracts out local details, localisation specifies those details for a particular locale. Technically this may include allowing {double-byte character sets} such as {unicode} or Japanese, local numbering, date and currency formats, and other local format conventions. It also includes the separation of {user interface} text e.g. in {dialog boxes} and {menus}. All the text used by an application may be kept in a separate file or directory, so that it can be translated all at once. User interfaces may require more screen space for text in other languages. The simplest form of internationalisation may be to make use of {operating system} calls that format time, date and currency values according to the operating system's configuration. The abbreviation i18n means "I - eighteen letters - N". (1999-06-28)
Internet Foundation Classes "language, library, programming, standard" (IFC) A {library} of {classes} used in the creation of {Java} {applets} with {GUIs}. Created by {Netscape}, the Internet Foundation Classes provide GUI elements, as well as classes for {Applications Services}, {Security}, {Messaging}, and {Distributed Objects}. The IFC code, which is exclusively Java, is layered on top of the Java {Abstract Windowing Toolkit} (AWT), thus preserving {platform independence}. The AWT and IFC collectively form the {Java Foundation Classes}, which provide a standardised framework for developing powerful Java applications. {IFC download (http://wp.netscape.com/eng/ifc/download.html)}. (2003-08-17)
interpreter "programming" A program which executes other programs. This is in contrast to a {compiler} which does not execute its input program (the "{source code}") but translates it into executable "{machine code}" (also called "{object code}") which is output to a file for later execution. It may be possible to execute the same source code either directly by an interpreter or by compiling it and then executing the {machine code} produced. It takes longer to run a program under an interpreter than to run the compiled code but it can take less time to interpret it than the total required to compile and run it. This is especially important when prototyping and testing code when an edit-interpret-debug cycle can often be much shorter than an edit-compile-run-debug cycle. Interpreting code is slower than running the compiled code because the interpreter must analyse each statement in the program each time it is executed and then perform the desired action whereas the compiled code just performs the action. This run-time analysis is known as "interpretive overhead". Access to variables is also slower in an interpreter because the mapping of identifiers to storage locations must be done repeatedly at run time rather than at compile time. There are various compromises between the development speed when using an interpreter and the execution speed when using a compiler. Some systems (e.g. some {Lisps}) allow interpreted and compiled code to call each other and to share variables. This means that once a routine has been tested and debugged under the interpreter it can be compiled and thus benefit from faster execution while other routines are being developed. Many interpreters do not execute the source code as it stands but convert it into some more compact internal form. For example, some {BASIC} interpreters replace {keywords} with single byte tokens which can be used to {index} into a {jump table}. An interpreter might well use the same {lexical analyser} and {parser} as the compiler and then interpret the resulting {abstract syntax tree}. There is thus a spectrum of possibilities between interpreting and compiling, depending on the amount of analysis performed before the program is executed. For example {Emacs Lisp} is compiled to "{byte-code}" which is a highly compressed and optimised representation of the Lisp source but is not machine code (and therefore not tied to any particular hardware). This "compiled" code is then executed (interpreted) by a {byte code interpreter} (itself written in {C}). The compiled code in this case is {machine code} for a {virtual machine} which is implemented not in hardware but in the byte-code interpreter. See also {partial evaluation}. (1995-01-30)
In the foregoing the list of fundamental propositional symbols has been left unspecified. A case of special importance is the case that the fundamental propositional symbols are an infinite list of variables, p, q, r, . . ., which may be taken as representing ambiguously any proposition whatever -- or any proposition of a certain class fixed in advance (the class should be closed under the operations of negation, conjunction, and inclusive disjunction). In this case we speak of the pure propositional calculus, and refer to the other cases as applied propositional calculus (although the application may be to something as abstract in character as the pure propositional calculus itself, as, e.g., in the case of the pure functional calculus of first order (§3), which contains an applied propositional calculus).
In the Ideen and in later works, Husserl applied the epithet "transcendental" to consciousness as it is aside from its (valid and necessary) self-apperception as in a world. At the same time, he restricted the term "psychic" to subjectivity (personal subjects, their streams of consciousness, etc.) in its status as worldly, animal, human subjectivity. The contrast between transcendental subjectivity and worldly being is fundamental to Husserl's mature concept of pure phenomenology and to his concept of a universal phenomenological philosophy. In the Ideen, this pure phenomenology, defined as the eidetic science of transcendental subjectivity, was contrasted with psychology, defined as the empirical science of actual subjectivity in the world. Two antitheses are involved, however eidetic versus factual, and transcendental versus psychic. Rightly, they yield a four-fold classification, which Husserl subsequently made explicit, in his Formale und Transzendentale Logik (1929), Nachwort zu meinen Ideen (1930), and Meditations Cartesiennes (1931). In these works, he spoke of psychology as including all knowledge of worldly subjectivity while, within this science, he distinguished an empirical or matter-of-fact pure psychology and an eidetic pure psychology. The former is "pure" only in the way phenomenology, as explicitly conceived in the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen, is pure: actual psychic subjectivity is abstracted as its exclusive theme, objects intended in the investigated psychic processes are taken only as the latter's noematic-intentional objects. Such an abstractive and self-restraining attitude, Husserl believed, is necessary, if one is to isohte the psychic in its purity and yet preserve it in its full intentionality. The instituting and maintaining of such an attitude is called "psychological epoche"; its effect on the objects of psychic consciousness is called "psychological reduction." As empiricism, this pure psychology describes the experienced typical structures of psychic processes and of the typical noematic objects belonging inseparably to the latter by virtue of their intrinsic intentionality. Description of typical personalities and of their habitually intended worlds also lies within its province. Having acquired empirical knowledge of the purely psychic, one may relax one's psychological epoche and inquire into the extrapsychic circumstances under which, e.g., psychic processes of a particulai type actually occur in the world. Thus an empirical pure intentional psychology would become part of a concrete empirical science of actual psychophysical organisms.
In various mathematical contexts, the term constant will be found applied to letters which should properly be called variables (according to our account here), but which are thought of as constant relatively to other variables appearing. The actual distinction in such cases, as revealed by logistic formalization, either is between free and bound variables, or concerns the order and manner in which the variables are bound by quantifiers, abstraction operators, etc.
jalap ::: n. --> The tubers of the Mexican plant Ipomoea purga (or Exogonium purga), a climber much like the morning-glory. The abstract, extract, and powder, prepared from the tubers, are well known purgative medicines. Other species of Ipomoea yield several inferior kinds of jalap, as the I. Orizabensis, and I. tuberosa.
James, William: (1842-1910) Unquestionably one of the most influential of American thinkers, William James began his career as a teacher shortly after graduation (MD, 1870) from Harvard University. He became widely known as a brilliant and original lecturer, and his already considerable reputation was greatly enhanced in 1890 when his Principles of Psychology made its appearance. Had James written no other work, his position in American philosophy and psychology would be secure; the vividness and clarity of his style no less than the keenness of his analysis roused the imagination of a public in this country which had long been apathetic to the more abstract problems of technical philosophy. Nor did James allow this rising interest to flag. Turning to religious and moral problems, and later to metaphysics, he produced a large number of writings which gave ample evidence of his amazing ability to cut through the cumbersome terminology of traditional statement and to lay bare the essential character of the matter in hand. In this sense, James was able to revivify philosophical issues long buried from any save the classical scholars. Such oversimplifications as exist, for example, in his own "pragmatism" and "radical empiricism" must be weighed against his great accomplishment in clearing such problems as that of the One and the Many from the dry rot of centuries, and in rendering such problems immediately relevant to practical and personal difficulties. -- W.S.W.
Java "programming, language" An {object-oriented}, {distributed}, {interpreted}, {architecture-neutral}, {portable}, {multithreaded}, dynamic, buzzword-compliant, general-purpose programming language developed by {Sun Microsystems} in the early 1990s (initially for set-top television controllers) and released to the public in 1995. Java was named after the Indonesian island, a source of {programming fluid}. Java first became popular as the earliest portable dynamic client-side content for the {web} in the form of {platform}-independent {Java applets}. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s it also became very popular on the server side, where an entire set of {APIs} defines the {J2EE}. Java is both a set of public specifications (controlled by {Oracle}, who bought {Sun Microsystems}, through the {JCP}) and a series of implementations of those specifications. Java is syntactially similar to {C++} without user-definable {operator overloading}, (though it does have {method} overloading), without {multiple inheritance} and extensive automatic {coercions}. It has automatic {garbage collection}. Java extends {C++}'s {object-oriented} facilities with those of {Objective C} for {dynamic method resolution}. Whereas programs in C++ and similar languages are compiled and linked to platform-specific binary executables, Java programs are typically compiled to portable {architecture-neutral} {bytecode} ".class" files, which are run using a {Java Virtual Machine}. The JVM is also called an {interpreter}, though it is more correct to say that it uses {Just-In-Time Compilation} to convert the {bytecode} into {native} {machine code}, yielding greater efficiency than most interpreted languages, rivalling C++ for many long-running, non-GUI applications. The run-time system is typically written in {POSIX}-compliant {ANSI C} or {C++}. Some implementations allow Java class files to be translated into {native} {machine code} during or after compilation. The Java compiler and {linker} both enforce {strong type checking} - procedures must be explicitly typed. Java aids in the creation of {virus}-free, tamper-free systems with {authentication} based on {public-key encryption}. Java has an extensive library of routines for all kinds of programming tasks, rivalling that of other languages. For example, the {java.net} package supports {TCP/IP} {protocols} like {HTTP} and {FTP}. Java applications can access objects across the {Internet} via {URLs} almost as easily as on the local {file system}. There are also capabilities for several types of distributed applications. The Java {GUI} libraries provide portable interfaces. For example, there is an abstract {Window} class with implementations for {Unix}, {Microsoft Windows} and the {Macintosh}. The {java.awt} and {javax.swing} classes can be used either in web-based {Applets} or in {client-side applications} or {desktop applications}. There are also packages for developing {XML} applications, {web services}, {servlets} and other web applications, {security}, date and time calculations and I/O formatting, database ({JDBC}), and many others. Java is not related to {JavaScript} despite the name. {(http://oracle.com/java)}. (2011-08-21)
Kami: (Japanese) Originally denoting anything that inspires and overawes man with a sense of holiness, the word assumed a meaning in Japanese equivalent to spirit (also ancestral spirit), divinity, and God. It is a central concept in the pre-Confucian and pre-Buddhistic native religion which holds the sun supreme and still enjoys national support, while it may also take on a more abstract philosophic significance. -- K.F.L.
knowledge representation The subfield of {artificial intelligence} concerned with designing and using systems for storing knowledge - {facts} and {rules} about some subject. A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a {conceptualisation} - an {abstract} view of the world that we wish to represent. In order to manipulate this knowledge we must specify how the abstract conceptualisation is represented as a {concrete} data structure. An {ontology} is an explicit specification of a conceptualisation. (1994-10-19)
Kundalini or Kundalini-Sakti(Sanskrit) ::: A term whose essential meaning is "circular" or "winding" or "spiral" or "coiling" action, orrather energy, and signifies a recondite power in the human constitution. Kundalini-sakti is derivative ofone of the elemental forces of nature. It works in and through, in the case of man, his auric egg, andexpresses itself in continuous action in many of the most familiar phenomena of existence even whenman himself is unconscious of it. In its higher aspect Kundalini is a power or force following winding orcircular pathways carrying or conveying thought and force originating in the higher triad. Abstractly, inthe case of man it is of course one of the fundamental energies or qualities of the pranas. Unskilled orunwise attempts to interfere with its normal working in the human body may readily result in insanity ormalignant or enfeebling disease.
lambda abstraction A term in {lambda-calculus} denoting a function. A lambda abstraction begins with a lower-case lambda (represented as "\" in this document), followed by a variable name (the "bound variable"), a full stop and a {lambda expression} (the body). The body is taken to extend as far to the right as possible so, for example an expression, \ x . \ y . x+y is read as \ x . (\ y . x+y). A nested abstraction such as this is often abbreviated to: \ x y . x + y The lambda expression (\ v . E) denotes a function which takes an argument and returns the term E with all {free} occurrences of v replaced by the {actual argument}. Application is represented by {juxtaposition} so (\ x . x) 42 represents the identity function applied to the constant 42. A {lambda abstraction} in {Lisp} is written as the symbol lambda, a list of zero or more variable names and a list of zero or more terms, e.g. (lambda (x y) (plus x y)) Lambda expressions in {Haskell} are written as a backslash, "\", one or more patterns (e.g. variable names), "-"" and an expression, e.g. \ x -" x. (1995-01-24)
lambda-calculus "mathematics" (Normally written with a Greek letter lambda). A branch of mathematical logic developed by {Alonzo Church} in the late 1930s and early 1940s, dealing with the application of {functions} to their arguments. The {pure lambda-calculus} contains no constants - neither numbers nor mathematical functions such as plus - and is untyped. It consists only of {lambda abstractions} (functions), variables and applications of one function to another. All entities must therefore be represented as functions. For example, the natural number N can be represented as the function which applies its first argument to its second N times ({Church integer} N). Church invented lambda-calculus in order to set up a foundational project restricting mathematics to quantities with "{effective procedures}". Unfortunately, the resulting system admits {Russell's paradox} in a particularly nasty way; Church couldn't see any way to get rid of it, and gave the project up. Most {functional programming} languages are equivalent to lambda-calculus extended with constants and types. {Lisp} uses a variant of lambda notation for defining functions but only its {purely functional} subset is really equivalent to lambda-calculus. See {reduction}. (1995-04-13)
lambda expression "mathematics" A term in the {lambda-calculus} denoting an unnamed function (a "{lambda abstraction}"), a variable or a constant. The {pure lambda-calculus} has only functions and no constants. (1995-04-13)
Lambda Prolog "language" An extension of standard {Prolog} defined by Dale A. Miller and Gopalan Nadathur in 1986, in which terms are {strongly typed} lambda terms. {Clauses} are {higher order} {hereditary Harrop formulas}. The main novelties are {universal quantification} on {goals} and {implication}. The {Prolog/Mali} compiler compiles Lambda Prolog for the {MALI} abstract memory system. {Teyjus (http://teyjus.cs.umn.edu/)} is an implementation of Lambda Prolog. {Lambda Prolog home (http://cse.psu.edu/~dale/lProlog/)}. Mailing list: lprolog@cs.umn.edu. ["Higher-order logic programming", Miller D.A. and Nadathur G., 3rd International Conference on Logic Programming, pp 448-462, London 1986]. [Nadathur G. "A Higher-Order Logic as a Basis for Logic Programming", Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1987]. (2002-10-15)
Language for the On-Line Investigation and Transformation of Abstractions "language" (LOLITA) An extension of the {Culler-Fried System} for {symbolic mathematics}. ["An On- line Symbol Manipulation System", F.W. Blackwell, Proc ACM 22nd Natl Conf, 1967]. [Sammet 1969, p. 464]. (2003-07-29)
language-sensitive editor An editor that is aware of the syntactic, semantic and in some cases the structural rules of a specific programming language and provides a framework for the user to enter {source code}. Programs or changes to previously stored programs are incrementally {parsed} into an {abstract syntax tree} and automatically checked for correctness. (1995-02-15)
LARCH/CLU "language, specification" The {Larch} specification language for {CLU}. Used in "Abstraction and Specification in Program Development", B. Liskov & J. Guttag, MIT Press 1986. (1996-01-02)
laving ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Lave ::: v. i. --> Being alive; having life; as, a living creature.
Active; lively; vigorous; -- said esp. of states of the mind, and sometimes of abstract things; as, a living faith; a living principle.
lclint "tool, programming" A lint-like {ANSI C} source checker from {MIT}. If formal specifications are supplied (in a separate file), lclint can do more powerful checking to detect inconsistencies between specifications and code. Adding specifications enables further checking, types can be defined as {abstract} and lclint can detect inconsistent use of {global variables}; undocumented modification of client-visible state; inconsistent use of an uninitialised {formal parameter}; or failure to initialise an actual parameter. {(http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/larch/lclint.html)}. (1995-05-11)
lenient evaluation "reduction" An {evaluation strategy}, described in [Traub, FPCA 89], under which all {redex}es are evaluated in parallel except inside the arms of conditionals and inside {lambda abstractions}. Lenient evaluation is an example of an {eager} evaluation strategy. (2004-01-22)
levels ::: A level is a general measure of higher and lower. While the terms “structures,” “stages,” and “waves” are sometimes loosely used to refer to “levels,” each term has their own important nuances. Any specific level has an actual structure. Levels tend to unfold in a sequence and thus progress through stages. Finally, levels are not rigidly separated from each other but are rather fluid and overlapping waves. In short, levels are abstract measures that represent fluid yet qualitatively distinct classes of recurrent patterns within developmental lines. Some examples include egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, planetcentric, and Kosmocentric.
Lewis, Clarence Irving: (1883-) Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. In Logic, Lewis has originated and defended strict implication (q.v.) in contrast to material implication, urging that formal inference should be based on a relation which can be known to hold without knowing what is true or false of this particular universe. See his Survey of Symbolic Logic, and his and C. H. Langford's Symbolic Logic, esp. Ch. VIII. Lewis has argued also for "queer logics", that is, abstract systems somewhat different from the abstract system usually interpreted as logic. Lewis raises the question how "queer" a system can be and still be interpretable properly as a system of logic.
Liskov substitution principle "programming, theory" (LSP) The principle that {object-oriented} {functions} that use {pointers} or references to a {base class} must be able to use {objects} of a {derived class} without knowing it. {Barbara Liskov} first wrote it as follows: If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behaviour of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a {subtype} of T. A function that violates the LSP uses a reference to a base class and must know about all the derivatives of that base class. Such a function violates the {open/closed principle} because it must be modified whenever a new derivative of the base class is created. [Liskov, B. Data Abstraction and Hierarchy, SIGPLAN Notices. 23(5), May 1988]. (2001-09-14)
list comprehension "functional programming" An expression in a {functional language} denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in {Haskell}: [ (x,y) | x "- [1 .. 6], y "- [1 .. x], x+y " 10] This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y "= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "{syntactic sugar}" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: filter p (concat (map (\ x -" map (\ y -" (x,y)) [1..x]) [1..6])) where p (x,y) = x+y " 10 According to a note by Rishiyur Nikhil "nikhil@crl.dec.com", (August 1992), the term itself seems to have been coined by Phil Wadler circa 1983-5, although the programming construct itself goes back much further (most likely Jack Schwartz and the SETL language). The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "{ZF expressions}", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]). ["The OL Manual" Philip Wadler, Quentin Miller and Martin Raskovsky, probably 1983-1985]. ["How to Replace Failure by a List of Successes" FPCA September 1985, Nancy, France, pp. 113-146]. (1995-02-22)
literalism ::: n. --> That which accords with the letter; a mode of interpreting literally; adherence to the letter.
The tendency or disposition to represent objects faithfully, without abstraction, conventionalities, or idealization.
Locke, John: (1632-1714) The first great British empiricist, denied the existence of innate ideas, categories, and moral principles. The mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Its whole content is derived from sense-experience, and constructed by reflection upon sensible data. Reflection is effected through memory and its attendant activities of contemplation, distinction, comparison in point of likeness and difference, and imaginative recompositon. Even the most abstract notions and ideas, like infinity, power, cause and effect, substance and identity, which seemingly are not given by experience, are no exceptions to the rule. Thus "infinity" confesses our inability to limit in fact or imagination the spatial and temporal extension of sense-experience; "substance," to perceive or understand why qualities congregate in separate clumps; "power" and "cause and effect," to perceive or understand why and how these clumps follow, and seemingly produce one another as they do, or for that matter, how our volitions "produce" the movements that put them into effect. Incidentally, Locke defines freedom as liberty, not of choice, which is always sufficiently motivated, but of action in accordance with choice. "Identity" of things, Locke derives from spatial and temporal continuity of the content of clumps of sensations; of structure, from continuity of arrangement in changing content; of person, from continuity of consciousness through memory, which, incidentally, permits of alternating personalities in the same body or of the transference of the same personality from one body to another.
Logic, formal: Investigates the structure of propositions and of deductive reasoning by a method which abstracts from the content of propositions which come under consideration and deals only with their logical form. The distinction between form and content can be made definite with the aid of a particular language or symbolism in which propositions are expressed, and the formal method can then be characterized by the fact that it deals with the objective form of sentences which express propositions and provides in these concrete terms criteria of meaningfulness and validity of inference. This formulation of the matter presupposes the selection of a particular language which is to be regarded as logically exact and free from the ambiguities and irregularities of structure which appear in English (or other languages of everyday use) -- i.e., it makes the distinction between form and content relative to the choice of a language. Many logicians prefer to postulate an abstract form for propositions themselves, and to characterize the logical exactness of a language by the uniformity with which the concrete form of its sentences reproduces or parallels the form of the propositions which they express. At all events it is practically necessary to introduce a special logical language, or symbolic notation, more exact than ordinary English usage, if topics beyond the most elementary are to be dealt with (see logistic system, and semiotic).
LOLITA {Language for the On-Line Investigation and Transformation of Abstractions}
loss "jargon" Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something is losing. Emphatic forms include "moby loss", and "total loss", "complete loss". Common interjections are "What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that "moby loss" is OK even though **"moby loser" is not used; applied to an abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare {lossage}. (1995-04-19)
LOWL "language" The {abstract machine} for {bootstrapping} {ML/1}, developed by P.J. Brown of the {University of Kent at Canterbury}. ["Macro Processors and Techniques for Portable Software", P.J. Brown, published by Wiley, ISBN 0.471.11005.1]. [Mentioned in "Machine Oriented Higher Level Languages", W. van der Poel, N-H 1974, p. 271]. [What does LOWL stand for?] (1997-11-04)
Main works: De arte combinatoria, 1666 ; Theoria motus concreti et abstracti, 1671 ; Discours de la metaphysique, 1686; Systeme nouveau de la nature, 1695; Nouveaux Essais sur l'entendement humain, 1701 (publ. 1765, criticism of Locke's Essay); Theodicee, 1710; Monadologie, 1714 (letter to Prince Eugene of Savoy). No complete edition of L. exists, but the Prussian Academy of Sciences began one and issued 4 vols. to date. Cf. Gerhardt's edition of L's philosophical works (7 vols., 1875-90) and mathematical works (1849-63), Foucher de Careil's edition, 7 vols. (1859-75), O. Klopp's edition of L.'s historico-political works, 10 vols. (1864-77), L. Couturat's Opuscules et fragments inedits de L., 1903. -- K.F.L.
marbles "jargon" (From the mainstream "lost his marbles") The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system {crash}, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from {backups}, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This {compiler} doesn't even have enough marbles to compile {hello, world}." [{Jargon File}] (1998-05-21)
Matter ::: What men call matter or substance is the existent but illusory aggregate of veils surrounding thefundamental essence of the universe which is consciousness-life-substance. From another point of view,matter or substance is in one sense the most evolved form of expression of manifested spirit in anyparticular hierarchy. This is but another way of saying that matter is but inherent energies or powers orfaculties of kosmical beings, unfolded, rolled out, and self-expressed. It is the nether and lowest pole ofwhat the original and originating spirit is; for spirit is the primal or original pole of the evolutionaryactivity which brought forth through its own inherent energies the appearance or manifestation in thekosmic spaces of the vast aggregate of hierarchies. Between the originant or spirit and the resultant ormatter, there is all the vast range of hierarchical stages or steps, thus forming the ladder of life or theladder of being of any one such hierarchy.When theosophists speak of spirit and substance, of which latter, matter and energy or force are thephysicalized expressions, we must remember that all these terms are abstractions -- generalizedexpressions for hosts of entities manifesting aggregatively. The whole process of evolution is the raisingof units of essential matter, life-atoms, into becoming at one with their spiritual and inmost essence. Asthe kosmic aeons slowly drop one after the other into the ocean of the past, matter pari passu is resolvedback into the brilliant realms of spirit from which it originally came forth. All the sheaths ofconsciousness, all the blinding veils around it, arise from the matter side or dark side or night side ofnature, which is matter -- the nether pole of spirit.
maximal free expression (MFE) A {free expression} is sub-expression of a {lambda abstraction} not containing the {bound variable}. A maximal free expression is a free expression not contained within any other free expression. See {full laziness}.
Meinong, Alexius: (1853-1921) Was originally a disciple of Brentano, who however emphatically rejected many of Meinong's later contentions. He claimed to have discovered a new a priori science, the "theory of objects" (to be distinguished from metaphysics which is an empirical science concerning reality, but was never worked out by Meinong). Anything "intended" by thought is an "object". Objects may either "exist" (such as physical objects) or "subsist" (such as facts which Meinong unfortunately termed "objectives", or mathematical entities), they may either be possible or impossible and they may belong either to a lower or to a higher level (such as "relations" and "complexions", "founded" on their simple terms or elements). In the "theory of objects," the existence of objects is abstracted from (or as Husserl later said it may be "bracketed") and their essence alone has to be considered. Objects are apprehended either by self-evident judgments or by "assumptions", that is, by "imaginary judgments". In the field of emotions there is an analogous division since there are also "imaginary" emotions (such as those of the spectator in a tragedy). Much of Meinong's work was of a psychological rather than of a metaphysical or epistemological character. -- H.G.
“Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built; they think that these words are only abstract metaphysical jargon flung about by the philosophers in their clouds or laboured out in long and wearisome books like The Life Divine.
metaphysical ::: highly abstract or theoretical; abstruse, relating to that which is immaterial or concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth.
metaphysics ::: n. --> The science of real as distinguished from phenomenal being; ontology; also, the science of being, with reference to its abstract and universal conditions, as distinguished from the science of determined or concrete being; the science of the conceptions and relations which are necessarily implied as true of every kind of being; phylosophy in general; first principles, or the science of first principles.
Hence: The scientific knowledge of mental phenomena;
Mind acts by representations and constructions, by the separa- tion and weaving together of its constructed data ; it can make a synthetic constnietlon and see it as a whole, but when it looks for the reality of things, it takes refuge in abstractions — it has not the concrete vision, experience, contact sought by the mystic and the spiritual seeker. To know Self and Reality directly or truly, It has to be silent and reflect some light of these things or undergo self-exceeding and Iransfonnation, and this is only possible either by a higher Light descending into it or by its ascent, the taking up or immcrgcncc of it into a higher Light of e^tence.
Miranda "language" (From the Latin for "admirable", also the heroine of Shakespeare's "Tempest") A {lazy} {purely functional} programming language and {interpreter} designed by {David Turner} of the University of Kent in the early 1980s and implemented as a product of his company, {Research Software Limited}. Miranda combines the main features of {KRC} and {SASL} with {strong typing} similar to that of {ML}. It features terse {syntax} using the {offside rule} for indentation. The {type} of an expression is inferred from the {source} by the {compiler} but explicit type declarations are also allowed. It has nested {pattern-matching}, {list comprehensions} and {modules}. It uses {operator sections} rather than {lambda abstractions}. User types are algebraic, and in early versions could be constrained by {laws}. It is implemented using {SKI combinator} {reduction}. Originally implemented for {Unix}, there are versions for most UNIX-like platforms including {Intel PC} under {Linux}. The {KAOS} operating system is written entirely in Miranda. There are translators from Miranda to {Haskell} {mira2hs (/pub/misc/mira2hs)} and to {LML} {mira2lml (/pub/misc/mira2lml)}. Non-commercial near-equivalents of Miranda include {Miracula} and {Orwell}. {(http://miranda.org.uk/)}. [{"Miranda: A Non Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types" (http://miranda.org.uk/nancy.html)}, D.A. Turner, in Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, LNCS 201, Springer 1985]. [{"An Overview of Miranda" (http://miranda.org.uk/overview.pdf)}, D. A. Turner, SIGPLAN Notices, 21(12):158--166, December 1986]. ["Functional Programming with Miranda", Ian Holyer, Pitman Press 0-273-03453-7]. (2007-03-22)
ML 1. "robotics" Manipulator Language. IBM language for handling robots. 2. Meta Language. R. Milner "rm@lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk" et al, 1973. A {strict} {higher-order} {functional language}. It was the first language to include {polymorphic} typing which was statically-checked. It also had {garbage collection} and a formal {semantics}. It began as the {metalanguage} for the Edinburgh {LCF} proof assistant. (LCF="Logic for Computable Functions") People soon noticed that ML could be a useful general programming language and stand-alone versions were implemented. {Standard ML} (SML) is a descendant of these (and related languages such as {Hope}). The "metalanguage" aspect has long since disappeared from the language itself (although there are some systems that still use it that way). The historical name is now so inappropriate that asking what ML stands for is like asking what {C} or {Unix} stands for. It doesn't stand for anything; it just is. LCF ML was implemented in {Stanford LISP}. Cardelli (1981) implemented ML in {Pascal} using the {Functional Abstract Machine} (FAM). It has been significantly redesigned to produce {Standard ML} and {Lazy ML}. ["A Metalanguage for Interactive Proof in LCF", M.J.C. Gordon et al, 5th POPL, ACM 1978]. (2006-07-21)
MODEF Pascal-like language with polymorphism and data abstraction. "Definition of the Programming Language MODEF", J. Steensgard-Madsen et al, SIGPLAN Notices 19(2):92-110 (Feb 1984).
MODEL "language" A {Pascal}-like language with extensions for large-scale system programming and interface with {Fortran} applications. MODEL includes {generic procedures}, and a "static" {macro}-like approach to {data abstraction}. It produces {P-code} and was used to implement the {DEMOS} {operating system} on the {Cray-1}. ["A Manual for the MODEL Programming Language", J.B. Morris, Los Alamos 1976]. (1996-05-29)
Modern Period. In the 17th century the move towards scientific materialism was tempered by a general reliance on Christian or liberal theism (Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Toland, Hartley, Priestley, Boyle, Newton). The principle of gravitation was regarded by Newton, Boyle, and others, as an indication of the incompleteness of the mechanistic and materialistic account of the World, and as a direct proof of the existence of God. For Newton Space was the "divine sensorium". The road to pure modern idealism was laid by the epistemological idealism (epistemological subjectivism) of Campanella and Descartes. The theoretical basis of Descartes' system was God, upon whose moral perfection reliance must be placed ("God will not deceive us") to insure the reality of the physical world. Spinoza's impersonalistic pantheism is idealistic to the extent that space or extension (with modes of Body and Motion) is merely one of the infinity of attributes of Being. Leibniz founded pure modern idealism by his doctrine of the immateriality and self-active character of metaphysical individual substances (monads, souls), whose source and ground is God. Locke, a theist, gave chief impetus to the modern theory of the purely subjective character of ideas. The founder of pure objective idealism in Europe was Berkeley, who shares with Leibniz the creation of European immaterialism. According to him perception is due to the direct action of God on finite persons or souls. Nature consists of (a) the totality of percepts and their order, (b) the activity and thought of God. Hume later an implicit Naturalist, earlier subscribed ambiguously to pure idealistic phenomenalism or scepticism. Kant's epistemological, logical idealism (Transcendental or Critical Idealism) inspired the systems of pure speculative idealism of the 19th century. Knowledge, he held, is essentially logical and relational, a product of the synthetic activity of the logical self-consciousness. He also taught the ideality of space and time. Theism, logically undemonstrable, remains the choice of pure speculative reason, although beyond the province of science. It is also a practical implication of the moral life. In the Critique of Judgment Kant, marshalled facts from natural beauty and the apparent teleological character of the physical and biological world, to leave a stronger hint in favor of the theistic hypothesis. His suggestion thit reality, as well as Mind, is organic in character is reflected in the idealistic pantheisms of his followers: Fichte (abstract personalism or "Subjective Idealism"), Schellmg (aesthetic idealism, theism, "Objective Idealism"), Hegel (Absolute or logical Idealism), Schopenhauer (voluntaristic idealism), Schleiermacher (spiritual pantheism), Lotze ("Teleological Idealism"). 19th century French thought was grounder in the psychological idealism of Condillac and the voluntaristic personalism of Biran. Throughout the century it was essentially "spiritualistic" or personalistic (Cousin, Renouvier, Ravaisson, Boutroux, Lachelier, Bergson). British thought after Hume was largely theistic (A. Smith, Paley, J. S. Mill, Reid, Hamilton). In the latter 19th century, inspired largely by Kant and his metaphysical followers, it leaned heavily towards semi-monistic personalism (E. Caird, Green, Webb, Pringle-Pattison) or impersonalistic monism (Bradley, Bosanquet). Recently a more pluralistic personalism has developed (F. C. S. Schiller, A. E. Taylor, McTaggart, Ward, Sorley). Recent American idealism is represented by McCosh, Howison, Bowne, Royce, Wm. James (before 1904), Baldwin. German idealists of the past century include Fechner, Krause, von Hartmann, H. Cohen, Natorp, Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey, Brentano, Eucken. In Italy idealism is represented by Croce and Gentile, in Spain, by Unamuno and Ortega e Gasset; in Russia, by Lossky, in Sweden, by Boström; in Argentina, by Aznar. (For other representatives of recent or contemporary personalism, see Personalism.) -- W.L.
module 1. "programming" An independent piece of {software} which forms part of one or more larger {programs}. Different languages have different concepts of a module but there are several common ideas. Modules are usually compiled seperately (in compiled languages) and provide an {abstraction} or information hiding mechanism so that a module's implementation can be changed without requiring any change to other modules. In this respect they are similar to {objects} in an {object-oriented language}, though a module may contain many {procedures} and/or {functions} which would correspond to many objects. A module often has its own {name space} for {identifiers} so the same identifier may be used to mean different things in different modules. [Difference from {package}?]. 2. "hardware" An independent assembly of electronic components with some distinct function, e.g. a RAM module consisting of several RAM chips mounted on a small circuit board. (1997-10-27)
monad "theory, functional programming" /mo'nad/ A technique from {category theory} which has been adopted as a way of dealing with {state} in {functional programming languages} in such a way that the details of the state are hidden or abstracted out of code that merely passes it on unchanged. A monad has three components: a means of augmenting an existing type, a means of creating a default value of this new type from a value of the original type, and a replacement for the basic application operator for the old type that works with the new type. The alternative to passing state via a monad is to add an extra argument and return value to many functions which have no interest in that state. Monads can encapsulate state, side effects, exception handling, global data, etc. in a purely lazily functional way. A monad can be expressed as the triple, (M, unitM, bindM) where M is a function on types and (using {Haskell} notation): unitM :: a -" M a bindM :: M a -" (a -" M b) -" M b I.e. unitM converts an ordinary value of type a in to monadic form and bindM applies a function to a monadic value after de-monadising it. E.g. a state transformer monad: type S a = State -" (a, State) unitS a = \ s0 -" (a, s0) m `bindS` k = \ s0 -" let (a,s1) = m s0 in k a s1 Here unitS adds some initial state to an ordinary value and bindS applies function k to a value m. (`fun` is Haskell notation for using a function as an {infix} operator). Both m and k take a state as input and return a new state as part of their output. The construction m `bindS` k composes these two state transformers into one while also passing the value of m to k. Monads are a powerful tool in {functional programming}. If a program is written using a monad to pass around a variable (like the state in the example above) then it is easy to change what is passed around simply by changing the monad. Only the parts of the program which deal directly with the quantity concerned need be altered, parts which merely pass it on unchanged will stay the same. In functional programming, unitM is often called initM or returnM and bindM is called thenM. A third function, mapM is frequently defined in terms of then and return. This applies a given function to a list of monadic values, threading some variable (e.g. state) through the applications: mapM :: (a -" M b) -" [a] -" M [b] mapM f [] = returnM [] mapM f (x:xs) = f x `thenM` ( \ x2 -" mapM f xs `thenM` ( \ xs2 -" returnM (x2 : xs2) )) (2000-03-09)
monitor 1. A {cathode-ray tube} and associated electronics connected to a computer's video output. A monitor may be either {monochrome} (black and white) or colour ({RGB}). Colour monitors may show either digital colour (each of the red, green and blue signals may be either on or off, giving eight possible colours: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow) or analog colour (red, green and blue signals are continuously variable allowing any combination to be displayed). Digital monitors are sometimes known as {TTL} because the voltages on the red, green and blue inputs are compatible with TTL logic chips. See also {gamut}, {multisync}, {visual display unit}. 2. A programming language construct which encapsulates variables, access procedures and initialisation code within an abstract data type. The monitor's variable may only be accessed via its access procedures and only one process may be actively accessing the monitor at any one time. The access procedures are {critical sections}. A monitor may have a queue of processes which are waiting to access it. 3. A hardware device that measures electrical events such as pulses or voltage levels in a digital computer. 4. To oversee a program during execution. For example, the monitor function in the {Unix} {C} library enables profiling of a certain range of code addresses. A histogram is produced showing how often the {program counter} was found to be at each position and how often each profiled function was called. {Unix} {man} page: monitor(3). 5. A control program within the {operating system} that manages the allocation of system resources to active programs. 6. A program that measures software performance.
monument ::: 1. A structure, such as a building, pillar, statue or sculpture, erected as a memorial to a person or event, as a building, pillar or statue. 2. Any enduring evidence or notable example of something. 3. An exemplar, model, or personification of some abstract quality. monuments.
moody ::: superl. --> Subject to varying moods, especially to states of mind which are unamiable or depressed.
Hence: Out of humor; peevish; angry; fretful; also, abstracted and pensive; sad; gloomy; melancholy.
mooner ::: n. --> One who abstractedly wanders or gazes about, as if moonstruck.
Morals, Morality ::: What is the basis of morals? This is the most important question that can be asked of any system ofthought. Is morality based on the dicta of man? Is morality based on the conviction in most men's heartsthat for human safety it is necessary to have certain abstract rules which it is merely convenient tofollow? Are we mere opportunists? Or is morality, ethics, based on truth, which it is not merelyexpedient for man to follow, but necessary? Surely upon the latter! Morals is right conduct based uponright views, right thinking.In the third fundamental postulate of The Secret Doctrine [1:17] we find the very elements, the veryfundamentals, of a system of morality greater than which, profounder than which, more persuasive thanwhich, perhaps, it would be impossible to imagine anything.On what, then, is morality based? And by morality is not meant merely the opinion which somepseudo-philosophers have, that morality is more or less that which is "good for the community," based onthe mere meaning of the Latin word mores, "good customs," as opposed to bad. No! Morality is thatinstinctive hunger of the human heart to do righteousness, to do good to every man because it is good andsatisfying and ennobling to do so.When man realizes that he is one with all that is, inwards and outwards, high and low; that he is one withall, not merely as members of a community are one, not merely as individuals of an army are one, butlike the molecules of our own flesh, like the atoms of the molecule, like the electrons of the atom,composing one unity -- not a mere union but a spiritual unity -- then he sees truth. (See also Ethics)
Moreover, it is a serious wide-spread error of interpretation to consider Bergson as an anti-intellectualist. His alleged anti-intellectualism should be considered as a protest against taking the static materialism and spatialization of Newton's conception of nature is being anything but a high abstraction, as a rejection of the extreme claims of mechanistic and materialistic science, as an effort of reason to transcend itself in harmony with the greatest idealistic thinkers, as an effort of thinkers to stress the dynamic nature of reality, and as a persistent criticism of reason, a continuation of the Kantian tradition. His much misread conception of intuition may be viewed as akin to Spinoza's intuitio, to wit: a completion rather than a rejection of reason. -- H.H.
muse ::: n. 1. A state of abstraction or contemplation; reverie. 2. The goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like. musings, musers. *v. 3. To be absorbed in one"s thoughts; engage in meditation. 4. To consider or say thoughtfully. mused, musing. adj. *mused. 5. Perplexed, bewildered, bemused. musing. 6. Being absorbed in thoughts; reflecting deeply; contemplating; engaged in meditation. muse-lipped.
name capture "reduction" In {beta reduction}, when a term containing a {free} occurrence of a variable v is substituted into another term where v is bound the free v becomes spuriously bound or "captured". E.g. (\ x . \ y . x y) y --" \ y . y y (WRONG) This problem arises because two distinct variables have the same name. The most common solution is to rename the bound variable using {alpha conversion}: (\ x . \ y' . x y') y --" \ y' . y y' Another solution is to use {de Bruijn notation}. Note that the argument expression, y, contained a {free variable}. The whole expression above must therefore be notionally contained within the body of some {lambda abstraction} which binds y. If we never reduce inside the body of a lambda abstraction (as in reduction to {weak head normal form}) then name capture cannot occur. (1995-03-14)
Negatively, a repudiation of the intellectualistic persuasion that an adequate solution of the truth problem can be found through an abstract intellectual inquiry. Positively, a view of action as the key to truth, similar to Fichte's view. The true and sound standard of action is an independent spiritual life, independent in bringing the world .and life in accord with its values. Spiritual life grows by the active aid of human cooperation to ever higher dimensions. Spiritual being is achieved by the vital deeds of individuals. (Eucken) -- H.H.
Neo-Idealism: Primarily a name given unofficially to the Italian school of neo-Hegelianism headed by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, founded on a basic distinction that it proposes between two kinds of "concrete universals" (s.v.). In addition to the Hegelian concrete universal, conceived as a dialectical synthesis of two abstract opposltes, is posited a second type in which the component elements are "concretes" rather than dialectical abstracts, i.e. possess relative mutual independence and lack the characteristic of logical opposition. The living forms of Mind, both theoretical and practical, are universal in this latter sense. This implies that fine art, utility, and ethics do not comprise a dialectical series with philosophy at their head, i.e. they are not inferior forms of metaphysics. Thus neo-Idealism rejects Hegel's panlogism. It also repudiates his doctrine of the relative independence of Nature, the timeless transcendence of the Absolute with respect to the historical process, and the view that at any point of history a logically final embodiment of the Absolute Idea is achieved. -- W.L.
Nominalism: (Lat. nominalis, belonging to a name) In scholastic philosophy, the theory that abstract or general terms, or universals, represent no objective real existents, but are mere words or names, mere vocal utterances, "flatus vocis". Reality is admitted only to actual physical particulars. Universals exist only post res. Opposite of Realism (q.v.) which maintains that universals exist ante res. First suggested by Boethius in his 6th century Latin translation of the Introduction to the Categories (of Aristotle) by Porphyry (A.D. 233-304). Porphyry had raised the question of how Aristotle was to be interpreted on this score, and had decided the question in favor of what was later called nominalism. The doctrine did not receive any prominence until applied to the Sacrament of the Eucharist by Berengar in the 11th century. Berengar was the first scholastic to insist upon the evidence of his senses when examining the nature of the Eucharist. Shortly after, Roscellinus, who had broadened the doctrine to the denial of the reality of all universals and the assertion of the sole reality of physical particulars, was forced by the Council of Soissons to recant. Thereafter, despite Abelard's unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the doctrine with realism by finding a half-way position between the two, nominalism was not again explicitly held until William of Occam (1280-1349) revived it and attempted to defend it within the limits allowed by Church dogma. In the first frankly nominalistic system Occam distinguished between the real and the grammatical meanings of terms or universal. He assigned a real status to universals in the mind, and thus was the first to see that nominalism can have a subjective as well as an objective aspect. He maintained that to our intellects, however, everything real must be some particular individual thing. After Occam, nominalism as an explicitly held doctrine disappeared until recently, when it has been restated in certain branches of Logical Positivism. -- J.K.F.
“Non-Being is only a word. When we examine the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better chance than the infinite Self of being more than an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive conception. And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time.” The Life Divine
Non-Being / Non-Existence ::: Non-Being is only a word. When we examine the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better chance than the infinite Self of beingmore than an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive conception.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 32
non-Being ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Non-Being is only a word. When we examine the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better chance than the infinite Self of being more than an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive conception. And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time.” The Life Divine ::: Non-Being"s, Non-being"s, non-being, non-being"s,
notional ::: a. --> Consisting of, or conveying, notions or ideas; expressing abstract conceptions.
Existing in idea only; visionary; whimsical.
Given to foolish or visionary expectations; whimsical; fanciful; as, a notional man.
OATH Object-oriented Abstract Type Hierarchy, a class library for C++ from {Texas Instruments}.
objectfuscated code "humour, programming" {Object-oriented} code which has been abstracted to so many levels that no-one can understand it anymore. A play on {obfuscated code}. [{Dodgy Coder (http://www.dodgycoder.net/2011/11/yoda-conditions-pokemon-exception.html)}]. (2014-08-01)
Objecting to Fichte, his master's method of deducing everything from a single, all-embracing principle, he obstinately adhered to the axiom that everything is what it is, the principle of identity. He also departed from him in the principle of idealism and freedom. As nnn is not free in the sense of possessing a principle independent of the environment, he reverted to the Kantian doctrine that behind and underlying the world of appearance there is a plurality of real things in themselves that are independent of the operations of mind upon them. Deserving credit for having developed the realism that was latent in Kant's philosophy, he conceived the ''reals" so as to do away with the contradictions in the concepts of experience. The necessity for assuming a plurality of "reals" arises as a result of removing the contradictions in our experiences of change and of things possessing several qualities. Herbart calls the method he applies to the resolution of the contradictions existing between the empirically derived concepts, the method of relations, that is the accidental relation between the different "reals" is a question of thought only, and inessential for the "reals" themselves. It is the changes in these relations that form the process of change in the world of experience. Nothing can be ultimately real of which two contradictory predicates can be asserted. To predicate unity and multiplicity of an object is to predicate contradictions. Hence ultimate reality must be absolutely unitary and also without change. The metaphysically interpreted abstract law of contradiction was therefore central in his system. Incapability of knowing the proper nature of these "reals" equals the inability of knowing whether they are spiritual or material. Although he conceived in his system that the "reals" are analogous with our own inner states, yet his view of the "reals" accords better with materialistic atomism. The "reals" are simple and unchangeable in nature.
Objective CAML "language" (Originally "CAML" - Categorical Abstract Machine Language) A version of {ML} by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel Mauny and others of {INRIA}. CAML is intermediate between {LCF ML} and {SML} [in what sense?]. It has {first-class} functions, {static type inference} with {polymorphic} types, user-defined {variant types} and {product types}, and {pattern matching}. It is built on a proprietary run-time system. The CAML V3.1 implementation added {lazy} and {mutable} data structures, a "{grammar}" mechanism for interfacing with the {Yacc} {parser generator}, {pretty-printing} tools, high-performance {arbitrary-precision} arithmetic, and a complete library. in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new implementation called {CAML Light}, freeing the previous implementation from too many experimental high-level features, and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end. Following the addition of a {native-code} compiler and a powerful {module} system in 1995 and of the {object} and {class} layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to Objective CAML. In 2000, Jacques Garrigue added labeled and optional arguments and anonymous variants. {Objective CAML Home (http://ocaml.org/)}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.ml}. ["The CAML Reference Manual", P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS, 1989]. (2002-05-21)
object-oriented programming "programming" (OOP) The use of a class of programming languages and techniques based on the concept of an "{object}" which is a data structure ({abstract data type}) encapsulated with a set of routines, called "{methods}", which operate on the data. Operations on the data can __only__ be performed via these methods, which are common to all objects that are instances of a particular "{class}". Thus the interface to objects is well defined, and allows the code implementing the methods to be changed so long as the interface remains the same. Each class is a separate {module} and has a position in a "{class hierarchy}". Methods or code in one class can be passed down the hierarchy to a {subclass} or inherited from a {superclass}. This is called "{inheritance}". A {procedure} call is described as invoking a method on an object (which effectively becomes the procedure's first {argument}), and may optionally include other arguments. The method name is looked up in the object's class to find out how to perform that operation on the given object. If the method is not defined for the object's class, it is looked for in its superclass and so on up the class hierarchy until it is found or there is no higher superclass. OOP started with {SIMULA-67} around 1970 and became all-pervasive with the advent of {C++}, and later {Java}. Another popular object-oriented programming language (OOPL) is {Smalltalk}, a seminal example from {Xerox}'s {Palo Alto Research Center} (PARC). Others include {Ada}, {Object Pascal}, {Objective C}, {DRAGOON}, {BETA}, {Emerald}, {POOL}, {Eiffel}, {Self}, {Oblog}, {ESP}, {LOOPS}, {POLKA}, and {Python}. Other languages, such as {Perl} and {VB}, permit, but do not enforce OOP. {FAQ (http://iamwww.unibe.ch/~scg/OOinfo/FAQ/)}. {(http://zgdv.igd.fhg.de/papers/se/oop/)}. {(http://cuiwww.unige.ch/Chloe/OOinfo)}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.object}. (2001-10-11)
OBJ Joseph Goguen 1976. A family of declarative "ultra high level" languages. Abstract types, generic modules, subsorts (subtypes with {multiple inheritance}), pattern-matching modulo equations, E-strategies (user control over laziness), module expressions (for combining modules), theories and views (for describing module interfaces). For the massively parallel RRM (Rewrite Rule Machine). ["Higher-Order Functions Considered Unnecessary for Higher-Order Programming", J.A. Goguen, in Research Topics in Functional Programming].
Of quite a different kind are so-called real definitions, which are not conventions for introducing new symbols or notations -- as syntactical and semantical definitions are -- but are propositions of equivalence (material, formal, etc.) between two abstract entities (propositions, concepts, etc.) of which one is called the definiendum and the other the definiens. Not all such propositions of equivalence, however, are real definitions, but only those in which the definiens embodies the "essential nature" (essentia, ουσια) of the definiendum. The notion of a real definition thus has all the vagueness of the quoted phrase, but the following may be given as an example. If all the notations appearing, including ⊃x, have their usual meanings (regarded as given in advance), the proposition expressed by (F)(G)[[F(x) ⊃x G(x)] ≡ (x)[∼F(x) ∨ G(x)]] is a real definition of formal implication -- to be contrasted with the nominal definition of the ¦notation for formal implication which is given in the article Logic, formal, § 3. This formula, expressing a real definition of formal implication, might appear, e.g., as a primitive formula in a logistic system.
One may assert that the human brain, capable of forming ideas, does so not prior to or independently of the rest of the natural world, but in relation to it, moved and stimulated by its manifold content. Ideas reflect things, but the reflection, like everything else, is dialectical, not inert, but active. Ideas grow out of and lead back to things, sometimes very circuitously; things may be reflected fancifully, by abstraction or in new combinations as well as directly. While there is a perfectly objective reality to reflect, the reflection is never perfect: truth is absolute, but knowledge relative.
open/closed principle "programming, theory" A principle used in {OOPL} which states that a {class} must be open and closed where open means it has the ability to be extended and closed means it cannot be modified other than by extension. The idea is that once a class has been approved for use having gone through code reviews, unit tests, and other qualifying procedures, you don't want to change the class very much, just extend it. In practice the open/closed principle simply means making good use of {abstraction} and {polymorphism}. (1997-09-23)
Open Distributed Processing "standard" (ODP) An attempt to standardise an {OSI} {application layer} communications architecture. ODP is a natural progression from {OSI}, broadening the target of standardisation from the point of interconnection to the end system behaviour. The objective of ODP is to enable the construction of {distributed systems} in a multi-vendor environment through the provision of a general architectural framework that such systems must conform to. One of the cornerstones of this framework is a model of multiple viewpoints which enables different participants to observe a system from a suitable perspective and a suitable level of {abstraction}. (1995-03-10)
Open Systems Interconnection "networking" (OSI-RM, OSI Reference Model, seven layer model) A model of network architecture and a suite of {protocols} (a {protocol stack}) to implement it, developed by {ISO} in 1978 as a framework for international {standards} in heterogeneous computer {network} architecture. The OSI architecture is split between seven {layers}, from lowest to highest: 1 {physical layer}, 2 {data link layer}, 3 {network layer}, 4 {transport layer}, 5 {session layer}, 6 {presentation layer}, 7 {application layer}. Each layer uses the layer immediately below it and provides a service to the layer above. In some implementations a layer may itself be composed of sub-layers. OSI is the umbrella name for a series of non-proprietary protocols and specifications, comprising, among others, the OSI Reference Model, ASN.1 ({Abstract Syntax Notation 1}), BER ({Basic Encoding Rules}), {CMIP} and {CMIS} (Common Management Information Protocol and Services), {X.400} (Message Handling System, or MHS), {X.500} (Directory Service), {Z39.50} (search and retrieval protocol used by {WAIS}), and many others. Apart from its actual application to real protocols, it also serves as a useful teaching model. (2004-02-13)
O'small "language" A small, concise, formally defined {object-oriented} language intended for teaching, by Andreas Hense "ahense@ahense.de". O'small requires {sml-yacc}, {sml-lex} and {sml-noshare}. Binaries are provided for {SPARC} and it is probably portable to other {Unix} systems. There is also an {interpreter} in {Miranda}. {(http://ahense.de/)}. [Christoph Boeschen, "Christmas - An abstract machine for O'small". Master's thesis, Universit"at des Saarlandes, Fachbereich, 1993-06-14]. (2001-02-11)
Other primitive formulas (possibly involving new primitive notations) which may be added correspond to the axiom of choice (q. v.) or are designed to introduce classes (q. v.) or descriptions (q. v.). Functional abstraction (q. v.) may also be Introduced by means of additional primitive formulas or primitive rules of inference, or it may be defined with the aid of descriptions. Whitehead and Russell employ the axiom of infinity and the axiom of choice but avoid the necessity of special primitive formulas in connection with classes and descriptions by introducing classes and descriptions as incomplete symbols.
Packed Encoding Rules "protocol, standard" (PER) {ASN.1} encoding rules for producing a compact {transfer syntax} for data structures described in {ASN.1}, defined in 1994. PER provides a much more compact encoding then {BER}. It tries to represents the data units using the minimum number of {bits}. The compactness requires that the decoder knows the complete {abstract syntax} of the data structure to be decoded, however. Documents: {ITU-T} X.691, {ISO} 8825-2. (1998-05-19)
Paramahamsa: A Sanskrit word, denoting a high adept or master of esoteric science, or an ascetic who has subdued all his physical senses by abstract meditation.
parser "language" An {algorithm} or program to determine the syntactic structure of ("to parse") a {sentence} or string of {symbols} in some language. A parser normally takes as input a sequence of {tokens} output by a {lexical analyser}. It may produce some kind of {abstract syntax tree} as output. A parser may be produced automatically from a {grammar} by a {parser generator} such as {yacc}. A parser is normally part of some larger program, like a {compiler}, which takes the output of the parser and attempts to extract meaning from it in some way, e.g. translating it into another language. (2009-06-26)
PCF A simply typed, {functional language}. ["Fully Abstract Translations Between Functional Languages", J. Riecke, 18th POPL, pp. 245-254 (1991)]. ["LCF Considered as a Programming Language", Theor CS 5:223, 1977]. (1996-01-18)
Peano, Giuseppe, 1858-1932, Italian mathematician. Professor of mathematics at the University of Turin, 1890-1932. His work in mathematical logic marks a transition stage between the old algebra of logic and the newer methods. It is inferior to Frege's by present standards of rigor, but nevertheless contains important advances, among which may be mentioned the distinction between class inclusion (⊂) and class membership (∈) -- which had previously been confused -- and the introduction of a notation for formation of a class by abstraction (q. v.). His logical notations are more convenient than Frege's, and many of them are still in common use.
Pebble A {polymorphic} language. ["A Kernel Language for Abstract Data Types and Modules", R.M. Burstall & B. Lampson, in Semantics of Data Types, LNCS 173, Springer 1984]. (1995-01-26)
personification ::: n. --> The act of personifying; impersonation; embodiment.
A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstract idea is represented as animated, or endowed with personality; prosopop/ia; as, the floods clap their hands.
Plato (427-347 B.C.) recognized the person in his doctrine of the soul, but turned the direction of thought toward dominance by the abstract Idea.
pointillage ::: A word coined by Sri Aurobindo. The suffix age, originally in words adopted from Fr., is typically used in abstract nouns to indicate”aggregate”. Hence, pointillage indicates something made up of minute details; particularized. The root word, pointillism, refers to a method, invented by French impressionist painters, of producing luminous effects by crowding a surface with small spots of various colours, which are blended by the eye.
pointillage ::: a word coined by Sri Aurobindo. The suffix age, originally in words adopted from Fr., is typically used in abstract nouns to indicate "aggregate”. Hence, pointillage indicates something made up of minute details; particularized. The root word, pointillism, refers to a method, invented by French impressionist painters, of producing luminous effects by crowding a surface with small spots of various colours, which are blended by the eye.
Poly/ML "language" {SML} implemented in D.C.J. Matthews's {Poly}, for {Motorola 68020} and {SPARC} by Abstract Hardware Ltd. (1999-11-23)
powerdomain "theory" The powerdomain of a {domain} D is a domain containing some of the {subsets} of D. Due to the asymmetry condition in the definition of a {partial order} (and therefore of a domain) the powerdomain cannot contain all the subsets of D. This is because there may be different sets X and Y such that X "= Y and Y "= X which, by the asymmetry condition would have to be considered equal. There are at least three possible orderings of the subsets of a powerdomain: Egli-Milner: X "= Y iff for all x in X, exists y in Y: x "= y and for all y in Y, exists x in X: x "= y ("The other domain always contains a related element"). Hoare or Partial Correctness or Safety: X "= Y iff for all x in X, exists y in Y: x "= y ("The bigger domain always contains a bigger element"). Smyth or Total Correctness or Liveness: X "= Y iff for all y in Y, exists x in X: x "= y ("The smaller domain always contains a smaller element"). If a powerdomain represents the result of an {abstract interpretation} in which a bigger value is a safe approximation to a smaller value then the Hoare powerdomain is appropriate because the safe approximation Y to the powerdomain X contains a safe approximation to each point in X. (""=" is written in {LaTeX} as {\sqsubseteq}). (1995-02-03)
Pragmatics: The study of the relations between signs and their interpreters in abstraction from relations to their designata or to other signs. A department of Semiotic (q.v.). -- M.B.
pratyahara. ::: abstraction or withdrawal of the mind and senses from their objects in order to still the mind; the absorption of the mind in the supreme consciousness by realising the Self in all objects; the fifth of the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga
precisive ::: a. --> Cutting off; (Logic) exactly limiting by cutting off all that is not absolutely relative to the purpose; as, precisive censure; precisive abstraction.
precis ::: n. --> A concise or abridged statement or view; an abstract; a summary.
prescind ::: v. t. --> To cut off; to abstract.
To consider by a separate act of attention or analysis.
principal type The most general {type} of an expression. For example, the following are all valid types for the {lambda abstraction} (\ x . x): Int -" Int Bool -" Bool (a-"b) -" (a-"b) but any valid type will be an instance of the principal type: a -" a. An instance is derived by substituting the same type expression for all occurences of some {type variable}. The principal type of an expression can be computed from those of its subexpressions by Robinson's {unification} {algorithm}. (1994-12-16)
PROgrammed Graph REwriting Systems "language" (PROGRES) A very high level language based on {graph grammars}, developed by Andy Scheurr "andy@i3.informatik.rwth-aachen.de" and Albert Zuendorf "albert@i3.informatik.rwth-aachen.de" of {RWTH}, Aachen in 1991. PROGRES supports structurally {object-oriented specification} of {attributed graph} structures with {multiple inheritance} hierarchies and types of types (for {parametric polymorphism}). It also supports declarative/relational specification of derived attributes, node sets, binary relationships (directed edges) and {Boolean} {constraints}, rule-oriented/visual specification of parameterised graph rewrite rules with complex application conditions, {nondeterministic} and {imperative programming} of composite graph transformations (with built-in {backtracking} and cancelling arbitrary sequences of failing graph modifications). It is used for implementing {abstract data types} with graph-like internal structure, as a visual language for the {graph-oriented database} {GRAS}, and as a rule-oriented language for prototyping {nondeterministic}ally specified data/rule base transformations. PROGRES has a formally defined {semantics} based on "PROgrammed Graph Rewriting Systems". It is an almost {statically typed} language which additionally offers "down casting" operators for run time checked type casting/conversion (in order to avoid severe restrictions concerning the language's expressiveness). Version RWTH 5.10 includes an integrated environment. [A. Scheurr, "Introduction to PROGRES, an Attribute Graph Grammar Based Specification Language", in Proc WG89 Workshop on Graphtheoretic Concepts in Computer Science", LNCS 411, Springer 1991]. {(ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Unix/PROGRES/)} for {Sun-4}. (1993-11-02)
Prograph "language" A visual {dataflow} programming language and environment from the {Technical University of Halifax}. Prograph is an entirely graphical {visual programming} language, other than for the text of {method} names, and supports the program development process in a highly-interactive fashion. Operation icons are connected by data links through which information flows. It supports {object orientation} via {class}-based {data abstraction} with {single inheritance}. Prograph is available for the {Macintosh}, and soon for Windows and Unix, from {TGS Systems}. (1995-03-31)
Prolog/Mali "language" (PM) {Lambda-Prolog} for the {MALI}-V06 abstract memory system, developed by Pascal Brisset at IRISA, France. There is a compiler which compiles to {C}, a linker, libraries, {run-time system}, and documentation. It runs under {Unix}. {(ftp://ftp.irisa.fr/pm/)}. Mailing list: prolog-mali-request@irisa.fr. E-mail: "pm@irisa.fr". (1992-07-06)
Proposition: This word has been used to mean a declarative sentence (in some particular language); the content of meaning of a declarative sentence, i e., a postulated abstract object common not only to different occurrences of the same declarative sentence but also to different sentences (whether of the same language or not) which are synonymous or, as we say, mean the same thing; a declarative sentence associated with its content of meaning. Often the word proposition is used ambiguously between two of these meanings, or among all three.
pure lambda-calculus {Lambda-calculus} with no constants, only functions expressed as {lambda abstractions}. (1994-10-27)
Quest 1. A language designed for its simple denotational semantics. "The Denotational Semantics of Programming Languages", R. Tennent, CACM 19(8):437-453 (Aug 1976). 2. QUantifiers and SubTypes. Language with a sophisticated type system. Just as types classify values, "kinds" classify types and type operators. Explicit universal and existential quantification over types, type operators, and subtypes. Subtyping is defined inductively on all type constructions, including higher-order functions and abstract types. User-definable higher-order type operators. "Typeful Programming", Luca Cardelli "luca@src.dec.com", RR 45, DEC SRC 1989. Implemented in Modula-3. {(ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/Quest/quest12A.tar.Z)}. 3. "tool, text" A {multimedia} {authoring} system. Quest has been available for {MS-DOS} for some time. Version 3.5 for {Microsoft Windows} was released around March 1995. It features an {Authorware}-style {flowchart} system with an {ANSI-C} {script language}. (1995-04-02)
RAISE Specification Language "language" (RSL) (RAISE = Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering). A wide-spectrum specification and design language developed by {ESPRIT} Project 315 at {CRI} A/S, Denmark. Systems may be modular, {concurrent} and {nondeterministic}. Specifications may be {applicative} or {imperative}, explicit or implicit, abstract or concrete. ["The RAISE Specification Language", RAISE Language Group, P-H 1992, ISBN 0-13-752833-7]. (2007-10-02)
raw mode "operating system" A mode that allows a program to transfer {bits} directly to or from an {I/O} device without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the {operating system}. Systems that make this distinction for a disk file are generally regarded as broken. Compare {rare mode}, {cooked mode}. [{Jargon File}] (2002-04-14)
Realism: Theory of the reality of abstract or general terms, or umversals, which are held to have an equal and sometimes a superior reality to actual physical particulars. Umversals exist before things, ante res. Opposed to nominalism (q.v.) according to which universals have a being only after things, post res. Realism means (a) in ontology that no derogation of the reality of universals is valid, the realm of essences, or possible umversals, being as real as, if not more real than, the realm of existence, or actuality; (b) in epistemology: that sense experience reports a true and uninterrupted, if limited, account of objects; that it is possible to have faithful and direct knowledge of the actual world. While realism was implicit in Egyptian religion, where truth was through deification distinguished from particular truths, and further suggested in certain aspects of Ionian philosophy, it was first explicitly set forth by Plato in his doctrine of the ideas and developed by Aristotle in his doctrine of the forms. According to Plato, the ideas have a status of possibility which makes them independent both of the mind by which they may be known and of the actual world of particulars in which they may take place. Aristotle amended this, so that his forms have a being only in things, in rebus. Realism in its Platonic version was the leading philosophy of the Christian Middle Ages until Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) officially adopted the Aristotelian version. It has been given a new impetus in recent times by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) in America and by G. E. Moore (1873-) in England. Moore's realism has been responsible for many of his contemporaries in both English-speaking countries. Roughly speaking, the American realists, Montague, Perry, and others, in The New Realism (1912) have directed their attention to the epistemological side, while the English have constructed ontological systems. The most comprehensive realistic systems of the modern period are Process and Reality by A. N. Whitehead (1861-) and Space, Time and Deity by S. Alexander: (1859-1939). The German, Nicolai Hartmann, should also be mentioned, and there are others. -- J.K.F.
realism ::: the representation in art or literature of objects, actions, or social conditions as they actually are, without idealization or presentation in abstract form.
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal "humour" Back in the good old days - the "Golden Era" of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that didn't. A real computer programmer said things like "DO 10 I=1,10" and "ABEND" (they actually talked in capital letters, you understand), and the rest of the world said things like "computers are too complicated for me" and "I can't relate to computers - they're so impersonal". (A previous work [1] points out that Real Men don't "relate" to anything, and aren't afraid of being impersonal.) But, as usual, times change. We are faced today with a world in which little old ladies can get computers in their microwave ovens, 12-year-old kids can blow Real Men out of the water playing Asteroids and Pac-Man, and anyone can buy and even understand their very own Personal Computer. The Real Programmer is in danger of becoming extinct, of being replaced by high-school students with {TRASH-80s}. There is a clear need to point out the differences between the typical high-school junior Pac-Man player and a Real Programmer. If this difference is made clear, it will give these kids something to aspire to -- a role model, a Father Figure. It will also help explain to the employers of Real Programmers why it would be a mistake to replace the Real Programmers on their staff with 12-year-old Pac-Man players (at a considerable salary savings). LANGUAGES The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use {Fortran}. Quiche Eaters use {Pascal}. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked how to pronounce his name. He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the {IBM 370} {Fortran-G} and H compilers. Real programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done - they are perfectly happy with a {keypunch}, a {Fortran IV} {compiler}, and a beer. Real Programmers do List Processing in Fortran. Real Programmers do String Manipulation in Fortran. Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in Fortran. Real Programmers do {Artificial Intelligence} programs in Fortran. If you can't do it in Fortran, do it in {assembly language}. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing. STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING The academics in computer science have gotten into the "structured programming" rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the examples they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another - clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000-line programs that WORKED. (Really!) Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000-line Fortran program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won't help you solve a problem like that - it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming: Real Programmers aren't afraid to use {GOTOs}. Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused. Real Programmers like Arithmetic IF statements - they make the code more interesting. Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if they can save 20 {nanoseconds} in the middle of a tight loop. Real Programmers don't need comments - the code is obvious. Since Fortran doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don't have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using {assigned GOTOs}. Data Structures have also gotten a lot of press lately. Abstract Data Types, Structures, Pointers, Lists, and Strings have become popular in certain circles. Wirth (the above-mentioned Quiche Eater) actually wrote an entire book [2] contending that you could write a program based on data structures, instead of the other way around. As all Real Programmers know, the only useful data structure is the Array. Strings, lists, structures, sets - these are all special cases of arrays and can be treated that way just as easily without messing up your programing language with all sorts of complications. The worst thing about fancy data types is that you have to declare them, and Real Programming Languages, as we all know, have implicit typing based on the first letter of the (six character) variable name. OPERATING SYSTEMS What kind of operating system is used by a Real Programmer? CP/M? God forbid - CP/M, after all, is basically a toy operating system. Even little old ladies and grade school students can understand and use CP/M. Unix is a lot more complicated of course - the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week - but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on {UUCP}-net and write adventure games and research papers. No, your Real Programmer uses OS 370. A good programmer can find and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got in his JCL manual. A great programmer can write JCL without referring to the manual at all. A truly outstanding programmer can find bugs buried in a 6 megabyte {core dump} without using a hex calculator. (I have actually seen this done.) OS is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in the programming staff is encouraged. The best way to approach the system is through a keypunch. Some people claim there is a Time Sharing system that runs on OS 370, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they were mistaken. PROGRAMMING TOOLS What kind of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front panel of the computer. Back in the days when computers had front panels, this was actually done occasionally. Your typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever it got destroyed by his program. (Back then, memory was memory - it didn't go away when the power went off. Today, memory either forgets things when you don't want it to, or remembers things long after they're better forgotten.) Legend has it that {Seymore Cray}, inventor of the Cray I supercomputer and most of Control Data's computers, actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Seymore, needless to say, is a Real Programmer. One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of saving some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. The moral of this story: while a Real Programmer usually includes a keypunch and lineprinter in his toolkit, he can get along with just a front panel and a telephone in emergencies. In some companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work in doesn't contain a single keypunch. The Real Programmer in this situation has to do his work with a "text editor" program. Most systems supply several text editors to select from, and the Real Programmer must be careful to pick one that reflects his personal style. Many people believe that the best text editors in the world were written at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for use on their Alto and Dorado computers [3]. Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would ever use a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse. Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems - {Emacs} and {VI} being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor - complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise. It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine. For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary {object code} directly, using a wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its equivalent on non-IBM machines). This works so well that many working programs on IBM systems bear no relation to the original Fortran code. In many cases, the original source code is no longer available. When it comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job - no Quiche Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is called "job security". Some programming tools NOT used by Real Programmers: Fortran preprocessors like {MORTRAN} and {RATFOR}. The Cuisinarts of programming - great for making Quiche. See comments above on structured programming. Source language debuggers. Real Programmers can read core dumps. Compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity, destroy most of the interesting uses for EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Worst of all, bounds checking is inefficient. Source code maintenance systems. A Real Programmer keeps his code locked up in a card file, because it implies that its owner cannot leave his important programs unguarded [5]. THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK Where does the typical Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be sure that no Real Programmer would be caught dead writing accounts-receivable programs in {COBOL}, or sorting {mailing lists} for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking importance (literally!). Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray I supercomputers. Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding Russian transmissions. It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies. Real Programmers are at work for Boeing designing the operating systems for cruise missiles. Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based Fortran programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation - hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter. The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a Pascal program (or a Pascal programmer) for navigation to these tolerances. As you can tell, many of the world's Real Programmers work for the U.S. Government - mainly the Defense Department. This is as it should be. Recently, however, a black cloud has formed on the Real Programmer horizon. It seems that some highly placed Quiche Eaters at the Defense Department decided that all Defense programs should be written in some grand unified language called "ADA" ((C), DoD). For a while, it seemed that ADA was destined to become a language that went against all the precepts of Real Programming - a language with structure, a language with data types, {strong typing}, and semicolons. In short, a language designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real Programmer. Fortunately, the language adopted by DoD has enough interesting features to make it approachable -- it's incredibly complex, includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging memory, and Edsgar Dijkstra doesn't like it [6]. (Dijkstra, as I'm sure you know, was the author of "GoTos Considered Harmful" - a landmark work in programming methodology, applauded by Pascal programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language. The Real Programmer might compromise his principles and work on something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as we know it, providing there's enough money in it. There are several Real Programmers building video games at Atari, for example. (But not playing them - a Real Programmer knows how to beat the machine every time: no challenge in that.) Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because nobody has found a use for computer graphics yet. On the other hand, all computer graphics is done in Fortran, so there are a fair number of people doing graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL programs. THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAY Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works - with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway (although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud). Occasionally, the Real Programmer does step out of the office for a breath of fresh air and a beer or two. Some tips on recognizing Real Programmers away from the computer room: At a party, the Real Programmers are the ones in the corner talking about operating system security and how to get around it. At a football game, the Real Programmer is the one comparing the plays against his simulations printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper. At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts in the sand. At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying "Poor George, he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary." In a grocery store, the Real Programmer is the one who insists on running the cans past the laser checkout scanner himself, because he never could trust keypunch operators to get it right the first time. THE REAL PROGRAMMER'S NATURAL HABITAT What sort of environment does the Real Programmer function best in? This is an important question for the managers of Real Programmers. Considering the amount of money it costs to keep one on the staff, it's best to put him (or her) in an environment where he can get his work done. The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal. Surrounding this terminal are: Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office. Some half-dozen or so partly filled cups of cold coffee. Occasionally, there will be cigarette butts floating in the coffee. In some cases, the cups will contain Orange Crush. Unless he is very good, there will be copies of the OS JCL manual and the Principles of Operation open to some particularly interesting pages. Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calendar for the year 1969. Strewn about the floor are several wrappers for peanut butter filled cheese bars - the type that are made pre-stale at the bakery so they can't get any worse while waiting in the vending machine. Hiding in the top left-hand drawer of the desk is a stash of double-stuff Oreos for special occasions. Underneath the Oreos is a flowcharting template, left there by the previous occupant of the office. (Real Programmers write programs, not documentation. Leave that to the maintenance people.) The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, he prefers it that way. Bad response time doesn't bother the Real Programmer - it gives him a chance to catch a little sleep between compiles. If there is not enough schedule pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only impresses the hell out of his manager, who was despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation. In general: No Real Programmer works 9 to 5 (unless it's the ones at night). Real Programmers don't wear neckties. Real Programmers don't wear high-heeled shoes. Real Programmers arrive at work in time for lunch [9]. A Real Programmer might or might not know his wife's name. He does, however, know the entire {ASCII} (or EBCDIC) code table. Real Programmers don't know how to cook. Grocery stores aren't open at three in the morning. Real Programmers survive on Twinkies and coffee. THE FUTURE What of the future? It is a matter of some concern to Real Programmers that the latest generation of computer programmers are not being brought up with the same outlook on life as their elders. Many of them have never seen a computer with a front panel. Hardly anyone graduating from school these days can do hex arithmetic without a calculator. College graduates these days are soft - protected from the realities of programming by source level debuggers, text editors that count parentheses, and "user friendly" operating systems. Worst of all, some of these alleged "computer scientists" manage to get degrees without ever learning Fortran! Are we destined to become an industry of Unix hackers and Pascal programmers? From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright for Real Programmers everywhere. Neither OS 370 nor Fortran show any signs of dying out, despite all the efforts of Pascal programmers the world over. Even more subtle tricks, like adding structured coding constructs to Fortran have failed. Oh sure, some computer vendors have come out with Fortran 77 compilers, but every one of them has a way of converting itself back into a Fortran 66 compiler at the drop of an option card - to compile DO loops like God meant them to be. Even Unix might not be as bad on Real Programmers as it once was. The latest release of Unix has the potential of an operating system worthy of any Real Programmer - two different and subtly incompatible user interfaces, an arcane and complicated teletype driver, virtual memory. If you ignore the fact that it's "structured", even 'C' programming can be appreciated by the Real Programmer: after all, there's no type checking, variable names are seven (ten? eight?) characters long, and the added bonus of the Pointer data type is thrown in - like having the best parts of Fortran and assembly language in one place. (Not to mention some of the more creative uses for
Reason is a clarified, ordered and organised Ignorance. It is a half-enlightened Ignorance seeking for truth, but a truth which it insists on founding upon the data and postulates of the Ignorance. Reason is not in possession of the Truth, it is a seeker. It is [unable to] discover the Truth or embody it; it leaves Truth covered but rendered into mental representations, a verbal and ideative scheme, an abstract algebra of concepts, a theory of the Ignorance. Sense-evidence is its starting point and it never really gets away from that insecure beginning. Its concepts start from sense-data and though like a kite it can fly high into an air of abstractions, it is held to the earth of sense by a string of great strength; if that string is broken it drifts lazily [in] the clouds and always it falls back by natural gravitation to its original earth basis—only so can it receive strength to go farther. Its field is the air and sky of the finite, it cannot ascend into the stratosphere of the spiritual vision, still less can it move at ease in the Infinite.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 256
redocumentation The creation or revision of a semantically equivalent representation within the same relative abstraction level. The resulting forms of representation are usually considered alternate views intended for a human audience.
reduction (Or "contraction") The process of transforming an expression according to certain reduction rules. The most important forms are {beta reduction} (application of a {lambda abstraction} to one or more argument expressions) and {delta reduction} (application of a mathematical function to the required number of arguments). An {evaluation strategy} (or {reduction strategy}), determines which part of an expression (which redex) to reduce first. There are many such strategies. See {graph reduction}, {string reduction}, {normal order reduction}, {applicative order reduction}, {parallel reduction}, {alpha conversion}, {beta conversion}, {delta conversion}, {eta conversion}. (1995-02-21)
reify To regard (something abstract) as a material thing. (1995-03-07)
remote ::: 1. Located far away; distant in space or time; abstracted. (In lit. and fig. uses.) 2. Removed, as from the source or point of action. 3. Reserved and distant in manner; aloof. remotely, remoteness, remotenesses.
remote ::: superl. --> Removed to a distance; not near; far away; distant; -- said in respect to time or to place; as, remote ages; remote lands.
Hence, removed; not agreeing, according, or being related; -- in various figurative uses.
Not agreeing; alien; foreign.
Not nearly related; not close; as, a remote connection or consanguinity.
Separate; abstracted.
Renaissance: (Lat. re + nasci, to be born) Is a term used by historians to characterize various periods of intellectual revival, and especially that which took place in Italy and Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. The term was coined by Michelet and developed into a historical concept by J. Burckhardt (1860) who considered individualism, the revival of classical antiquity, the "discovery" of the world and of man as the main characters of that period as opposed to the Middle Ages. The meaning, the temporal limits, and even the usefulness of the concept have been disputed ever since. For the emphasis placed by various historians on the different fields of culture and on the contribution of different countries must lead to different interpretations of the whole period, and attempts to express a complicated historical phenomenon in a simple, abstract definition are apt to fail. Historians are now inclined to admit a very considerable continuity between the "Renaissance" and the Middle Ages. Yet a sweeping rejection of the whole concept is excluded, for it expresses the view of the writers of the period itself, who considered their century a revival of ancient civilization after a penod of decay. While Burckhardt had paid no attention to philosophy, others began to speak of a "philosophy of the renaissance," regarding thought of those centuries not as an accidental accompaniment of renaissance culture, but as its characteristic philosophical manifestation. As yet this view has served as a fruitful guiding principle rather than as a verified hypothesis. Renaissance thought can be defined in a negative way as the period of transition from the medieval, theological to the modern, scientific interpretation of reality. It also displays a few common features, such as an emphasis on man and on his place in the universe, the rejection of certain medieval standards and methods of science, the increased influence of some newly discovered ancient sources, and a new style and literary form in the presentation of philosophical ideas. More obvious are the differences between the various schools and traditions which cannot easily be brought to a common denominator Humimsm, Platonism, Aristotelianism, scepticism and natural philosophy, to which may be added the group of the founders of modern science (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo). -- P.O.K.
restructuring The transformation from one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject system's external behaviour (functionality and semantics).
reverse engineering "systems, product, design" The process of analysing an existing system to identify its components and their interrelationships and create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of {abstraction}. Reverse engineering is usually undertaken in order to redesign the system for better maintainability or to produce a copy of a system without access to the design from which it was originally produced. For example, one might take the {executable code} of a computer program, run it to study how it behaved with different inputs and then attempt to write a program which behaved identically (or better). An {integrated circuit} might also be reverse engineered by an unscrupulous company wishing to make unlicensed copies of a popular chip. (1995-10-06)
Ruby "language" 1. A {relational language} designed by Jones and M. Sheeran in 1986 for describing and designing circuits (a {hardware description language}). Ruby programs denote {binary relations} and programs are built-up inductively from primitive relations using a pre-defined set of {relational operators}. Ruby programs also have a geometric interpretation as networks of primitive relations connected by wires, which is important when layout is considered in circuit design. Ruby has been continually developed since 1986, and has been used to design many different kinds of circuits, including {systolic arrays}, {butterfly networks} and arithmetic circuits. {(ftp://ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/misc/ruby/)}. E-mail: "graham@cs.chalmers.se". ["Ruby - A Language of Relations and Higher-Order Functions", M. Sheeran, Proc 3rd Banff Workshop on Hardware Verification, Springer 1990]. (1994-10-27) 2. One of five pedagogical languages based on {Markov algorithms}, used in Higman's report (below). The other languages are {Brilliant}, {Diamond}, {Nonpareil}, and {Pearl}. ["Nonpareil, a Machine Level Machine Independent Language for the Study of Semantics", B. Higman, ULICS Intl Report No ICSI 170, U London (1968)]. (1994-10-27) 3. A fully {object oriented} {interpreted} {scripting language} by Yukihiro Matsumoto "matz@netlab.co.jp". Similar in scope to {Perl} and {Python}, Ruby has high-level {data types}, automatic {memory management}, {dynamic typing}, a {module} system, {exceptions}, and a rich standard library. Other features are {CLU}-style {iterators} for {loop abstraction}, {singleton classes}/{methods} and {lexical closures}. In Ruby, everything is an {object}, including the basic data types. For example, the number 1 is an instance of {class} Fixnum. Current version (stable): 1.6.7, as of 2002-03-01. {Ruby Home (http://ruby-lang.org/)}. {Ruby Central (http://rubycentral.com/)}. ["Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide", David Thomas, Andrew Hunt, Yukihiro Matsumoto pub. Addison Wesley 2000]. (2002-06-19)
samkhya (Sankhya) ::: the analysis, the enumeration and discriminative setting forth of the principles of our being; the abstract and analytical realisation of truth; [considered as one of the six darsanas]; [an adherent of the samkhya school].
Sather "language" /Say-ther/ (Named after the Sather Tower at {UCB}, as opposed to the Eiffel Tower). An interactive {object-oriented} language designed by Steve M. Omohundro at {ICSI} in 1991. Sather has simple {syntax}, similar to {Eiffel}, but it is non-proprietary and faster. Sather 0.2 was nearly a subset of Eiffel 2.0, but Sather 1.0 adds many distinctive features: parameterised {class}es, {multiple inheritance}, statically-checked {strong typing}, {garbage collection}. The compiler generates {C} as an {intermediate language}. There are versions for most {workstations}. Sather attempts to retain much of {Eiffel}'s theoretical cleanliness and simplicity while achieving the efficiency of {C++}. The compiler generates efficient and portable C code which is easily integrated with existing code. A variety of development tools including a debugger and {browser} based on {gdb} and a {GNU Emacs} development environment have also been written. There is also a {class library} with several hundred classes that implement a variety of basic data structures and numerical, geometric, connectionist, statistical, and graphical abstractions. The authors would like to encourage contributions to the library and hope to build a large collection of efficient, well-written, well-tested classes in a variety of areas of computer science. Sather runs on {Sun-4}, {HP9000}/300, {Decstation} 5000, {MIPS}, {Sony News} 3000, {Sequent}/{Dynix}, {SCO} {SysV}R3.2, {NeXT}, {Linux}. See also {dpSather}, {pSather}, {Sather-K}. {(ftp://ftp.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/sather)}. E-mail: "sather-admin@icsi.berkeley.edu". Mailing list: sather-request@icsi.berkeley.edu. (1995-04-26)
Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott: (1864-1937), unwilling to accept the idealism current at Oxford in his day on grounds that it was "absolutist", sought by a metaphysical pluralism not only to account for the unity and multiplicity of things, but also to furnish the basis for evolution theory. His developed philosophical position was generally known as "personal idealism", or "humanism", though it was closely akin to the pragmatism of William James. The kinship may be seen in Schiller's thesis that a theory of knowledge cannot be formed by abstracting from man's total experience, and may be seen further in his advocacy of the "logic of discovery" over the "logic of proof." Main works: Riddles of the Sphinx, 1891; Humanism, 1903; Logic For Use, 1930. -- C.K.D.
Scotism: The philosophical and theological system named after John Duns Scotus (1266? -1308), Doctor Subtilis, a Franciscan student and later professor at Oxford and Paris and the most gifted of the opponents of the Thomist school. The name is almost synonymous with subtlety and the system generally is characterized by excessive criticism, due to Duns Scotus' predilection for mathematical studies -- the influence, perhaps, of his Franciscan predecessor, Roger Bacon, upon him. This spirit led Scotus to indiscriminate attack upon all his great predecessors in both Franciscan and Dominican Schools, especially St. Thomas, upon the ground of the inconclusiveness of their philosophical arguments. His own system is noted especially for its constant use of the so called Scotist or formal distinction which is considered to be on the one hand less than real, because it is not between thing and thing, and yet more than logical or virtual, because it actually exists between various thought objects or "formalities" in one and the sime individual prior to the action of the mind -- distinctio formalis actualis ex natuta rei. e g., the distinction between the essence and existence, between the animality and rationality in a man, between the principle of individuation in him and his matter and form, and between the divine attributes in God, are all formal distinctions. This undoubtedly leaves the system open to the charge of extreme realism and a tendency generally to consider the report of abstract thought with little regard for sense experience. Further by insisting also upon a formal unity of these formalities which exists apart from conception and is therefore apparently real, the system appears to lead logically to monism, e.g., the really distinct materiality in all material things is formally one apart from the abstracting and universalizing activity of the mind. By insisting that this formal unity is less than real unity, the Scotists claim to escape the charge.
Scratchpad I "language" A general-purpose language originally for interactive {symbolic mathematics} by Richard Jenks, Barry Trager, Stephen M. Watt and Robert S. Sutor of {IBM Research}, ca 1971. It features abstract parametrised data types, {multiple inheritance} and {polymorphism}. There were implementations for {VM/CMS} and {AIX}. ["Scratchpad User's Manual", RA 70, IBM (June 1975)]. (1994-12-15)
SCRIPT 1. An early system on the {IBM 702}. [Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May 1959)]. 2. A {real-time} language. ["A Communication Abstraction Mechanism and its Verification", N. Francez et al, Sci Comp Prog 6(1):35-88 (1986)]. (1994-12-01)
SDL Specification and Design Language. Defined by the {ITU-T} (recommendation Z100) to provide a tool for unambiguous specification and description of the behaviour of telecommunications systems. The area of application also includes process control and real-time applications. SDL provides a Graphic Representation (SDL/GR) and a textual Phrase Representation (SDL/PR), which are equivalent representations of the same semantics. A system is specified as a set of interconnected {abstract machines} which are extensions of the {Finite State Machine} (FSM). 1. System Software Development Language. System software for the B1700. "System Software Development Language Reference Manual", 1081346, Burroughs Corp (Dec 1974). 2. Specification and Description Language. {ITU-T}. Specification language with both graphical and character-based syntaxes for defining interacting extended finite state machines. Used to specify discrete interactive systems such as industrial process control, traffic control, and telecommunication systems. Proc Plenary Assembly, Melbourne 14-1988-11-25, Fasc X.1, CCITT. "Telecommunications Systems Engineering Using SDL", R. Saracco et al, N-H 1989. Available from Verilog, MD. (See XDL). 3. Shared Dataspace Language. "A Shared Dataspace Language Supporting Large-Scale Concurrency", G. Roman et al, Proc 8th Intl Conf Distrib Comp Sys, IEEE 1988, pp.265-272. 4. Structure Definition Language. Used internally by DEC to define and generate the symbols used for VAX/VMS internal data structures in various languages. 5. System Description Language. language used by the Eiffel/S implementation of Eiffel to assemble clusters into a system. (see Lace).
Second-Order Lambda-calculus "language" (SOL) A {typed lambda-calculus}. ["Abstract Types have Existential Type", J. Mitchell et al, 12th POPL, ACM 1985, pp. 37-51]. (1995-07-29)
self-involution ::: n. --> Involution in one&
semaphore "programming, operating system" The classic method for restricting access to shared resources (e.g. storage) in a {multi-processing} environment. They were invented by {Dijkstra} and first used in {T.H.E} {operating system}. A semaphore is a {protected variable} (or {abstract data type}) which can only be accessed using the following operations: P(s) Semaphore s; { while (s == 0) ; /* wait until s"0 */ s = s-1; } V(s) Semaphore s; { s = s+1; } Init(s, v) Semaphore s; Int v; { s = v; } P and V stand for Dutch "Proberen", to test, and "Verhogen", to increment. The value of a semaphore is the number of units of the resource which are free (if there is only one resource a "binary semaphore" with values 0 or 1 is used). The P operation {busy-waits} (or maybe {sleeps}) until a resource is available whereupon it immediately claims one. V is the inverse, it simply makes a resource available again after the process has finished using it. Init is only used to initialise the semaphore before any requests are made. The P and V operations must be {indivisible}, i.e. no other process can access the semaphore during the their execution. To avoid {busy-wait}ing, a semaphore may have an associated {queue} of processes (usually a {FIFO}). If a process does a P on a semaphore which is zero the process is added to the semaphore's queue. When another process increments the semaphore by doing a V and there are tasks on the queue, one is taken off and resumed. (1995-02-01)
Sentential function has been used by some as a syntactical term, to mean a sentence (q.v.) containing free variables. This notion should not be confused with that of a propositional function (q.v.), the relationship is that a propositional function may be obtained from a sentential function by abstraction (q. v.) -- A.C.
Server Message Block "protocol" (SMB) A {client/server} {protocol} that provides file and printer sharing between computers. In addition SMB can share {serial ports} and communications abstractions such as {named pipes} and {mail slots}. SMB is similar to {remote procedure call} (RPC) specialised for file system access. SMB was developed by {Intel}, {Microsoft}, and {IBM} in the early 1980s. It has also had input from {Xerox} and {3Com}. It is the native method of file and print sharing for Microsoft {operating systems}; where it is called {Microsoft Networking}. {Windows for Workgroups}, {Windows 95}, and {Windows NT} all include SMB clients and servers. SMB is also used by {OS/2}, {Lan Manager} and {Banyan} {Vines}. There are SMB servers and clients for {Unix}, for example {Samba} and {smbclient}. SMB is a {presentation layer} protocol structured as a large set of commands (Server Message Blocks). There are commands to support file sharing, printer sharing, {user authentication}, resource browsing, and other miscellaneous functions. As clients and servers may implement different versions ("dialects") of the protocol they negotiate before starting a session. The {redirector} packages SMB requests into a {network control block} (NBC) structure that can be sent across the network to a remote device. SMB originally ran on top of the lower level protocols {NetBEUI} and {NetBIOS}, but now typically runs over {TCP/IP}. Microsoft have developed an extended version of SMB for the {Internet}, the {Common Internet File System} (CIFS), which in most cases replaces SMB. {CIFS} runs only runs over TCP/IP. {Just what is SMB? (http://samba.anu.edu.au/cifs/docs/what-is-smb.html)}. {IBM protocols (http://protocols.com/pbook/ibm.htm)}. {Microsoft SMB/CIFS documents (ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/drg/CIFS/)}. (1999-08-08)
set abstraction {list comprehension}
signature 1. A set of function symbols with {arities}. 2. "messaging" (Or sig) A few lines of information about the sender of an {electronic mail} message or {news} {posting}. Most {Unix} mail and news software will {automagically} append a signature from a file called .signature in the user's {home directory} to outgoing mail and news. A signature should give your real name and your {e-mail address} since, though these appear in the {headers} of your messages, they may be {munged} by intervening software. It is currently (1994) hip to include the {URL} of your {home page} on the {web} in your sig. The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an {ASCII} logo or one's choice of witty sayings (see {sig quote}, {fool file}). However, large sigs are a waste of {bandwidth}, and it has been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's prestige on the net. See also {doubled sig}, {sig virus}. 2. "programming" A concept very similar to {abstract base classes} except that they have their own {hierarchy} and can be applied to compiled {classes}. Signatures provide a means of separating {subtyping} and {inheritance}. They are implemented in {C++} as patches to {GCC} 2.5.2 by Gerald Baumgartner "gb@cs.purdue.edu". {(ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/gb/)}. (2001-01-05)
Similarly, a relation in extension may be formed by abstraction from a suitable formula A relative to two particular variables taken in a given order. -- A.C.
Similix An autoprojector (self-applicable partial evaluator) for a higher order subset of the strict functional language Scheme. Similix handles programs with user defined primitive abstract data type operators which may process global variables (such as input/output operators). Version 5.0. Anders Bondorf "anders@diku.dk" conformance: extension of large subset of R4RS Scheme. requires: Scheme ports: Scm, Chez Scheme portability: high E-mail: Anders Bondorf "anders@diku.dk" {(ftp://ftp.diku.dk/pub/diku/dists/Similix.tar.Z)}. (1993-05-18)
SIMULA I "language" SIMUlation LAnguage. An extension to {ALGOL 60} for the {Univac 1107} designed in 1962 by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl and implemented in 1964. SIMULA I was designed for {discrete simulation}. It introduced the {record} {class}, leading the way to {data abstraction} and {object-oriented programming} languages like {Smalltalk}. It also featured {coroutines}. SIMULA's philosophy was the result of addressing the problems of describing complex systems for the purpose of simulating them. This philosophy proved to be applicable for describing complex systems generally (not just for simulation) and so SIMULA is a general-purpose object-oriented application programming language which also has very good discrete event simulation capability. Virtually all OOP products are derived in some manner from SIMULA. For a description of the evolution of SIMULA and therefore the fundamental concepts of OOP, see Dahl and Nygaard in ["History of Programming Languages". Ed. R. W. Wexelblat. Addison-Wesley, 1981]. (1995-03-29)
Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real-Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its self-expression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe. …
Single Electron Tunneling Technology "hardware" A {neural network} hardware concept based on {single electron tunneling}. {Single electron tunneling transistors} have some properties which make them attractive for neural networks, among which their small size, low power consumption and potentially high speed. Simulations have been performed on some small circuits of SET transistors that exhibit functional properties similar to those required for neural networks. {(http://computer.org/conferen/proceed/mn96/ABSTRACT.HTM
Siri An {object-oriented} {constraint language} using a single abstraction mechanism developed by Bruce Horn of {CMU} in 1991. Siri is a conceptual blend of {BETA} and {Bertrand}. It is similar to {Kaleidoscope}. ["Constraint Patterns as a Basis for Object-Oriented Constraint Programming", B. Horn, OOPSLA '92 (Sept 1992)]. (1994-11-04)
sivam &
S-K reduction machine An {abstract machine} defined by Professor {David Turner} to evaluate {combinator} expressions represented as {binary graphs}. Named after the two basic combinators, S and K.
Space: In Aristotle, the container of all objects. In the Cambridge Platonists, the sensorium of God. In Kant: the a priori form of intuition of external phenomena. In modern math., name for certain abstract invariant gioups or set's. See Space-Time. -- P.P.W.
Space-perception: (Lat. spatium) The apprehension of the spatial properties and relations of the concrete objects of ordinary sense perception in contrast to the conceptual knowledge of the abstract spaces of physics and mathematics. Theories of space-perception are: a) nativistic, when they endow the mind with a primitive intuition of space which becomes qualitatively differentiated through sense experience; b) empirical, when they assume that perceptual space emerges fiom the correlation of the spatial features of the different senses. -- L.W.
Space-Time: The four-dimensional continuum including the three dimensions of space (length, width and height) and one of time; the unity of space and time. The concept was first suggested by H. Minkowski and immediately afterward incorporated by A. Einstein into his (special) theory of relativity. The former contended that nothing can exist or be conceived of as physical apart from space-time; for every object must have not only length, width and height, but also duration in time. As a result, a complete description and location of an object must be given in terms of four coordinates. Space-Time is mathematically grounded in world-points, or durationless geometrical points, as the foundation of all four-dimensional measurement; and in world-lines, or geometrical lines cutting across the four dimensions. An enduring geometrical point thus beconus a geometrical line (or possibly a curve) in space-time. Space-Time is physically conceived of as a general structure determined by the relationship among world-events, or four-dimensional events. The universe of four dimensions (the omniverse, as it may be called) includes space with all of its events and objects as well as time with its changes and motions. As such this four-dimensional universe must be changeless and motionless, insofar as things move and change only when taken in abstraction from time, or rather when space and time are regarded as separate.
SPECIAL "language, specification" A specification language, developed at {SRI} around 1976, used to specify the {abstract machines} in {Hierarchical Design Methodology} (HDM). ["SPECIAL - A Specification and Assertion Language", L. Robinson et al, TR CSL-46, SRI, Jan 1977]. (2012-07-08)
SQL "language, database, standard" /S Q L/ An industry-standard language for creating, updating and, querying {relational database management systems}. SQL was developed by {IBM} in the 1970s for use in {System R}. It is the {de facto standard} as well as being an {ISO} and {ANSI} {standard}. It is often embedded in general purpose programming languages. The first SQL standard, in 1986, provided basic language constructs for defining and manipulating {tables} of data; a revision in 1989 added language extensions for {referential integrity} and generalised {integrity} {constraints}. Another revision in 1992 provided facilities for {schema} manipulation and {data administration}, as well as substantial enhancements for data definition and data manipulation. Development is currently underway to enhance SQL into a computationally complete language for the definition and management of {persistent}, complex objects. This includes: generalisation and specialisation hierarchies, {multiple inheritance}, user defined {data types}, {triggers} and {assertions}, support for {knowledge based systems}, {recursive query expressions}, and additional data administration tools. It also includes the specification of {abstract data types} (ADTs), object identifiers, {methods}, {inheritance}, {polymorphism}, {encapsulation}, and all of the other facilities normally associated with object data management. The emerging {SQL3} standard is expected to be complete in 1998. According to Allen G. Taylor, SQL does __not__ stand for "Structured Query Language". That, like "SEQUEL" (and its pronunciation /see'kw*l/), was just another unofficial name for a precursor of SQL. However, the IBM SQL Reference manual for DB2 and Craig Mullins's "DB2 Developer's Guide" say SQL __does__ stand for "Structured Query Language". {SQL Standards (http://jcc.com/sql_stnd.html)}. {An SQL parser (ftp://ftp.ora.com/published/oreilly/nutshell/lexyacc/)} is described in "Lex & Yacc", by Levine, Mason & Brown published by O'Reilly. {The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics (http://mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/)}. ["A Guide to the SQL Standard", C.J. Date, A-W 1987]. ["SQL for Dummies", Allen G. Taylor, IDG Books Worldwide]. (2005-11-17)
SRDL Small {algebraic specification language}, allows {distfix operators}. ["A Constructive Method for Abstract Algebraic Software Specification", H. Klaeren, Theor Computer Sci 30, pp.134-204, 1984].
Stack Environment Control Dump machine (SECD machine) The first {abstract machine} for reducing {lambda-calculus} expressions, invented by P. J. Landin. The machine has four {registers} holding pointers to {linked lists} operated as push-down {stacks} which hold the information required for the evaluation of an expression. The registers point to (1) Stack which holds the arguments of partially evaluated expressions and results of completely evaluated ones, (2) Environment where the current expression being evaluated is stored, (3) Control which holds the machine instructions that manipulate the contents of the four registers that represent the expression being evaluated, (4) Dump on which the state of the machine is temporarily saved during the evaluation of expressions. See also {Lispkit}.
standard semantics The standard interpretation of a term in some language yields the term's standard denotational semantics, i.e. its "meaning". This is usually given by a semantic function which maps a term in the abstract syntax to a point in some domain. The domain is the interpretation of the term's type. The semantic function also takes an environment - a function which maps the free variables of the term to their meaning. We say that a domain point "denotes", or "is the denotation of", a term. A non-standard semantics results from some other interpretation, e.g. an abstract interpretation.
stargasing ::: n. --> The act or practice of observing the stars with attention; contemplation of the stars as connected with astrology or astronomy.
Hence, absent-mindedness; abstraction.
stream 1. "communications" An {abstraction} referring to any flow of data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or receiver, consumer). A stream usually flows through a channel of some kind, as opposed to {packets} which may be addressed and routed independently, possibly to multiple recipients. Streams usually require some mechanism for establishing a channel or a "{connection}" between the sender and receiver. 2. "programming" In the {C} language's buffered input/ouput library functions, a stream is associated with a file or device which has been opened using {fopen}. Characters may be read from (written to) a stream without knowing their actual source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently by the library routines. 3. "operating system" Confusingly, {Sun} have called their modular {device driver} mechanism "{STREAMS}". 4. "operating system" In {IBM}'s {AIX} {operating system}, a stream is a {full-duplex} processing and data transfer path between a driver in {kernel space} and a process in {user space}. [IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03]. 5. "communications" {streaming}. 6. "programming" {lazy list}. (1996-11-06)
structural recursion The process of transforming an expression by expressing its structure as a syntax tree and applying a certain transformation rule to each kind of node, starting from the top. Rules for non-{leaf nodes} will normally return a result which depends on applying the rules recursively to its sub-nodes. Examples include {syntax} analysis, {code generation}, {abstract interpretation} and {program transformation}. (1995-01-11)
Subset-Equational Language (SEL) A {declarative} language for set processing by Bharat Jayaraman with subset and equational program clauses; {pattern matching} over sets (it supports efficient iteration over sets); annotations to say which functions distribute over union in which arguments (for point-wise/incremental computation over sets); defining {transitive closures} through circular constraints (implemented by mixed top-down/{memoisation} and bottom-up strategy); {meta-programming} and simple {higher-order} programming; modest user-interface including tracing. The SEL {compiler}, written in {Quintus Prolog}, generates {WAM}-like code, extended to deal with set-matching, {memoisation}, and the novel control structure of the language. The {run-time system} is written in {C}. {(ftp://ftp.cs.buffalo.edu/users/bharat/SEL2)}. E-mail: Bharat Jayaraman "bharat@cs.buffalo.edu". ["Towards a Broader Basis for Logic Programming", B. Jayaraman, TR CS Dept, SUNY Buffalo, 1990]. ["Set Abstraction in Functional and Logic Programming", F.S.K. Silbermann "fs@cs.tulane.edu" et al, ACM Proc 1989]. (1994-12-15)
Subsistents: Abstract and eternal entities, values, universals in a non-mental and non-physical world. -- H.H.
Such methods of introducing new concepts, functions, etc. as definition by abstraction (q. v.), definition by recursion (q. v.), definition by composition (see Recursiveness) may be dealt with by reducing them to nominal definitions; i.e., by finding a nominal definition such that the definiens (and therefore also the definiendum) turns out, under an intended interpretation of the logistic system, to mean the concept, function, etc. which is to be introduced.
summary ::: a comprehensive and usually brief abstract, recapitulation, or compendium of previously stated facts or statements.
Symbolism: An artistic trend flourishing at the end of the XIXth century in reaction to faith in the beauty of nature, and endeavoring to represent spiritual values by means of abstract signs. -- L.V.
Symbolism: Representation of an entity or idea in terms of another, usually the translation of an abstraction into concrete form.
Syntax-Case "language" A {macro} system for {Scheme} by R. Kent Dybvig "dyb@cs.indiana.edu". It is superior to the low-level system described in the Revised^4 Report ({R4RS}). Pattern variables are ordinary identifiers with essentially the same status as lexical variable names and {macro} {keywords}. The {syntax} is modified to recognise and handle references to pattern variables. Version 2.1 works with {Chez Scheme} and the {Macintosh} port runs under {MacGambit} 2.0 {(ftp://iuvax.cs.indiana.edu/pub/scheme/syntax-case.tar.Z)}. {Macintosh (ftp://maya.dei.unipd.it/pub/mac/gambit/)}. ["Syntactic Abstraction in Scheme", Robert Hieb, R. Kent Dybvig and Carl Bruggeman IUCS TR
syntax directed translation A technique where the structure of a language processor (e.g. a compiler) is based on the structure of the language's {abstract syntax}. There might be one procedure in the translator corresponding to each category in the abstract syntax. That procedure is responsible for processing constructs of that category. Each procedure would call others corresponding to the construct's subconstituents and then combine their results to give the overall result for that construct.
syntax "language" The structure of valid strings in a given language, as described by a {grammar}. For example, the syntax of a binary number could be expressed as binary_number = bit [ binary_number ] bit = "0" | "1" meaning that a binary number is a bit optionally followed by a binary number and a bit is a literal zero or one digit. The meaning of the language is given by its {semantics}. See also {abstract syntax}, {concrete syntax}. (1994-10-31)
Syntax/Semantic Language "language" (S/SL) A high level {specification language} for {recursive descent parsers} developed by J.R. Cordy "cordy@cs.queensu.ca" and R.C. Holt "holt@uwaterloo.ca" at the University of Toronto in 1980. S/SL is a small language that supports cheap recursion and defines input, output, and error token names (& values), semantic mechanisms (class interfaces whose methods are really escapes to routines in a host programming language but allow good abstraction in the pseudo-code) and a pseudo-code program that defines the syntax of the input language by the token stream the program accepts. Alternation, control flow and one-symbol look-ahead constructs are part of the language. The S/SL processor compiles this pseudo-code into a table (byte-codes) that is interpreted by the S/SL table-walker (interpreter). The pseudo-code language processes the input language in recursive descent LL1 style but extensions allow it to process any LRk language relatively easily. S/SL is designed to provide excellent syntax error recovery and repair. It is more powerful and transparent than yacc but slower. S/SL has been used to implement production commercial compilers for languages such as {PL/I}, {Euclid}, {Turing}, {Ada}, and {COBOL}, as well as {interpreters}, {command processors}, and domain specific languages of many kinds. {(ftp://ftp.cs.queensu.ca/pub/cordy/ssl)}. ["Specification of S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language", J.R. Cordy and R.C. Holt, Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, 1980]. ["An Introduction to S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language", R.C. Holt, J.R. Cordy, and D.B. Wortman; ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Vol 4, No. 2, April 1982, pp 149-178]. ["Hierarchic Syntax Error Repair", D.T. Barnard and R.C. Holt, International Journal of Computing and Information Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 4, August 1982, Pages 231-258.] (2003-10-30)
syntax tree "mathematics, theory, language" A {tree} representing the {abstract syntax} of some {tokens} in a {language}. (1998-11-12)
Tattva: A Sanskrit term, literally meaning thatness or whatness; one of the principles ranging from abstract factors of conscious life to relations and laws governing natural facts. The Trika (q.v.) knows 36 tattvas which come into play when the universe “unfolds,” i.e., is created by Shiva in an act variously symbolized by the awakening of his mind, or a “shining forth” (see abhasa).
Tattva: (Skr.) "Thatness", "whatness", one of the principles ranging from abstract factors of conscious life to relations and laws governing natural facts. The Trika (q.v.). knows 36 tattvas which come into play when the universe "unfolds", i.e., is created by Shiva in an act variously symbolized by the awakening of his mind, or a "shining forth" (see abhasea). -- K.F.L.
Tbl 1. A language by M.E. Lesk for formatting tables, implemented as a {preprocessor} to {nroff}. (1994-11-01) 2. Table Building Language. A simple language by Robert Freiburghouse of {MIT} which combines user-defined actions into an {abstract machine}. It can be used to build table-driven predictive {parsers} and {code generators} in the {MULTICS} {Fortran} compiler and several {PL/I} compilers, including {VAX}-11 PL/I. ["Engineering A Compiler: VAX-11 Code Generation and Optimisation", P. Anklam et al, Digital Press 1977]. (1994-11-01)
Tcode Intermediate language used by the Spineless Tagless G-machine (an abstract machine based on graph reduction) designed as a target for compilation of non-strict functional languages. "The Spineless tagless G- machine", S. Peyton Jones et al, Fourth Intl Conf Func Prog Langs and Comp Arch pp.184-201, ACM Sept 1989.
TDF "language" An {intermediate language}, a close relative of {ANDF}. A TDF program is an {ASCII} stream describing an {abstract syntax tree}. TDF became part of {TenDRA} in abut 2001. ["TDF Specification", Defence Research Agency/Electronics Division, Great Malvern, England, +44 684 895314]. (2003-05-13)
T-gen A general-purpose {object-oriented} tool for the automatic generation of string-to-{object} translators. It was written in {Smalltalk} by Justin Graver "graver@comm.mot.com" and runs in the Smalltalk programming environment. T-gen supports the generation of both {top-down parsers} ({LL parsers}) and {bottom-up parsers} ({LR parsers}), which will automatically generate {derivation trees}, {abstract syntax trees} or arbitrary {Smalltalk} {objects}. The simple specification {syntax} and {graphical user interface} are intended to enhance the learning, comprehension and usefulness of T-gen. Runs on {Smalltalk-80}, {ParcPlace Objectworks}/{Smalltalk 4.0} or 4.1. {(ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/st80_r41/T-gen2.1/)}. (1992-10-18)
"The Divine is a Being and not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity; . . . .” The Synthesis of Yoga
“The Divine is a Being and not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity; …” The Synthesis of Yoga
The immediate inferences not involving obversion can be represented as valid inferences in the functional calculus of first order, but obversion can be to represented only in an extended calculus embracing functional abstraction (q. v.). For the p used above in describing obversion is, in terms of abstraction, λx[∼P(x)]. F. Ueberweg, System der Logik, 4th edn., Bonn, 1874.
“The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come in collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass.” Letters on Savitri
The intellectual thought
refines and sublimates to a r
refied abstractness; the supramental thought as it rises in its height increases to a greater spiritual concreteness. The thought of the intellect presents itself to us as an abstraction from something seized by the mind sense and is as if supported in a void and subtle air of mind by an intangible force of the intelligence. It has to resort to a use of the mind’s power of image if it wishes to make itself more concretely felt and seen by the soul sense and soul vision. The supramental thought on the contrary presents always the idea as a luminous substance of being, luminous stuff of consciousness taking significative thought form and it th
refore creates no such sense of a gulf between the idea and the real as we are liable to feel in the mind, but is itself a reality, it is realidea and the body of a reality.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 835
"The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations.” Letters on Savitri
“The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations.” Letters on Savitri
the opposites of its own truths of being ::: an abyss of non-existence,24 a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence [saccidananda] can manifest themselves"; (same as asat brahma)"something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe", not a mere negation but "a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions".
Theory: (Gr. theoria, viewing) The hypothetical universal aspect of anything. For Plato, a contemplated truth. For Aristotle, pure knowledge as opposed to the practical. An abstraction from practice. The principle from which practice proceeds. Opposite of practice. -- J.K.F. Hypothesis. More loosely: supposition, whatever is problematic, verifiable but not verified. (As opposed to practice) systematically organized knowledge of relatively high generality. (See "the theory of light"). (As opposed to laws and observations): explanation. The deduction of the axioms and theorems of one system from assertions (not necessarily verified) from another system and of a relatively less problematic and more intelligible nature. (Note: Since criteria of what is 'intelligible' and 'problematic' are subjective and liable to fluctuation, any definition of the term is bound to be provisional. It might be advisable to distinguish between laws (general statements in a system), principles (axioms), and theories (methods for deriving the axioms by means of appropriate definitions employing terms from other systems). -- M.B.
theory ::: n. --> A doctrine, or scheme of things, which terminates in speculation or contemplation, without a view to practice; hypothesis; speculation.
An exposition of the general or abstract principles of any science; as, the theory of music.
The science, as distinguished from the art; as, the theory and practice of medicine.
The philosophical explanation of phenomena, either physical
There are two major points of reference for tracing1 the path that Soviet philosophy has taken -- the successive controversies around the issues of mechanism and of idealism. The first began in the early twenties as a discussion centering on the philosophy of science, and eventually spread to all phases of philosophy. The central issue was whether materialism could be identified with mechanism. Those who answered in the affirmative, among them Timiriazev, Timinski, Axelrod and Stepanov, were called mechanistic materialists. Their position tended to an extreme empiricism which was suspicious of generalization and theory, saw little if any value in Hegel's philosophy, or in dialectical as distinguished from formal logic, and even went so far, in some cases, as to deny the necessity of philosophy in general, resting content with the findings of the specific sciences. It was considered that they tended to deny the reality of quality, attempting to reduce it mechanically to quantity, and to interpret evolution as a mere quantitative increase or decrease of limited factors, neglecting the significance of leaps, breaks and the precipitation of new qualities. In opposition to their views, a group of thinkers, led by Deborin, asserted the necessity of philosophic generalizition and the value of the dialectical method in Hegel as a necessary element in Marxian materialism. In 1929, at a conference of scientific institutions attended by 229 delegates from all parts of the country, the issues were discussed by both sides. A general lack of satisfaction with the mechanist position was expressed in the form of a resolution at the close of the conference. However, the Deborin group was also criticized, not only by the mechanists, but by many who were opposed to the mechanists as well. It was felt by Mitin, Yudin and a group of predominantly younger thinkers that neither camp was really meeting the obligations of philosophy. While they felt there was much that was valuable in Deborin's criticism of mechanism, it seemed to them that he had carried it too far and had fallen over backward into the camp of the idealists. They called his group menshevizing idealists, that is to say, people who talked like the Mensheviks, a pre-revolutionary faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. By this was meant that they were unduly abstract, vague and tended to divorce theory from practice. In particular, they seemed to accept Hegelian dialectics as such, overlooking the deeper implications of the materialist reconstruction of it which Marx insisted upon. Moreover, they had neglected the field of social problems, and consequently made no significant philosophic contribution to momentous social issues of the times such as collectivization of the land, abandonment of NEP, the possibility of a Five Year Plan. At a three day conference in 1930, the situation was discussed at length by all interested parties. Deborin, Karev and Sten leading the discussion on one side, Mitin and Yudin on the other. The sense of the meetings was that the criticisms made of the Deborin group were valid.
There is also an analogous process of functional abstraction relative to two or more variables (taken in a given order), which yields a polyadic function when applied to a formula A.
The sort of system which grounds the method is not the sort within which the principle of contradiction obtains. Contradictories cannot be dialectically resolved; between them there is no ground of synthesis. But such systems are abstract, that is, exemplified only in formal deductions; they are lacking in factual content. Dialectical analysis is possible only within systems which are factual, that is, constituted by statements of fact and statements of possibility grounded in fact. Here the principle of contrariety, not the principle of contradiction, obtains; and dialectical analysis is identical with the resolution of contraries. Here, and here alone, is the dialectical method applicable; and it alone is applicable here.
The soul is the principle of all vital actions and, though these vital operations on the biological, sensory and intellectual levels are attributed to various "faculties", these faculties are not really distinct from the essence of the soul. In this life the human intellect cannot operate without the aid of images supplied by sense perception. An intellectual concept of a single individual thing may be formed directly and then a universal concept of the common nature of many sensible things within a class may be developed by the intellect through the process of abstraction. The will is the faculty of rational appetite, it is free in the ultimate choice of its object, which is called a "good." Suarez emphasizes the psychological and moral supremacy of the will. The Suarezian theory of knowledge is what would be called naive realism today.
"The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
“The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 201
Thread Language Zero "language" (TL0) The {instruction set} of the TAM ({Threaded Abstract Machine}), used to implement {Id}. ["Fine-grain Parallelism with Minimal Hardware Support", David Culler et al, SIGPLAN Notices 26(4):164-175, ASPLOS-IV Proc, Apr 1991]. (1995-03-13)
Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist. Bibliography: B. Geyer, Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle, Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter, Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922). --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B. In logic, see Operationism. In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations. 1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events. 2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance. Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning). Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class. The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined. In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations. For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.) For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation. Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes. Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion. For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R. The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .). The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C. G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M. In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established. Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935; El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921; España Invertebrada, 1922; Kant, 1924; La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925; Espiritu de la Letra, 1927; La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929; Goethe desde Adentio, 1934; Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939; Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939; El Libro de las Misiones, 1940; Ideas y Creencias, 1940; and others. Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P
To be an Aristotelian under such extremely complicated circumstances was the problem that St. Thomas set himself. What he did reduced itself fundamentally to three points: (a) He showed the Platonic orientation of St. Augustine's thought, the limitations that St. Augustine himself placed on his Platonism, and he inferred from this that St. Augustine could not be made the patron of the highly elaborated and sophisticated Platonism that an Ibn Gebirol expounded in his Fons Vitae or an Avicenna in his commentaries on the metaphysics and psychology of Aristotle. (b) Having singled out Plato as the thinker to search out behind St. Augustine, and having really eliminated St. Augustine from the Platonic controversies of the thirteenth century, St. Thomas is then concerned to diagnose the Platonic inspiration of the various commentators of Aristotle, and to separate what is to him the authentic Aristotle from those Platonic aberrations. In this sense, the philosophical activity of St. Thomas in the thirteenth century can be understood as a systematic critique and elimination of Platonism in metaphysics, psychology and epistemology. The Platonic World of Ideas is translated into a theory of substantial principles in a world of stable and intelligible individuals; the Platonic man, who was scarcely more than an incarcerated spirit, became a rational animal, containing within his being an interior economy which presented in a rational system his mysterious nature as a reality existing on the confines of two worlds, spirit and matter; the Platonic theory of knowledge (at least in the version of the Meno rather than that of the later dialogues where the doctrine of division is more prominent), which was regularly beset with the difficulty of accounting for the origin and the truth of knowledge, was translated into a theory of abstraction in which sensible experience enters as a necessary moment into the explanation of the origin, the growth and the use of knowledge, and in which the intelligible structure of sensible being becomes the measure of the truth of knowledge and of knowing.
token 1. "grammar" A basic, grammatically indivisible unit of a language such as a {keyword}, operator or identifier. Compare: {lexeme}. 2. "convention" (Or "{pumpkin}") An abstract concept passed between cooperating agents to ensure synchronised access to a shared resource. Such a token is never duplicated or destroyed (unless the resource is) and whoever has the token has exclusive access to the resource it controls. See for example {token ring}. If several programmers are working on a program, one programmer will "have the token" at any time, meaning that only he can change the program whereas others can only read it. If someone else wants to modify it he must first obtain the token. (1999-02-23)
"To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event.” Letters on Savitri*
“To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event.” Letters on Savitri
trance ::: 1. A semiconscious state, as between sleeping and waking; a daze. 2. A hypnotic, cataleptic, or ecstatic state. 3. A state of deep musing or mental abstraction from external things; absorption, exaltation, rapture, ecstasy. trance-bound, trance-claimed, trance-closed, splendour-trance.
transfer syntax "networking, protocol" The actual representation of data as it is transmitted over a {network} (as opposed to {abstract syntax}). (1998-05-19)
Value: The contemporary use of the term "value" and the discipline now known as the theory of value or axiology are relatively recent developments in philosophy, being largely results of certain 19th and 20th century movements. See Ethics. "Value" is used both as a noun and as a verb. As a noun it is sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete. As an abstract noun it designates the property of value or of being valuable. In this sense "value" is often used as equivalent to "worth" or "goodness," in which case evil is usually referred to as "disvalue." But it is also used more broadly to cover evil or badness as well as goodness, just as "temperature" is used to cover both heat and cold. Then evil is referred to as negative value and goodness as positive value.
VII. Probability as a Physical Magnitude determined by Axioms.. This theory, which is favoured mainly by the Intuitionist school of mathematics, considers probability as a physical constant of which frequencies are measures. Thus, any frequency is an approximate measure of one physical constant attached to an event and to a set of trials: this constant is the probability of that event over the set of trials. As the observed frequencies differ little for large numbers of trials from their corresponding probabilities, some obvious properties of frequencies may be extended to probabilities. This is done without proceeding to the limit, but through general approximation as in the case of physical magnitudes. These properties are not constructed (as in the axiomatization of Mises), but simply described as such, they form a set of axioms defining probability. The classical postulates involved in the treatises of Laplace, Bertrand or Poincare have been modified in this case, under the joint influence of the discovery of measure by Borei, and of the use of abstract sets. Their new form has been fully stated by Kolmogoroff and interpreted by Frechet who proposes to call this latest theory the 'modernized axiomatic definition' of probability. Its interpretation requires that it should be preceded by an inductive synthesis, and followed by numerical verifications.
vikalpa. ::: conditioned mind; doubt; wrong concept; imagination; fantasy; mental construct; abstraction
virtual machine 1. An {abstract machine} for which an {interpreter} exists. Virtual machines are often used in the implementation of portable executors for {high-level languages}. The HLL is compiled into code for the virtual machine (an {intermediate language}) which is then executed by an {interpreter} written in {assembly language} or some other portable language like {C}. Examples are {Core War}, {Java Virtual Machine}, {OCODE}, {OS/2}, {POPLOG}, {Portable Scheme Interpreter}, {Portable Standard Lisp}, {Parallel Virtual Machine}, {Sequential Parlog Machine}, {SNOBOL Implementation Language}, {SODA}, {Smalltalk}. 2. A software emulation of a physical computing environment. The term gave rise to the name of {IBM}'s {VM} {operating system} whose task is to provide one or more simultaneous execution environments in which operating systems or other programs may execute as though they were running "on the bare iron", that is, without an eveloping Control Program. A major use of VM is the running of both outdated and current versions of the same operating system on a single {CPU} complex for the purpose of system migration, thereby obviating the need for a second processor. (2002-04-15)
visualised ::: formed mental pictures of things that are invisible or abstract.
WAM Intermediate language for compiled Prolog, used by the Warren Abstract Machine. "An Abstract Prolog Instruction Set", D.H.D. Warren, TR 309, SRI 1983.
Weak Head Normal Form "reduction, theory" (WHNF) A {lambda expression} is in weak head normal form (WHNF) if it is a {head normal form} (HNF) or any {lambda abstraction}. I.e. the top level is not a {redex}. The term was coined by {Simon Peyton Jones} to make explicit the difference between {head normal form} (HNF) and what {graph reduction} systems produce in practice. A lambda abstraction with a reducible body, e.g. \ x . ((\ y . y+x) 2) is in WHNF but not HNF. To reduce this expression to HNF would require reduction of the lambda body: (\ y . y+x) 2 --" 2+x Reduction to WHNF avoids the {name capture} problem with its need for {alpha conversion} of an inner lambda abstraction and so is preferred in practical {graph reduction} systems. The same principle is often used in {strict} languages such as {Scheme} to provide {call-by-name} evaluation by wrapping an expression in a lambda abstraction with no arguments: D = delay E = \ () . E The value of the expression is obtained by applying it to the empty argument list: force D = apply D () = apply (\ () . E) () = E (1994-10-31)
Web Service Definition Language "architecture" (WSDL) An {XML} format for describing network {services} as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either "document oriented" or "procedure oriented" information. The operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services). WSDL is typically used with {SOAP} over {HTTP} but it is extensible to allow description of endpoints and their messages independent of what message formats or network protocols. [Reference?] (2004-06-21)
Whence, in the typical Scholastic or medieval notion, intellect is an immaterial faculty of the soul, that is, its operations are performed without a bodily organ, though they depend on the body and its senses for the material from which they receive their first impulse. Nothing is in the intellect that has not been previously in the senses. The impressions received by the external senses are synthesized by the internal sensus communis which forms an image or phantasm; the phantasm is presented to the intellect by imagination, memory and the vis cogitativa co-operating. The internal senses are conceived as being bound to organic functions of the brain. The intellect operates in a twofold manner, but is only one. As active intellect (intellectus agens) it "illuminates" the phantasm, disengaging there from the universal nature; as passive intellect (int. possibilis) it is informed by the result of this abstractive operation and develops the concept. Concepts are united into judgments by combination and division (assertion and negation). Judgments are related to each other in syllogistic reasoning or by the abbreviated form of enthymeme. Aquinas denies to the intellect the capacity of becoming aware of particulars in any direct way. The intellect knows of them (e.g. when asserting: Socrates is a man) only indirectly by reflecting on its own operations and finally on the phantasm which served as starting point. Propositions, however, have no directly corresponding phantasm. Later Scholastics credit the intellect with a direct knowledge of particulars (Suarez). See Abstraction, Faculty. -- R.A.
While not abandoning its interest in beauty, artistic value, and other normative concepts, recent aesthetics has tended to lay increasing emphasis on a descriptive, factual approach to the phenomena of art and aesthetic experience. It differs from art history, archeology, and cultural history in stressing a theoretical organization of materials in terms of recurrent types and tendencies, rather than a chronological or genetic one. It differs from general psychology in focusing upon certain selected phases in psycho-physical activity, and on their application to certain types of objects and situations, especially those of art. It investigates the forms and characteristics of art, which psychology does not do. It differs from art criticism in seeking a more general, theoretical understanding of the arts than is usual in that subject, and in attempting a more consistently objective, impersonal attitude. It maintains a philosophic breadth, in comparing examples of all the arts, and in assembling data and hypotheses from many sources, including philosophy, psychology, cultural history, and the social sciences. But it is departing from traditional conceptions of philosophy in that writing labelled "aesthetics" now often includes much detailed, empirical study of particular phenomena, instead of restricting itself as formerly to abstract discussion of the meaning of beauty, the sublime, and other categories, their objective or subjective nature, their relation to pleasure and moral goodness, the purpose of art, the nature of aesthetic value, etc. There has been controversy over whether such empirical studies deserve to be called "aesthetics", or whether that name should be reserved for the traditional, dialectic or speculative approach; but usage favors the extension in cases where the inquiry aims at fairly broad generalizations.
While the highest truths or the pure ideas are to the ideative mind abstractions, because mind lives partly in the phenomenal and partly in intellectual constructions and has to use the method of abstraction to arrive at the higher realities, the supermind lives in the spirit and th
refore in the very substance of what these ideas and truths represent or rather fundamentally are and truly realises them, not only thinks but in the act of thinking feels and identifies itself with their substance, and to it they are among the most substantial things that can be.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, , Page: 844-45
Whitehead, Alfred North: British philosopher. Born in 1861. Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1911-14. Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, London, 1914-24. Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. From 1924 until retirement in 1938, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Among his most important philosophical works are the Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (1910-13) (with Bertrand Russell; An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919); The Concept of Nature (1920); Science and the Modern World (1926); Religion tn the Making (1926); Symbolism (1928); Process and Reality (1929); and Adventures of Ideas (1933). The principle of relativity in physics is the key to the understanding of metaphysics. Whitehead opposes the current philosophy of static substance having qualities which he holds to be based on the simply located material bodies of Newtonian physics and the "pure sensations" of Hume. This 17th century philosophy depends upon a "bifurcation of nature" into two unequal systems of reality on the Cartesian model of mind and matter. The high abstractions of science must not be mistaken for concrete realities. Instead, Whitehead argues that there is only one reality, what appears, whatever is given in perception, is real. There is nothing existing beyond what is present in the experience of subjects, understanding by subject any actual entity. There are neither static concepts nor substances in the world; only a network of events. All such events are actual extensions or spatio-temporal unities. The philosophy of organism, as Whitehead terms his work, is based upon the patterned process of events. All things or events are sensitive to the existence of all others; the relations between them consisting in a kind of feeling. Every actual entity is then a "prehensive occasion", that is, it consists of all those active relations with other things into which it enters. An actual entity is further determined by "negative prehension", the exclusion of all that which it is not. Thus every feeling is a positive prehension, every abstraction a negative one. Every actual entity is lost as an individual when it perishes, but is preserved through its relations with other entities in the framework of the world. Also, whatever has happened must remain an absolute fact. In this sense, past events have achieved "objective immortality". Except for this, the actual entities are involved in flux, into which there is the ingression of eternal objects from the realm of possibilities. The eternal objects are universals whose selection is necessary to the actual entities. Thus the actual world is a certain selection of eternal objects. God is the principles of concretion which determines the selection. "Creativity" is the primal cause whereby possibilities are selected in the advance of actuality toward novelty. This movement is termed the consequent nature of God. The pure possibility of the eternal objects themsehes is termed his primordial nature. -- J.K.F.
Windows NT "operating system" (Windows New Technology, NT) {Microsoft}'s 32-bit {operating system} developed from what was originally intended to be {OS/2} 3.0 before {Microsoft} and {IBM} ceased joint development of OS/2. NT was designed for high end {workstations} (Windows NT 3.1), servers (Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server), and corporate networks (NT 4.0 Enterprise Server). The first release was {Windows NT 3.1}. Unlike {Windows 3.1}, which was a graphical environment that ran on top of {MS-DOS}, Windows NT is a complete operating system. To the user it looks like Windows 3.1, but it has true {multi-threading}, built in networking, security, and {memory protection}. It is based on a {microkernel}, with 32-bit addressing for up to 4Gb of {RAM}, virtualised hardware access to fully protect applications, installable file systems, such as {FAT}, {HPFS} and {NTFS}, built-in networking, {multi-processor} support, and {C2 security}. NT is also designed to be hardware independent. Once the machine specific part - the {Hardware Abstraction Layer} (HAL) - has been ported to a particular machine, the rest of the operating system should theorertically compile without alteration. A version of NT for {DEC}'s {Alpha} machines was planned (September 1993). NT needs a fast {386} or equivalent, at least 12MB of {RAM} (preferably 16MB) and at least 75MB of free disk space. NT 4.0 was followed by {Windows 2000}. {Usenet} newsgroups: {news:comp.os.ms-windows.nt.setup}, {news:comp.os.ms-windows.nt.misc}. (2002-06-10)
Windows Open Service Architecture "architecture, library, Microsoft" (WOSA) One of the mainstays of {Microsoft Windows}: the ethos of {abstraction} of core {services}. For each extension, Windows {Open} Services {Architecture} defines an {API} and an {SPI}, as well as a universal interface (usually placed in a single {DLL}) that both comply to. These then {transparent}ly let the {operating system} speak to {device drivers}, {database managers}, and other {low level} entities. These extensions include, among others, {ODBC} (called the "crowning jewel of WOSA"), {TAPI}, {WOSA/XFS}, {SAPI} and {MAPI}, and their supporting services, as well as the abstraction of access to {printers}, {modems}, and {networking services}, which run identically over {TCP/IP}, {IPX/SPX}, and {NetBEUI}. (2000-08-16)
W. V. Quine, Mathematical Logic, New York, 1940. In psychology: the mental operation by which we proceed from individuals to concepts of classes, from individual dogs to the notion of "the dog." We abstract features common to several individuals, grouping them thus together under one name.
X.208 {Abstract Syntax Notation 1}
X.409 "standard, messaging" Part of the {X.400} {electronic mail} specification which included the original definition of {Abstract Syntax Notation 1}. [What was it about?] (1998-08-06)
X.680 "standard" [Is it {Coordinated Universal Time} or {Abstract Syntax Notation 1}?] (1999-12-09)
x, class abstraction with respect to x -- so that x M may be read "the class of x's such that M." An alternative notation, instead of x , is x3.
xy, relation abstraction with respect to x and y -- so that xyM may be read "the relation which holds between x and y if and only if M."
yoga ::: n. --> A species of asceticism among the Hindoos, which consists in a complete abstraction from all worldly objects, by which the votary expects to obtain union with the universal spirit, and to acquire superhuman faculties.
λx, functional abstraction with respect to x -- so that λxM may be read "the (monadic) function whose value for the argument x is M."
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6 Friedrich Nietzsche
6 David Lynch
6 C S Lewis
6 Albert Camus
5 Wassily Kandinsky
1:The Divine is a Being and not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Mystery of Love, #KEYS
2:Hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom. ~ C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, #KEYS
3:An abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
4:The relation between "life" and "to live" is . . . like that between "a race" and "to run," one of which signifies the act in the abstract, and the other in the concrete ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.54.1ad2)., #KEYS
5:Expansion and contraction's mystic act
Created touch and friction in the void,
Into abstract emptiness brought clash and clasp: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.05,#KEYS
6:Its glimmerings lighted with the abstract word
A half-visible ground and travelling yard by yard
It mapped a system of the Self and God.
I could not live the truth it spoke and thought. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Satyavan and Savitri,#KEYS
7:Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells. ~ Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #KEYS
8:The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise. ~ Gabor Mate, #KEYS
9:Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #KEYS
10:States of consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such states of consciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most important and indispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
11:We have in this figure of various psychological levels, each considered as a world in itself, a key to the conceptions of the Vedic Rishis.
And it is the causal Truth, represented in the person of Surya Savitri, that is the creator of all its forms. For it is the causal Idea in the infinite being,—the idea, not abstract, but real and dynamic,—that originates the law, the energies, the formations of things and the working out of their potentialities in determined forms by determined processes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Selected Hymns, Surya Savitri - Creator and Increaser,#KEYS
12:The highest truth, the integral self-knowledge is not to be gained by this self-blinded leap into the Absolute but by a patient transit beyond the mind into the Truth-consciousness where the Infinite can be known, felt, seen, experienced in all the fullness of its unending riches. And there we discover this Self that we are to be not only a static tenuous vacant Atman but a great dynamic Spirit individual, universal and transcendent. That Self and Spirit cannot be expressed by the mind's abstract generalisations; all the inspired descriptions of the seers and mystics cannot exhaust its contents and its splendours.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Integral Knowledge, The Object Of Knowledge [296],#KEYS
13:Truth is one, unique, single; it is
indivisibly One.
And its Oneness, and the knowledge of
that oneness belongs to him; is
placed in him.
Impossible, impossible; it is aloofness,
estrangement, separation; he is known only
by them.
Knowledge of One is abstract; single,
indivisible.
To say one, and to say single is to reach
the attribute; but he, who is one, is beyond
attribute.
If I say "I," he sends back "I," in answer
to my "I". So, "he" is for you and not for
me.
And if I say Unity is Oneness for his
loneliness, for his being alone, then I
placed him in
creation; among things created.
And if I say single One, as number one; how
can he come
within
number?
And if I say, he is One for as the
result of being considered one, being proved
One-then I
placed limit on him; delimited
him. ~ Mansur al Hallaj,#KEYS
14:She sets the hard inventions of her brain
In a pattern of eternal fixity:
Indifferent to the cosmic dumb demand,
Unconscious of too close realities,
Of the unspoken thought, the voiceless heart,
She leans to forge her credos and iron codes
And metal structures to imprison life
And mechanic models of all things that are.
For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:
She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines
Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts
And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.
At will she spaces in thin air of mind
Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,
Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,
Her numberless warring strict philosophies;
Out of Nature's body of phenomenon
She carves with Thought's keen edge in rigid lines,
Like rails for the World-Magician's power to run, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri,#KEYS
15:The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
~ David Foster Wallace,#KEYS
16:From above to below, the sefirot depict the drama of emanation, the transition from Ein Sof to creation. In the words of Azriel of Gerona, "They constitute the process by which all things come into being and pass away." From below to above, the sefirot constitute a ladder of ascent back to the One. The union of Tif'eret and Shekhinah gives birth to the human soul, and the mystical journey begins with the awareness of this spiritual fact of life. Shekhinah is the opening to the divine: "One who enters must enter through this gate." Once inside, the sefirot are no longer an abstract theological system; they become a map of consciousness. The mystic climbs and probes, discovering dimensions of being. Spiritual and psychological wholeness is achieved by meditating on the qualities of each sefirah, by imitating and integrating the attributes of God. "When you cleave to the sefirot, the divine holy spirit enters into you, into every sensation and every movement." But the path is not easy. Divine will can be harsh: Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac in order to balance love with rigor. From the Other Side, demonic forces threaten and seduce. [The demonic is rooted in the divine]. Contemplatively and psychologically, evil must be encountered, not evaded. By knowing and withstanding the dark underside of wisdom, the spiritual seeker is refined.~ Daniel C Matt, The Essential Kabbalah, 10, #KEYS
17:At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare - or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.
So he switched to opera - usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more.
Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years. ~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,#KEYS
18:But even when the desire to know exists in the requisite strength, the mental vision by which abstract truth is recognised is hard to distinguish from vivid imaginability and consonance with mental habits. It is necessary to practise methodological doubt, like Descartes, in order to loosen the hold of mental habits; and it is necessary to cultivate logical imagination, in order to have a number of hypotheses at command, and not to be the slave of the one which common sense has rendered easy to imagine. These two processes, of doubting the familiar and imagining the unfamiliar, are correlative, and form the chief part of the mental training required for a philosopher.
The naïve beliefs which we find in ourselves when we first begin the process of philosophic reflection may turn out, in the end, to be almost all capable of a true interpretation; but they ought all, before being admitted into philosophy, to undergo the ordeal of sceptical criticism. Until they have gone through this ordeal, they are mere blind habits, ways of behaving rather than intellectual convictions. And although it may be that a majority will pass the test, we may be pretty sure that some will not, and that a serious readjustment of our outlook ought to result. In order to break the dominion of habit, we must do our best to doubt the senses, reason, morals, everything in short. In some directions, doubt will be found possible; in others, it will be checked by that direct vision of abstract truth upon which the possibility of philosophical knowledge depends. ~ Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World,#KEYS
19:the omnipresent Trinity :::
In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort,-God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension. It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta. There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic maybe our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,#KEYS
20:The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine, the Infinite and the Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our individual being and its relations to the universe and it transcends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them which our mind and our senses give us, is, so long as they are unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasensuous knowledge, a false report, an imperfect construction, an attenuated and erroneous figure. And yet that which the universe and the individual seem to be is still a figure of what they really are, a figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind it. Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there is a knowledge, a Truth-Consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray.
There the abstract terms of pure reason and the constructions .of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soul-vision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and the universe; but it can too see that existence from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of human life were not an useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing in the terms of the universe. It is true that in themselves they and all that is here have no significance, and to build separate significances for them is to live in an illusion, Maya; but they have a supreme significance in the Supreme, an absolute Power in the Absolute and it is that that assigns to them and refers to that Truth their present relative values. This is the all-uniting experience that is the foundation of the deepest integral and most intimate self-knowledge and world-knowledge
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, 293, 11457,#KEYS
21:The ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting, dramatic ideas about that. For example-very briefly-there was a deity known as Marduk. Marduk was a Mesopotamian deity, and imagine this is sort of what happened. As an empire grew out of the post-ice age-15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago-all these tribes came together. These tribes each had their own deity-their own image of the ideal. But then they started to occupy the same territory. One tribe had God A, and one tribe had God B, and one could wipe the other one out, and then it would just be God A, who wins. That's not so good, because maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war. So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priority-which ideal is going to take priority.
What seems to happen is represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in celestial space. From a practical perspective, it's more like an ongoing dialog. You believe this; I believe this. You believe that; I believe this. How are we going to meld that together? You take God A, and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God C from them, and you say, 'God C now has the attributes of A and B.' And then some other tribes come in, and C takes them over, too. Take Marduk, for example. He has 50 different names, at least in part, of the subordinate gods-that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization. That's part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted. You think, 'this is important, and it works, because your tribe is alive, and so we'll take the best of both, if we can manage it, and extract out something, that's even more abstract, that covers both of us.'
I'll give you a couple of Marduk's interesting features. He has eyes all the way around his head. He's elected by all the other gods to be king God. That's the first thing. That's quite cool. They elect him because they're facing a terrible threat-sort of like a flood and a monster combined. Marduk basically says that, if they elect him top God, he'll go out and stop the flood monster, and they won't all get wiped out. It's a serious threat. It's chaos itself making its comeback. All the gods agree, and Marduk is the new manifestation. He's got eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. When he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat. We need to know that, because the word 'Tiamat' is associated with the word 'tehom.' Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis, so it's linked very tightly to this story. Marduk, with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words, goes out and confronts Tiamat, who's like this watery sea dragon. It's a classic Saint George story: go out and wreak havoc on the dragon. He cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world out of her pieces. That's the world that human beings live in.
The Mesopotamian emperor acted out Marduk. He was allowed to be emperor insofar as he was a good Marduk. That meant that he had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magic; he could speak properly. We are starting to understand, at that point, the essence of leadership. Because what's leadership? It's the capacity to see what the hell's in front of your face, and maybe in every direction, and maybe the capacity to use your language properly to transform chaos into order. God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out. The best they could do was dramatize it, but it's staggeringly brilliant. It's by no means obvious, and this chaos is a very strange thing. This is a chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time.
Chaos is half psychological and half real. There's no other way to really describe it. Chaos is what you encounter when you're blown into pieces and thrown into deep confusion-when your world falls apart, when your dreams die, when you're betrayed. It's the chaos that emerges, and the chaos is everything it wants, and it's too much for you. That's for sure. It pulls you down into the underworld, and that's where the dragons are. All you've got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open, and to speak as carefully and as clearly as you can. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get through it that way and come out the other side. It's taken people a very long time to figure that out, and it looks, to me, that the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago, because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply using the same system that we used to represent serpentile, or other, carnivorous predators. ~ Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series, 1,#KEYS
22:GURU YOGA
Guru yoga is an essential practice in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism and Bon. This is true in sutra, tantra, and Dzogchen. It develops the heart connection with the masteR By continually strengthening our devotion, we come to the place of pure devotion in ourselves, which is the unshakeable, powerful base of the practice. The essence of guru yoga is to merge the practitioner's mind with the mind of the master.
What is the true master? It is the formless, fundamental nature of mind, the primordial awareness of the base of everything, but because we exist in dualism, it is helpful for us to visualize this in a form. Doing so makes skillful use of the dualisms of the conceptual mind, to further strengthen devotion and help us stay directed toward practice and the generation of positive qualities.
In the Bon tradition, we often visualize either Tapihritsa* as the master, or the Buddha ShenlaOdker*, who represents the union of all the masters. If you are already a practitioner, you may have another deity to visualize, like Guru Rinpoche or a yidam or dakini. While it is important to work with a lineage with which you have a connection, you should understand that the master you visualize is the embodiment of all the masters with whom you are connected, all the teachers with whom you have studied, all the deities to whom you have commitments. The master in guru yoga is not just one individual, but the essence of enlightenment, the primordial awareness that is your true nature.
The master is also the teacher from whom you receive the teachings. In the Tibetan tradition, we say the master is more important than the Buddha. Why? Because the master is the immediate messenger of the teachings, the one who brings the Buddha's wisdom to the student. Without the master we could not find our way to the Buddha. So we should feel as much devotion to the master as we would to the Buddha if the Buddha suddenly appeared in front of us.
Guru yoga is not just about generating some feeling toward a visualized image. It is done to find the fundamental mind in yourself that is the same as the fundamental mind of all your teachers, and of all the Buddhas and realized beings that have ever lived. When you merge with the guru, you merge with your pristine true nature, which is the real guide and masteR But this should not be an abstract practice. When you do guru yoga, try to feel such intense devotion that the hair stands upon your neck, tears start down your face, and your heart opens and fills with great love. Let yourself merge in union with the guru's mind, which is your enlightened Buddha-nature. This is the way to practice guru yoga.
The Practice
After the nine breaths, still seated in meditation posture, visualize the master above and in front of you. This should not be a flat, two dimensional picture-let a real being exist there, in three dimensions, made of light, pure, and with a strong presence that affects the feeling in your body,your energy, and your mind. Generate strong devotion and reflect on the great gift of the teachings and the tremendous good fortune you enjoy in having made a connection to them. Offer a sincere prayer, asking that your negativities and obscurations be removed, that your positive qualities develop, and that you accomplish dream yoga.
Then imagine receiving blessings from the master in the form of three colored lights that stream from his or her three wisdom doors- of body, speech, and mind-into yours. The lights should be transmitted in the following sequence: White light streams from the master's brow chakra into yours, purifying and relaxing your entire body and physical dimension. Then red light streams from the master's throat chakra into yours, purifying and relaxing your energetic dimension. Finally, blue light streams from the master's heart chakra into yours, purifying and relaxing your mind.
When the lights enter your body, feel them. Let your body, energy, and mind relax, suffused inwisdom light. Use your imagination to make the blessing real in your full experience, in your body and energy as well as in the images in your mind.
After receiving the blessing, imagine the master dissolving into light that enters your heart and resides there as your innermost essence. Imagine that you dissolve into that light, and remain inpure awareness, rigpa.
There are more elaborate instructions for guru yoga that can involve prostrations, offerings, gestures, mantras, and more complicated visualizations, but the essence of the practice is mingling your mind with the mind of the master, which is pure, non-dual awareness. Guru yoga can be done any time during the day; the more often the better. Many masters say that of all the practices it is guru yoga that is the most important. It confers the blessings of the lineage and can open and soften the heart and quiet the unruly mind. To completely accomplish guru yoga is to accomplish the path.
~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep, [T3],#KEYS
23:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #KEYS
24:Education
THE EDUCATION of a human being should begin at birth and continue throughout his life.
Indeed, if we want this education to have its maximum result, it should begin even before birth; in this case it is the mother herself who proceeds with this education by means of a twofold action: first, upon herself for her own improvement, and secondly, upon the child whom she is forming physically. For it is certain that the nature of the child to be born depends very much upon the mother who forms it, upon her aspiration and will as well as upon the material surroundings in which she lives. To see that her thoughts are always beautiful and pure, her feelings always noble and fine, her material surroundings as harmonious as possible and full of a great simplicity - this is the part of education which should apply to the mother herself. And if she has in addition a conscious and definite will to form the child according to the highest ideal she can conceive, then the very best conditions will be realised so that the child can come into the world with his utmost potentialities. How many difficult efforts and useless complications would be avoided in this way!
Education to be complete must have five principal aspects corresponding to the five principal activities of the human being: the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual. Usually, these phases of education follow chronologically the growth of the individual; this, however, does not mean that one of them should replace another, but that all must continue, completing one another until the end of his life.
We propose to study these five aspects of education one by one and also their interrelationships. But before we enter into the details of the subject, I wish to make a recommendation to parents. Most parents, for various reasons, give very little thought to the true education which should be imparted to children. When they have brought a child into the world, provided him with food, satisfied his various material needs and looked after his health more or less carefully, they think they have fully discharged their duty. Later on, they will send him to school and hand over to the teachers the responsibility for his education.
There are other parents who know that their children must be educated and who try to do what they can. But very few, even among those who are most serious and sincere, know that the first thing to do, in order to be able to educate a child, is to educate oneself, to become conscious and master of oneself so that one never sets a bad example to one's child. For it is above all through example that education becomes effective. To speak good words and to give wise advice to a child has very little effect if one does not oneself give him an example of what one teaches. Sincerity, honesty, straightforwardness, courage, disinterestedness, unselfishness, patience, endurance, perseverance, peace, calm, self-control are all things that are taught infinitely better by example than by beautiful speeches. Parents, have a high ideal and always act in accordance with it and you will see that little by little your child will reflect this ideal in himself and spontaneously manifest the qualities you would like to see expressed in his nature. Quite naturally a child has respect and admiration for his parents; unless they are quite unworthy, they will always appear to their child as demigods whom he will try to imitate as best he can.
With very few exceptions, parents are not aware of the disastrous influence that their own defects, impulses, weaknesses and lack of self-control have on their children. If you wish to be respected by a child, have respect for yourself and be worthy of respect at every moment. Never be authoritarian, despotic, impatient or ill-tempered. When your child asks you a question, do not give him a stupid or silly answer under the pretext that he cannot understand you. You can always make yourself understood if you take enough trouble; and in spite of the popular saying that it is not always good to tell the truth, I affirm that it is always good to tell the truth, but that the art consists in telling it in such a way as to make it accessible to the mind of the hearer. In early life, until he is twelve or fourteen, the child's mind is hardly open to abstract notions and general ideas. And yet you can train it to understand these things by using concrete images, symbols or parables. Up to quite an advanced age and for some who mentally always remain children, a narrative, a story, a tale well told teach much more than any number of theoretical explanations.
Another pitfall to avoid: do not scold your child without good reason and only when it is quite indispensable. A child who is too often scolded gets hardened to rebuke and no longer attaches much importance to words or severity of tone. And above all, take good care never to scold him for a fault which you yourself commit. Children are very keen and clear-sighted observers; they soon find out your weaknesses and note them without pity.
When a child has done something wrong, see that he confesses it to you spontaneously and frankly; and when he has confessed, with kindness and affection make him understand what was wrong in his movement so that he will not repeat it, but never scold him; a fault confessed must always be forgiven. You should not allow any fear to come between you and your child; fear is a pernicious means of education: it invariably gives birth to deceit and lying. Only a discerning affection that is firm yet gentle and an adequate practical knowledge will create the bonds of trust that are indispensable for you to be able to educate your child effectively. And do not forget that you have to control yourself constantly in order to be equal to your task and truly fulfil the duty which you owe your child by the mere fact of having brought him into the world.
Bulletin, February 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Human intellect is incurably abstract. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 2:Funerals are all abstract ceremony. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 3:Remember‚Äîboredom is the enemy, not some abstract "failure. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 4:Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 5:Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 6:In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 7:There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 8:There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 9:Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 10:Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-sr, @wisdomtrove 11:Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 12:There is more fine abstract design in Navajo rugs than in all these modern paintings. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 13:I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 14:My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 15:The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 16:Abstract qualities begin With capitals alway: The True, the Good, the Beautiful- Those are the things that pay! ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove 17:I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 18:There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 19:The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 20:Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ‚ÄúMore people died‚Äù don‚Äôt say ‚ÄúMortality rose. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 21:My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 22:Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 23:I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than ... intellectual, abstract understanding. ~ steve-jobs, @wisdomtrove 24:And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 25:Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 26:Do not talk to me of goodness, of abstract justice, of nature law. Necessity is the highest law, public welfare is the highest justice. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 27:We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 28:Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all. ~ arthur-schopenhauer, @wisdomtrove 29:He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 30:When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 31:It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions – but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract ‘either‑or’, and keeps to the concrete. ~ arthur-schopenhauer, @wisdomtrove 32:When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 33:There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 34:Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 35:But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 36:The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 37:Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 38:I paint; I draw and paint - I've been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 39:Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 40:Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: "He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community." A community is not an abstract ideal. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 41:Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 42:It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 43:But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 44:... the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 45:Zen perceives and feels, and does not abstract and meditate. Zen penetrates and is finally lost in the immersion. Meditation, on the other hand, is outspokenly dualistic and consequently inevitably superficial. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove 46:There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men in their various relations with each other, in whatever circumstances they may be, that they will neither injure nor be injured. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 47:What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 48:The trouble with us is that we expect too much from the great happenings, the unusual things, and we overlook the common flowers on the path of life, from which we might abstract sweets, comforts, delights. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 49:& 50:I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 51:What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 52:Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 53:The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness. Arthur Eddington ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 54:It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 55:Discover all that you are not - body, feelings thoughts, time, space, this or that - nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 56:To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing himself in reveries, a sea-voyage is full of subjects for meditation; but then they are the wonders of the deep and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove 57:Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 58:One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form. ~ friedrich-wilhelm-joseph-schelling, @wisdomtrove 59:I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work. ~ steve-jobs, @wisdomtrove 60:I can picture the color of the song, or the shape of it, or who it is that I'm trying to appeal to, in the song, and what I'm trying to, almost, reinforce my feelings for. And I know that sounds sort of vague and abstract, but I've got a handle on it when I'm doing it. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 61:One should not search for an abstract meaning of life ... Life can be made meaningful in a threefold way: first, through what we give to life ... second, by what we take from the world ... third, through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change ... ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 62:Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 63:Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled ... I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 64:It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding. ~ steve-jobs, @wisdomtrove 65:The things I talk about and explain couldn't happen - yet, they don't seem impossible - you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane - and it's trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 66:Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 67:To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 68:I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 69:Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 70:If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 71:When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 72:Discover all you are not. Body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, time, space, being and not-being, this or that - nothing concrete or abstract you can point out to is you. You must watch your-self continuously - particularly your mind - moment by moment, missing nothing. This witnessing is essential for the separation of the self from the not-self. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 73:Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes - we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 74:A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 75:This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 76:It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 77:There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 78:In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate & 79:Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine... I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 80:There is seemingly so little love shared in this world, it is not surprising that we ask, "Where have all the lovers gone?" Since love is the most vital energy for good that is within our power to utilize, it is puzzling why we so seldom do so. Love is just a useless, abstract idea until we put it into action... unless we are always actively living in love, we are not utilizing the greatest gift we have been given and which we, in turn, have to offer. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 81:I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 82:At least three time per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? He eliminated all of the activities he used as crutches and began to focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 83:There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substiutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelming uncanny fact of mere existence. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 84:Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 85:The biggest adversary in our life is ourselves. We are what we are, in a sense, because of the dominating thoughts we allow to gather in our head. All concepts of self-improvement, all actions and paths we take, relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves. Life is limited only by how we really see ourselves and feel about our being. A great deal of pure self-knowledge and inner understanding allows us to lay an all-important foundation for the structure of our life from which we can perceive and take the right avenues. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 86:One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 87:The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality - to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 88:Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract - was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 89:This segregation is confirmed by the common stereotypes of these two disciplines and their representatives. While scientists are perceived as absentminded, casually dressed individuals who live in a refined world of abstract theory with little practical reality, lawyers are usually perceived as formally dressed people who are practically oriented, concentrating mainly on trivialities (such as negotiating their retaining fee) and engaging professionally in all sorts of nitty-gritty social intercourse—the kind of things that normal people, although worried by them, would rather not have to deal with themselves. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove 90:We desire to abide in this most luminous darkness, and without sight or knowledge, to see that which is above sight or knowledge, by means of that very fact that we see not and know not. For this is truly to see and know, to praise Him who is above nature in a manner above nature, by the abstraction of all that is natural; as those who would make a statue out of the natural stone abstract all the surrounding material which hinders the sight of the shape lying concealed within, and by that abstraction alone reveal its hidden beauty. It is needful, as I think, to make this abstraction in a manner precisely opposite to that in which we deal with the Divine attributes; for we add them together, beginning with the primary ones, and passing from them to the secondary, and so to the last; but here we ascend from the last to the first, abstracting all, so as to unveil and know that which is beyond knowledge, and which in all things is hidden from our sight by that which can be known, and so to behold that supernatural darkness which is hidden by all such light as is in created things. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove 91:Because in proportion as we ascend higher our speech is contracted to the limits of our view of the purely intelligible; and so now, when we enter that darkness which is above understanding, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, and the negation of thought. Thus in the other treatises our subject took us from the highest to the lowest, and in the measure of this descent our treatment of it extended itself; whereas now we rise from beneath to that which is the highest, and accordingly our speech is restrained in proportion to the height of our ascent; but when our ascent is accomplished, speech will cease altogether, and be absorbed into the ineffable. But why, you will ask, do we add in the first and begin to abstract in the last? The reason is that we affirmed that which is above all affirmation by comparison with that which is most nearly related to it, and were therefore compelled to make a hypothetical affirmation; but when we abstract that which is above all abstraction, we must distinguish it also from those things which are most remote from it. Is not God more nearly life and goodness than air or a stone; must we not deny more fully that He is drunken or enraged, than that He can be spoken of or understood? ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Beasts abstract not. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
2:All good art is abstract. ~ John Newman, #NFDB
3:For you are abstract, ~ Hilda Doolittle, #NFDB
4:All great art is abstract. ~ Jean Renoir, #NFDB
5:I paint abstract expressions. ~ Billy Zane, #NFDB
6:Oh abstractions are just abstract ~ Stephen Dunn, #NFDB
7:Human intellect is incurably abstract. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
8:son favored abstract expressionism. ~ Lincoln Child, #NFDB
9:abstract himself out of the moment ~ Gregory Benford, #NFDB
10:Funerals are all abstract ceremony. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
11:The abstract kills, the concrete saves. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
12:All good art is abstract in its structure. ~ Paul Strand, #NFDB
13:Nothing is more abstract than reality. ~ Giorgio Morandi, #NFDB
14:He can only bear tragedy if it's abstract. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
15:In an age of abstract experience, fornication ~ Allen Tate, #NFDB
16:I try to make concrete that which is abstract. ~ Juan Gris, #NFDB
17:My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
18:Abstract truth is the eye of reason. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
19:Even abstract shapes must have a likeness ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
20:Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
21:In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery. ~ C L R James, #NFDB
22:Money is human happiness in the abstract. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
23:Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics! ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
24:To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. ~ Ben Shahn, #NFDB
25:All men in the abstract are just and good. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
26:Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream. ~ Jacques Audiard, #NFDB
27:Even an abstract form has to have a likeness. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
28:I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
29:Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. ~ Jackson Pollock, #NFDB
30:Meron bang taong walang itsura? Anu yun, abstract? ~ Eros S Atalia, #NFDB
31:Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract. ~ Leo Ornstein, #NFDB
32:All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. ~ John Green, #NFDB
33:except for the odd abstract painting on the wall. His ~ Bella Forrest, #NFDB
34:The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
35:Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks. ~ Joni Mitchell, #NFDB
36:As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically. ~ Lee Krasner, #NFDB
37:Picasso, that’s abstract art. Kandinsky. Jackson Pollock. ~ Mary Kubica, #NFDB
38:I, abstract, adoring, distant
And unsalvageable. ~ Lucie Brock Broido,#NFDB
39:I like people in the abstract but not in the concrete? ~ Dennis E Taylor, #NFDB
40:Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract "failure. ~ Tim Ferriss, #NFDB
41:We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
42:Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
43:I feel it's just some sort of game if it's just abstract. ~ Jeffrey Smart, #NFDB
44:Isn't it funny how something so abstract can speak to us? ~ Sarah Crossan, #NFDB
45:Art is only abstract when you look the other way. ~ Karen Elizabeth Gordon, #NFDB
46:It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
47:I wanted to be an abstract painter, but I was rotten at it. ~ Jenny Holzer, #NFDB
48:That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
49:That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
50:The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few. ~ Margot Asquith, #NFDB
51:He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time. ~ H W Brands, #NFDB
52:I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract. ~ Joaquin Phoenix, #NFDB
53:I wear my pants on my upper torso to be abstract and different. ~ Thom Yorke, #NFDB
54:Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract "failure. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
55:Abstract love of humanity is nearly always love of self. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
56:At the level of the microcode, physical and abstract meet. The ~ Tracy Kidder, #NFDB
57:In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings. ~ Lance Henriksen, #NFDB
58:Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. ~ Julie Taymor, #NFDB
59:the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
60:A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
61:Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
62:Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
63:How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
64:Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
65:I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional, and I still do. ~ George Lucas, #NFDB
66:Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold. ~ Max Porter, #NFDB
67:He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
68:It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea … ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
69:Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions. ~ Berthold Auerbach, #NFDB
70:The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
71:fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me. ~ Elizabeth Bowen, #NFDB
72:In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
73:To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
74:Abstract propositions should never be discussed by a legislative body. ~ James Buchanan, #NFDB
75:Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
76:It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home. ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
77:A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
78:Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality. ~ Jim Hodges, #NFDB
79:I guess it's easy to dream about things that are abstract, or impossible. ~ Melissa Keil, #NFDB
80:Abstract painting is dead. That's why it has become so interesting again. ~ Chris Martin, #NFDB
81:I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
82:It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea. . . . ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
83:Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee. ~ Georges Clemenceau, #NFDB
84:All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
85:Freedom - rather more complicated in the concrete than the abstract, yes? ~ Ian C Esslemont, #NFDB
86:I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters, ~ Pete Hamill, #NFDB
87:Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract ~ William James, #NFDB
88:The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
89:The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
90:You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
91:Even in an abstract dimension, ideas built on flawed foundations will fail. ~ Romina Russell, #NFDB
92:Higher-order functions allow us to abstract over actions, not just values. ~ Marijn Haverbeke, #NFDB
93:No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents. ~ Edward Said, #NFDB
94:An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer. ~ Marcel Duchamp, #NFDB
95:There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
96:To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
97:Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments. ~ Jean Luc Godard, #NFDB
98:The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi. ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
99:Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
100:Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians. ~ Frank Stella, #NFDB
101:It almost never makes sense to create an abstract superclass with only one subclass. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
102:There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
103:Detailed descriptions, abstract ambitions, relevant observations, your's and mine. ~ Ellen Hopkins, #NFDB
104:Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe. ~ John Polkinghorne, #NFDB
105:Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
106:The certainty of mathematics depends on its complete abstract generality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
107:abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
108:Because rejection is an abstract word that doesn’t have an image attached to it, I ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
109:Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm, ~ Tomas Transtr mer, #NFDB
110:I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much. ~ Newt Gingrich, #NFDB
111:Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB
112:A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things. ~ Jonathan Demme, #NFDB
113:Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
114:this
is the abstract, this
is the cold doing, this
is the almost impossible ~ Charles Olson,#NFDB
115:I always say that modernization is not an abstract thing; its a very specific task. ~ Dmitry Medvedev, #NFDB
116:In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
117:Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture. ~ Adrienne Monnier, #NFDB
118:Erika had never lost the feeling that viewing a body was almost abstract; theatrical. ~ Robert Bryndza, #NFDB
119:How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach? ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
120:Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. ~ Al Capp, #NFDB
121:I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. ~ Gustave Moreau, #NFDB
122:I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it's all we need. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
123:Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, #NFDB
124:With a metric you can really go to town, otherwise it is just abstract nonsense. ~ Jennifer Tour Chayes, #NFDB
125:You shall find there a man who is the abstract of all faults that all men follow. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
126:Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
127:I'm an abstract painter not just for myself, but because I really believe in abstraction. ~ Brice Marden, #NFDB
128:The abstract thinking of the world is never to be expected of persons in high places... ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
129:of the country was likely to know that Pollock was a famous abstract artist—but apparently ~ Marcia Clark, #NFDB
130:There is more fine abstract design in Navajo rugs than in all these modern paintings. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
131:He had nothing against debauchery in the abstract, but he was particular about the details. ~ Ellen Kushner, #NFDB
132:I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words. ~ Georges Simenon, #NFDB
133:I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
134:None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
135:So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
136:All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized. ~ David Hockney, #NFDB
137:Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract. ~ Rod Dreher, #NFDB
138:This tired abstract anger; inarticulate passive opposition; always the same thing in dublin ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
139:Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas. ~ Jean Luc Godard, #NFDB
140:For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
141:Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
142:She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short. ~ Clive James, #NFDB
143:The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. ~ Lucian Freud, #NFDB
144:The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. ~ Jan Tschichold, #NFDB
145:I used to like the foods that come in abstract shapes: chicken nuggets, Fruit Roll-Ups, hot dogs. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
146:Real is an abstract concept. Are we ever ourselves, our whole selves, except when we’re alone? ~ Hailey Edwards, #NFDB
147:The abstract has no emotional content... the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is. ~ Cecil Balmond, #NFDB
148:The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more you must seduce the senses to it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
149:The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
150:Truth, like light, is only abstract to the blind, and those who choose to live in darkness. ~ Gerard de Marigny, #NFDB
151:Beauty is a type of art everyone is trying to perfect, but no one realizes it's abstract art. ~ Keaton Stromberg, #NFDB
152:People weep at music all the time, because music gives form to some abstract level of integration. ~ Joe Bradley, #NFDB
153:I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions. ~ Claes Oldenburg, #NFDB
154:no difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions, ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
155:The abstract concepts of the mind cannot apprehend Reality, although they are an expression of it. ~ Rupert Spira, #NFDB
156:You've got a lot of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
157:Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties. ~ Nora Ephron, #NFDB
158:God is not a vague abstract principle or force but a living person who fellowships with His people. ~ John M Frame, #NFDB
159:If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
160:The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought. ~ John Bargh, #NFDB
161:The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
162:We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition. ~ Asger Jorn, #NFDB
163:Whoever thought the immediate alternates with the immediate action is not an abstract painter. ~ Pierre Alechinsky, #NFDB
164:Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
165:I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
166:I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
167:My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
168:Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
169:Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end. ~ Yiyun Li, #NFDB
170:[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us. ~ Don Richard Riso, #NFDB
171:Blue suggests the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. ~ Yves Klein, #NFDB
172:I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base. ~ Carl R Rogers, #NFDB
173:For an ordinary trooper like him, ignorance was not simply an abstract value. It was in the manual. ~ Alan Dean Foster, #NFDB
174:There are moments when clear images finally begin to emerge within the abstract painting of your life. ~ Renee Carlino, #NFDB
175:When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God. ~ Kenneth Lee Pike, #NFDB
176:A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
177:It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge. ~ Jay McInerney, #NFDB
178:Sanctuary cities are a lot like hitchhiking. And the abstract, it feels really good until you feel dead. ~ Greg Gutfeld, #NFDB
179:The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time. ~ James J Gibson, #NFDB
180:The force that propels the human spirit on the clear way forward and upward is the abstract spirit. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
181:For an ordinary trooper like him, ignorance was not simply an abstract value. It was in the manual. — ~ Alan Dean Foster, #NFDB
182:Freedom is an abstract offshoot. You can't describe freedom. How can you describe it? I tried and I failed. ~ Neil Young, #NFDB
183:I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
184:In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration. ~ Ansel Adams, #NFDB
185:It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television. ~ Atom Egoyan, #NFDB
186:When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract. ~ Claes Oldenburg, #NFDB
187:You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist. ~ Robert Rauschenberg, #NFDB
188:...because from bigness comes impersonality, insensitivity and a lust to concentrate abstract power. ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
189:I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery. ~ Eric Cantona, #NFDB
190:One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's appearance is her nakedness, an art stripped bare. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
191:The common willing of a common world is an eminently practical undertaking and not in the least abstract. ~ Daniel Kemmis, #NFDB
192:The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness. ~ Arthur Eddington, #NFDB
193:I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality. ~ Ralph Gibson, #NFDB
194:Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
195:objects and entities are all abstract conceptions that are superimposed by thinking onto experience itself. ~ Rupert Spira, #NFDB
196:Don’t leave Christmas in the abstract. Your sin. Your conflict with the Devil. Your victory. He came for this. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
197:Jealousy is only hurt ego. Revenge is meaningless. Life is abstract. There is no point other than pleasure. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB
198:Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use. ~ Julian Jaynes, #NFDB
199:...as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
200:I don’t abstract from anything.…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface. ~ Robert Ryman, #NFDB
201:It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not. ~ Jackson Pollock, #NFDB
202:The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
203:We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
204:I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting. ~ Andrew Lam, #NFDB
205:The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
206:Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting. ~ David Hockney, #NFDB
207:Abstract qualities begin With capitals alway: The True, the Good, the Beautiful- Those are the things that pay! ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
208:I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
209:Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
210:The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
211:There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
212:I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
213:I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract. ~ Ellsworth Kelly, #NFDB
214:We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
215:...but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
216:Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism! ~ Carl Andre, #NFDB
217:The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes. ~ Eric Temple Bell, #NFDB
218:The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. ~ George Lakoff,#NFDB
219:There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
220:We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually. ~ Rahm Emanuel, #NFDB
221:In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
222:Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly. ~ Eric Drooker, #NFDB
223:My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
224:Al Capp’s description of abstract art: “A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
225:All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
226:Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
227:I tried to think these thoughts but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
228:Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless. ~ Georges Bernanos, #NFDB
229:Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine ~ Edgard Varese, #NFDB
230:... my whole existence is governed by abstract ideas.... the ideal must be preserved regardless of fact. ~ Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, #NFDB
231:That’s the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? You’re done when you don’t want to do it anymore. ~ Amy Sillman, #NFDB
232:Imagination, that dost so abstract us That we are not aware, not even when A thousand trumpets sound about our ears! ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
233:... I shall go on making sublime and philosophical discoveries, and employing myself in deep, abstract studies. ~ Lady Hester Stanhope, #NFDB
234:I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes. ~ Jean Helion, #NFDB
235:But the Holy Spirit is not simply an abstract force. He is a person who empowers the people of God for the Christian life. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
236:One can love one's neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
237:We believe more readily in the abstract application of God's promises than we do in their application to us personally. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
238:Children in the abstract, had never appealed to me. They seemed to be loud creatures, often dripping some form of goo. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
239:Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
240:General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
241:I think, basically, I'm an abstract artist. I just think that that's not even an issue. I think everything's abstract. ~ Julian Schnabel, #NFDB
242:One can love one's neighbours in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
243:Seeing it makes a magnificent abstract concept real, and reality tends to taint even the most wonderful ideas [...] - Caradoc ~ P C Cast, #NFDB
244:The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
245:I am convinced that abstract form, imagery, color, texture, and material convey meaning equal to or greater than words. ~ Katherine McCoy, #NFDB
246:I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than ... intellectual, abstract understanding. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
247:I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint. ~ Adolph Gottlieb, #NFDB
248:Men and objects share a common abstract destiny: to be of equally insignificant value in the algebra of life’s mystery. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
249:The future, as always, felt too abstract to worry about, too nebulous, too otherworldly. What mattered was the here and now. ~ Manil Suri, #NFDB
250:Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star. ~ Dana Carvey, #NFDB
251:Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
252:One can love one's neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible. If ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
253:Everyone knew that women had not the capacity for abstract thought; in this, as in so much, men dictated and women followed. ~ Jane Johnson, #NFDB
254:Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results. ~ William James, #NFDB
255:I'm always going back and forth between wanting to do stuff that's abstract and stuff that's just telling everybody to listen. ~ Jenny Hval, #NFDB
256:It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws ~ Hans Hofmann, #NFDB
257:My guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect... ~ Bob Dylan,#NFDB
258:Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality. ~ Ben Nicholson, #NFDB
259:The voyage on the common sea towards some unknown place is perhaps more human than the abstract path to the world’s void. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
260:Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
261:For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
262:There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world. ~ Nikolai Lobachevsky, #NFDB
263:To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
264:why is it that the simple, abstract language of mathematics can accurately capture so much of our infinitely complex world? ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
265:Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
266:Blaming TV as an abstract entity is nonsensical. It's our hand on the remote. There's a world out there outside the tube. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon, #NFDB
267:His gaze brushed over her, abstract and hungry. "You burn so very brightly, you know"
"Yeah," she muttered. "You said. ~ Rachel Caine,#NFDB
268:The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered. ~ William Irwin Thompson, #NFDB
269:With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
270:From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
271:I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is. ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
272:Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring. ~ Larry Rivers, #NFDB
273:When a nation was faced with a choice between abstract principle or complete self-interest, it took self-interest every time. ~ Jack L Chalker, #NFDB
274:You can write very obtuse and abstract lyrics, and if they want to, people are going to find something amazing that you're saying. ~ Girl Talk, #NFDB
275:And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
276:grape, knife, cup, wheat / are symbols in eternity, / and every concrete object / has abstract value, is timeless / in the dream parallel ~ H D, #NFDB
277:The distinction between the natural and the supernatural is a distinction between two abstract aspects, not two concrete things. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
278:True hunger was a weapon stronger
than any of his abstract desires. It’s what toppled countries and made men desperate. ~ Diana Peterfreund,#NFDB
279:We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface. ~ Theo van Doesburg, #NFDB
280:Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel, #NFDB
281:I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art. ~ Peggy Guggenheim, #NFDB
282:The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
283:A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts. ~ Bill Gaede, #NFDB
284:His machines - soon to be called Turing machines - offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world. ~ Andrew Hodges, #NFDB
285:proposed External Examiner’s CV (electronic copy preferred) 3. The candidate’s abstract as it appears in the final draft of the thesis ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
286:Bin Laden didn't come from the abstract. He came from somewhere, and if you look where ... you'll see America's hand of villainy. ~ Harry Belafonte, #NFDB
287:Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
288:The Goldberg Variations is a good example of how symmetry is not just a physical property but pervades many abstract structures. ~ Marcus du Sautoy, #NFDB
289:When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
290:By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
291:... in St. Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe. (Cities and be intentional or unintentional. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
292:The concrete life of the individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea of the whole may drag out its sorry existence. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
293:Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage. ~ Paul Engle, #NFDB
294:What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
295:In a dream I cannot see tangled abstract phallacy random turmoil builds in me i'm a addicted to chaos -Megadeth, Addicted to Chaos ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
296:Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests. ~ Meyer Schapiro, #NFDB
297:"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
298:The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences. ~ T D Jakes, #NFDB
299:I mean, I find things that happened in real life to be the funniest - things that you observe instead of crazy abstract things, you know. ~ Jonah Hill, #NFDB
300:Many of the earlier gods developed from "persons"into personified ideas, and finally into abstract ideas. ~ Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, #NFDB
301:Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field. ~ Paul Dirac, #NFDB
302:Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.) ~ Mel Bochner, #NFDB
303:Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea. ~ Christopher Nolan, #NFDB
304:The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract. ~ Stephen Gaghan, #NFDB
305:The piece of music is nothing without the act of interpretation. That is the only way it can live, and it's a totally abstract thing. ~ Helene Grimaud, #NFDB
306:The stuff of thought is historical stuff―no matter how abstract, general, or pure it may become in philosophic or scientific theory. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
307:Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other’s windows and they always agree on everything. ~ Charles D Ambrosio, #NFDB
308:I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
309:Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
310:The Divine is a Being and not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Mystery of Love, #NFDB
311:there are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation. ~ Patricia Wentworth, #NFDB
312:This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does. ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
313:Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
314:Ethics is not just an abstract intellectual discipline. It is about the conflicts that arise in trying to meet real human needs and values. ~ John Ziman, #NFDB
315:People are stupid and talk a lot of shit. But only in the abstract. They are loud-mouthed in their machismo and silent in their cowardice. ~ Rory Miller, #NFDB
316:the greatest illusion of the abstract ego is that it can do anything to bring about radical improvement either in itself or in the world. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
317:The Lord’s sovereignty over Israel is not an abstract concept. He speaks to the will of Israel, summoning its people to follow him. ~ Thomas R Schreiner, #NFDB
318:Well, I’m afraid you’ll think it so prosy. We always begin at the abstract end of things, and you can’t begin this story anywhere else. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
319:It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
320:Stories attract us; abstract details repel us. Consequently, entertaining side issues and backstories are prioritised over relevant facts. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
321:Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
322:If what charms you is nothing but abstract principles, sit down and turn them over quietly in your mind: but never dub yourself a Philosopher. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
323:Know what your sin is and confess it; but do not imagine that you have approved yourself a penitent by confessing sin in the abstract. ~ Theodore L Cuyler, #NFDB
324:Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
325:My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that. ~ Donald Byrd, #NFDB
326:I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
327:I love my mystery, I love the abstract world I live in, the delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously, wordless sensations I experience. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
328:I tried to put on a smile but, being too cold, I could only manage a grin. That’s one reason why I don’t like winter: smiles become abstract. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
329:Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride. ~ Nicolas Cage, #NFDB
330:... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning. ~ James Bryant Conant, #NFDB
331:...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things. ~ Constantin Brancusi, #NFDB
332:The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable. ~ Robert K Merton, #NFDB
333:The science of mathematics treats its object as though it were something abstracted mentally, whereas it is not abstract in reality. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
334:Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. ~ Joan Mitchell, #NFDB
335:Do not talk to me of goodness, of abstract justice, of nature law. Necessity is the highest law, public welfare is the highest justice. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
336:Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
337:Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
338:The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
339:began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
340:I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
341:So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
342:But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine. ~ Dominique de Menil, #NFDB
343:Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretical stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
344:It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
345:Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
346:There's no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
347:Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else. ~ Eric Maisel, #NFDB
348:I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless. ~ Jonas Mekas, #NFDB
349:In short, it is much easier to see a thing through from the point of view of abstract principle than from that of concrete responsibility. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
350:Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures. ~ Henri Poincare, #NFDB
351:The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
352:We are not in a mincing lady's boudoir; we are, as it were, two abstract beings in a balloon, who have met in order to speak out the truth. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
353:When you "spell" a word correctly, you
are in effect casting a spell, charging these abstract, arbitrary symbols with meaning and power. ~ Christopher Vogler,#NFDB
354:Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
355:I don't like [to] make a woman ... an abstract concept of the fashion. I don't like [to] say, "You must wear that." ... I am not a dictator. ~ Yves Saint Laurent, #NFDB
356:In a dream I cannot see
tangled abstract phallacy
random turmoil builds in me
i'm a addicted to chaos
-Megadeth, Addicted to Chaos ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
357:It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
358:We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation. ~ Alexander Herzen, #NFDB
359:How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
360:In the word 'technology,' however, the suffix, 'logy' modifies the stem 'techno' so as to make it an abstract word meaning "the logic of building. ~ David Keirsey, #NFDB
361:it is possible to hypothesize that a dorsal ‘mentalizing’ subnetwork is relatively more engaged in creating situated conceptualizations when abstract, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
362:While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
363:Abstract academic discussions have a way of leaving their mark on entire civilizations, as the events of this century have proved all too well. ~ Michael D O Brien, #NFDB
364:But it is a pipe." "No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever. ~ John Green, #NFDB
365:The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
366:There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete. ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
367:We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. ~ Salvador Dal, #NFDB
368:And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints. ~ Elizabeth McCracken, #NFDB
369:Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things. ~ Sarah Manguso, #NFDB
370:Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. ~ Nicolas Cage, #NFDB
371:Mathematics, even in its present and most abstract state, is not detached from life. It is just the ideal handling of the problems of life. ~ Cassius Jackson Keyser, #NFDB
372:We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
373:How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think! ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
374:I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis, ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
375:i began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
376:I expected him to do his usual thing of "Oh, Sophie, but that is impossible b/c of this big word, and that big word, and also this abstract concept. ~ Rachel Hawkins, #NFDB
377:Plenty of philosophical men live in abstract regions, debating types and shadows. The rarer sort is the reader and thinker who can see the world whole. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
378:Quantum physics is no longer an abstract theory for specialists. We must now absolutely include it in our education and also in our culture. ~ Claude Cohen Tannoudji, #NFDB
379:To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. ~ Ben Shahn, #NFDB
380:Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman's mind beauty is something she needs to touch. ~ Jean Giraudoux, #NFDB
381:But it is a pipe."
"No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever. ~ John Green,#NFDB
382:Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
383:She'd grown up believing in hell in an abstract nightmare way; but west Texas had given her something more concrete upon which to dread the afterlife. ~ Cherie Priest, #NFDB
384:The abstract and the concrete side of operations are opposites, but you can't have one without the other, if, that is, you want get the job done well. ~ David Keirsey, #NFDB
385:the right hemisphere works smoothly with the limbic level of organization, whereas the left hemisphere is more ideally suited to the abstract functions of ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
386:Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
387:Atwater gave the boy twopence and began to bite the apple. It was green and tasted of absolutely nothing. It was like eating material in the abstract. ~ Anthony Powell, #NFDB
388:Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it. ~ Roy Lichtenstein, #NFDB
389:Growing up in Eastern Europe you learn very youg that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people's everyday lives. ~ Slavenka Drakuli, #NFDB
390:If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
391:Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
392:All our abstract intelligence is good for is constructing systems, or semi-systematic ideas, which for animals is a simple matter of lying in the sun. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
393:All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability. ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
394:Humans, even with our powerful brains and capacity for abstract thought, are still slaves to our emotions, which dogs will pick up on and resonate with. ~ Gregory Berns, #NFDB
395:My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash - like something you caught out of the corner of your eye, but in the picture you can look at it directly. ~ Andrew Wyeth, #NFDB
396:All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards. ~ Paul Feyerabend, #NFDB
397:caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, #NFDB
398:Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us? ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
399:I expected him to do his usual thing of "Oh, Sophie, but that is impossible because of this big word, and that big word, and also this abstract concept. ~ Rachel Hawkins, #NFDB
400:It is impossible to be completely abstract about clothes because they have no life unless they are worn. They must fit onto a body or they do not exist. ~ Elizabeth Hawes, #NFDB
401:To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events. ~ Teresa de Lauretis, #NFDB
402:I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
403:It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract ~ I M Pei, #NFDB
404:Wisdom is an absolute positivism which regards only what can be grasped by direct experience as real, and everything else as unreal, abstract, and illusory. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
405:Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
406:One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
407:People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it's an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security. ~ James Gosling, #NFDB
408:Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible. ~ Feist, #NFDB
409:By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man ; not of Tree, only a tree. ~ Neil Postman, #NFDB
410:Do you know what a two-headed camel fucking a rocking chair looks like? I do. It looks like the shitty abstract painting that hangs over my therapist's desk. ~ Ryan C Thomas, #NFDB
411:I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination. ~ Ralph Eugene Meatyard, #NFDB
412:Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience. ~ Benjamin Wiker, #NFDB
413:The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations. ~ Ada Lovelace, #NFDB
414:The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are absolute. They are released from any already existant thing in nature and their content lies in themselves. ~ Naum Gabo, #NFDB
415:we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity—we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
416:When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality. ~ Julie Taymor, #NFDB
417:All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend, #NFDB
418:Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising. ~ David Ogilvy, #NFDB
419:Considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development... might be carried as far as possible. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
420:In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject. ~ Paul Tillich, #NFDB
421:I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts. ~ A J Ayer, #NFDB
422:I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall. ~ Frank Stella, #NFDB
423:Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that seems abstract - sustainable development - and turn it into a reality for all the world's people ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
424:Specific music starts feeding my imagination and gives me a landscape that corresponds somehow, in some abstract way, to the world I'm just starting to imagine. ~ Jim Jarmusch, #NFDB
425:When she was fifteen if you'd told her that when she was twenty she'd be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
426:Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
427:Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
428:I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture. ~ Christian Marclay, #NFDB
429:I have tried to integrate the spirituality into the training in a way that meets my need not to destroy the beauty of it through abstract philosophizing. ~ Marshall B Rosenberg, #NFDB
430:I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can. ~ Virgil Thomson, #NFDB
431:Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
432:My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen. ~ Dana Gioia, #NFDB
433:Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout. ~ Lawren Harris, #NFDB
434:Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
435:Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. ~ Mark Fisher, #NFDB
436:Charlotte Yates didn’t especially care for music. All that abstract mooning about. Words, that was what moved people. A good play was worth a thousand symphonies. ~ Magnus Flyte, #NFDB
437:I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints abstract colors but wants to show that he does so because he chooses to, not because he can't draw. ~ Clarice Lispector, #NFDB
438:There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious - in the abstract, anyway. ~ Lydia Davis, #NFDB
439:Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
440:From Jung I took courage to tell my patients not to put their faith in abstract concepts. Put your faith in your own unconscious, your own dreams. ~ Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work, #NFDB
441:I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
442:I’m arguing that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure, which is by definition an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
443:Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them. ~ William James, #NFDB
444:Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
445:Our relationship with places is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think. ~ Tony Hiss, #NFDB
446:It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
447:The Indian languages are extremely barbarous and barren, and very ill fitted for communicating things moral and divine, or even things speculative and abstract. ~ Jonathan Edwards, #NFDB
448:But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
449:Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
450:He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
451:To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
452:We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn't hear it. ~ Arto Lindsay, #NFDB
453:I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
454:Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. ~ Martin Amis, #NFDB
455:The movement of abstract art... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture. ~ Meyer Schapiro, #NFDB
456:You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract. ~ Talib Kweli, #NFDB
457:If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years. ~ Mark Edward, #NFDB
458:It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society . ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
459:There were many markings in pencil, and those strange symbols again, dashed off, it seemed, revealing their opacity what a complex and abstract thing written language is. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
460:The work of Christian intellectuals is not done in the abstract; it is effective participation in the preservation of the world, and in the building up of the church. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
461:When I'm not working on a children's book, I'm painting abstract paintings. That's probably the most joyous thing for me as an artist. But I do love children's books. ~ Mary GrandPre, #NFDB
462:But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
463:I guess I have no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if they sometimes read as abstract. I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche. ~ Joe Bradley, #NFDB
464:My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow. ~ Caitlin Thomas, #NFDB
465:Now faith is not what we
hereafter have we have a
world resting on nothing
Rest was never more than
abstract since it is empty
reality we cannot escape ~ Susan Howe,#NFDB
466:With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me. ~ Kurt Wagner, #NFDB
467:After all, it is a lot of trouble to hate people, isn’t it? And a lot of trouble to be angry, and a lot of trouble to bother with such abstract notions as guilt or revenge. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
468:For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
469:I don't see Dior as something that could become mine. I see it as a dialogue with the women who wear it. I want to stay connected to them rather than to an abstract brand. ~ Raf Simons, #NFDB
470:I'm this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive. ~ Natsuo Kirino, #NFDB
471:Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification. ~ Michael Ignatieff, #NFDB
472:My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
473:The true miracle is that abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that predicts and describes a vast universe full of the amazing variety that we see. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
474:When she was fifteen if you'd told her
that when she was twenty she'd be going
to bed with bald-headed men and liking it,
she would have thought you very abstract. ~ H G Wells,#NFDB
475:I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise. ~ Pam Gems, #NFDB
476:Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration. ~ William James, #NFDB
477:The body should not just be something you see. It's also the inside of it. It's frightening and abstract and much more than pretty or not pretty. The shape of it is boring. ~ Jenny Hval, #NFDB
478:But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready to distort the truth, ready to hear nor see anything, as long as he can justify his logic. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
479:Constructions of a-rhythmical forms, the clash between concrete and abstract forms... ...The acute angle is passionate and dynamic, expressing will and a penetrating force. ~ Carlo Carra, #NFDB
480:I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it. ~ Chuck Close, #NFDB
481:I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts. ~ Richard Schmid, #NFDB
482:It points, for instance, to the fact that there is never an abstract, single 'Christian answer' to an issue to which all Christians are bound to adhere or conform. ~ William Stringfellow, #NFDB
483:I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. ~ Henry Flynt, #NFDB
484:Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. ~ Walter Pater, #NFDB
485:Music is an essential part of everything we do. Like puppetry, music has an abstract quality which speaks to a worldwide audience in a wonderful way that nourishes the soul. ~ Jim Henson, #NFDB
486:Theology isn't what drove them to their...theology." author writes on dealing with the embittering experience of those who protect a wounded place with abstract arguments. ~ Andy Stanley, #NFDB
487:When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
488:I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
489:Of course, knowledge is also important because without it we cannot know what God requires. However, knowledge and truth remain abstract unless we commune with God in prayer. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
490:To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction ~ William James, #NFDB
491:When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive knowledge. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
492:Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
493:Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
494:Our greatest sufferings do not lie in the present, as intuitive representations or immediate feeling, but rather in reason, as abstract concepts, tormenting thoughts. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
495:I did grow up in a rough neighborhood in Portland, which is an abstract concept for anybody who's rolled through Portland because now it looks like a TV set, literally. ~ Esperanza Spalding, #NFDB
496:If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
497:Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
it in a useful way. ~ Jaron Lanier,#NFDB
498:Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is “dying,” can avert the complete denaturing of the world. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
499:Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
500:Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
501:Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
502:The individual is the only reality. The further we move away from the individual toward abstract ideas about Homo Sapiens, the more likely we are to fall into error. P. 45 ~ Carl Gustav Jung, #NFDB
503:When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
504:You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye. ~ Clement Greenberg, #NFDB
505:Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
506:Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
507:Harappan pottery is distinctive, with designs in black, of plants, birds and abstract forms, frequently painted on a red surface. Pottery is a clue to locating Harappan sites, ~ Romila Thapar, #NFDB
508:He always looked at her in a studious way, as if he was trying to piece her together like she was a marble puzzle. A statue he was constructing from parts of her abstract soul. ~ Sarah Noffke, #NFDB
509:I'm trying not to delve into my world of abstraction and self-indulgence. But I haven't. When I sit down and I try not to [be abstract], it comes out really forced and awkward. ~ Spencer Krug, #NFDB
510:There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art. ~ Jean Dubuffet, #NFDB
511:We aren’t really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
512:Art comes into being in that abstract interval between a thought and reality, and no one - not even the artist who created it - can remeasure the influences that caused it. ~ Edgar Alwin Payne, #NFDB
513:Expansion and contraction’s mystic act
Created touch and friction in the void,
Into abstract emptiness brought clash and clasp: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life,#NFDB
514:One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
515:There is nothing more incredible and moving and appealing than good music, and it cannot always be reduced to a story, to exposition. It's so much more abstract and brilliant. ~ Sufjan Stevens, #NFDB
516:We shall find the abstract equivalent for all forms & elements in the universe, then we shall combine them in sculptural constructions according to the mood of our inspiration. ~ Giacomo Balla, #NFDB
517:An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind— ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
518:Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past. ~ James G Frazer, #NFDB
519:I am fine, though it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist or abstract. I suppose I'll explore one or all of these things. ~ Cindy Sherman, #NFDB
520:Love is like that, fragile and light. No wonder it rests upon our hearts in intangible moments, bids us follow fleeting thoughts and ideas and pursue our abstract imaginings. ~ Belinda Peregrin, #NFDB
521:There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
522:We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
523:Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, #NFDB
524:A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
525:Death can be successfully put out of mind for the simple reason that it is beyond human experience. Death is either the abstract concept of nonexistence or the emotion of fear. ~ Lidiya Ginzburg, #NFDB
526:Hope isn't an abstract theory about where human aspirations end and the impossible begins; it's a never-ending experiment, continually expanding the boundaries of the possible. ~ Paul Rogat Loeb, #NFDB
527:It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without a choice of fabric - without a practical or visual reality. ~ Giorgio Armani, #NFDB
528:It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
529:Let me first say that I don't think the millennium target of cutting global poverty in half is an impossible or abstract target. I think it is a real and achievable goal. ~ Gro Harlem Brundtland, #NFDB
530:Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
531:Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day. ~ Marcus Buckingham, #NFDB
532:Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque, A dull dark white against the day’s pale white And abstract larches in the neutral light. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
533:The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo. Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
534:We care about knowledge because knowledge is crucial to a worthwhile, valuable life. The questions of epistemology may be abstract, but their importance to our lives is vital. ~ Duncan Pritchard, #NFDB
535:A little too abstract, a little too wise, It is time for us to kiss the earth again, It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies, Let the rich life run to the roots again. ~ Robinson Jeffers, #NFDB
536:As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
537:I'm not in any way trying to make statements that are not also invaded by emotions and abstract ideas that I don't really understand myself. It's more interesting when I can do that. ~ Jenny Hval, #NFDB
538:I was an abstract expressionist before I had seen any abstract expressionist paintings. I started when I was a kid and continued just doing abstract stuff all through high school. ~ Dennis Hopper, #NFDB
539:There's art on the show that's really bad - these cliché Abstract Expressionist gestural things. It's almost like extensions of my performance, because in the scene I'm really mad. ~ James Franco, #NFDB
540:Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers. ~ Kathryn Lasky, #NFDB
541:I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism. ~ Barbara Hepworth, #NFDB
542:Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult. ~ Gilles Deleuze, #NFDB
543:what can be more solemn and absurd, considered in the abstract, than, symbolizing the existence of the other sex by taking off a portion of your clothing and waving it in the air? ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
544:If the fact that brutes abstract not be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number. ~ George Berkeley, #NFDB
545:I'm such a perfectionist. I always feel overpraised or whatever. In the abstract, I know I'm a good person, a good professional. But it's nice to be noticed a little bit, ain't it? ~ Jack Nicholson, #NFDB
546:It's easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand. When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It's not easy to be moved by abstract things. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa, #NFDB
547:Might it also be that creating narratives around murder allows a measure of comfort? Murder in the abstract is terrifying; in the details, you realise it has nothing to do with you. ~ Emily Maguire, #NFDB
548:No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
549:Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation. ~ James Weldon Johnson, #NFDB
550:The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being. ~ James G Frazer, #NFDB
551:Abstract expression is so solid, so successful and recognizable, but there's a mystery about the artists that goes into it, a fetishism about the artists themselves and who they were. ~ Keanu Reeves, #NFDB
552:Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument. ~ Plato, #NFDB
553:I don't want my generals or my defense secretary or my national-security team to ever feel deploying weapons to kill people as routine or abstract, even if the targets are bad people. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
554:Music, the most abstract and uncanny art, is an eternal river of sound moving through time. We can free ourselves from whatever may be holding us back, and join that flowing river. ~ William Westney, #NFDB
555:Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
556:Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
557:The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence. ~ Fred Brooks, #NFDB
558:When they were things he was afraid to do, he made himself do them. When they were abstract ideas, he told himself not to dwell on what wasn’t rational and what was out of his control. ~ Mara Wilson, #NFDB
559:Abstract thinking can lead us no further than to intellectual sophistries, which are invariably used as shields and subterfuges and are calculated to prevent the realization of the whole. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
560:And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting. ~ Robert Rauschenberg, #NFDB
561:But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
562:Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict. ~ Saul Alinsky, #NFDB
563:Experiences that don’t involve touching, seeing, or feeling actual results, such as being presented with an abstract sheet of numbers, are shown to be non-impactful and easily forgotten. ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
564:The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
565:What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation. ~ Hans Hofmann, #NFDB
566:But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
567:Freedom is too abstract a concept: You can’t eat it, fuck it, sit under it when it rains or even do very much with it besides get in trouble and have it taken away from you again. Most ~ Cintra Wilson, #NFDB
568:Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
569:If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse. ~ Michael Craig Martin, #NFDB
570:A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
571:If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography. ~ E J Hughes, #NFDB
572:My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like "recognition" and "credit" warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
573:Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics. ~ John P Kotter, #NFDB
574:The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
575:trying to convert an existing class from concrete to abstract by pushing just the concrete parts down into a new subclass, you might accidentally leave remnants of concrete behavior behind. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
576:1. A green-glass beanstalk
2. An abstract representation of a tree
3. A greener, glassier, uglier Washington Monument
4. The Jolly Green Giant's gigantic jolly green phallus. ~ John Green,#NFDB
577:A mobile is an abstract sculpture made chiefly out of sheet metal, steel rods, wire and wood. Some or all of these elements move, propelled by electric motors, wind, water or by hand. ~ Alexander Calder, #NFDB
578:It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
579:After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since. ~ Robert Bateman, #NFDB
580:An abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
581:A right , in the abstract, is a fact ; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. ~ Voltairine de Cleyre, #NFDB
582:I want to say my life inspires my lyrics, but I also try to abstract them as much as possible because I don't want to refer to my life explicitly. I'm definitely really embarrassed by my lyrics. ~ Grimes, #NFDB
583:People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know. ~ Jessica Livingston, #NFDB
584:This is what it means to be human: slaughtering the people we might have been. Metaphor or reality, abstract quantum formalism or flesh-and-blood truth, there’s nothing I can do to change it. ~ Greg Egan, #NFDB
585:To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
586:What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source. ~ Terry Brooks, #NFDB
587:What they didn’t want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source. ~ Terry Brooks, #NFDB
588:Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression. ~ Etel Adnan, #NFDB
589:A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again. ~ Robinson Jeffers,#NFDB
590:I know a lot of choreographers prefer to do abstract dance and not be bothered with a story, but even when I'm asked to do classical ballet or a modern piece, I still want to tell a story. ~ Susan Stroman, #NFDB
591:The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
592:Friendship's an abstract of this noble flame, 'Tis love refin'd, and purged from all its dross, 'Tis next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong in passion is, though not so gross. ~ Katherine Philips, #NFDB
593:I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway house between things, like myself, that are nothing. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
594:I'm interested in producing truncated shapes in proportion to the frame and composition, shapes that are preferably luminous. I'm not interested in the full-figure. I want to abstract forms. ~ Ralph Gibson, #NFDB
595:Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
596:I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive. ~ Gunter Brus, #NFDB
597:Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract reason of all laws. ~ Henry St John 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, #NFDB
598:Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
599:The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
600:Universalism is a corruption of objectivity. Whereas objectivity is achieved from particular things, universalism claims to define particularity from an abstract notion posed arbitrarily. ~ Alain de Benoist, #NFDB
601:Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. ~ Gilles Deleuze, #NFDB
602:You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing. ~ Jim Henson, #NFDB
603:Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
604:I am not alone is doubting the imperative to respect cultures, as opposed to persons; and I believe we can respect persons only inasmuch as we consider them as abstract rights-holders. ~ Kwame Anthony Appiah, #NFDB
605:I cannot so abstract myself from myself as to judge myself … ; another has an impartial judgement; through him I correct, complete, extend my own judgement, my own taste, my own knowledge. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
606:Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
607:Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. “The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
608:The second general division of names is into concrete and abstract. A concrete name is a name which stands for a thing; an abstract name is a name which stands for an attribute of a thing. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
609:To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
610:Concepts that had eluded him because they could not be shaped with images and feelings alone, but needed the rich subtlety of abstract language to shape and anchor them with a webbery of symbols. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
611:Success comes in an emerging set of abstract concepts that makes sense of all the detail. This distillation is a rigorous expression of the particular knowledge that has been found most relevant. ~ Eric Evans, #NFDB
612:The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places. ~ Sam Keen, #NFDB
613:The sovereignty of God deals not only with abstract principles but with real lines of authority. God has the right
to issue commands, to impose obligations, and to bind the consciences of men. ~ R C Sproul,#NFDB
614:Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
615:Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: "He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community." A community is not an abstract ideal. ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
616:Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
617:patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost ‘abstract’ and ‘propositional’ thought—and compares them with dogs (or, rather, he compares dogs to patients with aphasia). ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
618:There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this theres certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it. ~ J C Chandor, #NFDB
619:At times we would have these whole cities that would take up rooms and stretch out all over the house. But they were also very abstract, like 'this piece of cardboard is a pool' and so forth. ~ Ellen Gallagher, #NFDB
620:My advice to those who which to learn the art of scientific prophesy is not to rely on abstract reason, but to decipher the secret language of Nature from Nature's documents: the facts of experience. ~ Max Born, #NFDB
621:Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves. ~ Jean Dubuffet, #NFDB
622:Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
623:America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
624:Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
625:Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. ~ Jackson Pollock, #NFDB
626:He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realized that most people were not actually doing the reading. ~ Sally Rooney, #NFDB
627:In the 1960s, when abstract expressionism was the reigning style, those art students who tended to be sullen, brooding, and antisocial were thought by their teachers to be very creative. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
628:Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole. ~ Edith Stein, #NFDB
629:I think they should have movies in restaurants. I can't believe that so many people get together just to sit there. It's so abstract... isn't it abstract? What are these people sitting here watching? ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
630:As Buddhist teachers often point out, knowledge, in the sense of prajña, is not knowledge about anything. There is no abstract knower of an experience that is separate from the experience itself. ~ Francisco Varela, #NFDB
631:Electronic music lends itself to an abstract way of storytelling, so it keeps evolving. Theres a whole movement truly driving music further and there is no other music innovating as much as film music ~ Hans Zimmer, #NFDB
632:Getting dressed for a woman is an art form, surreal, vaguely abstract, figurative and byzantine. When you undress a woman you enter her subconscious kingdom, her scents, her secrets and her fantasy. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB
633:It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me. ~ Jose Padilha, #NFDB
634:There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. ~ Bruce Rosenblum, #NFDB
635:The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
636:But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
637:For Christians it is a happening, an event, that we affirm and respond to, regardless of the ebbs and flows of our abstract theological reflections concerning the source and nature of this happening. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
638:I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa, #NFDB
639:In the civil society, the individual is recognized and accepted as more than an abstract statistic or faceless member of some group; rather, he is a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience. ~ Mark Levin, #NFDB
640:It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
641:My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
642:And whence comes this courage? — because such HEARTS LIVE IN SOME MORE ABSTRACT AND HOLIER LIFE THAN THEIR OWN. BUT TO LIVE FOREVER UPON THIS EARTH IS TO LIVE IN NOTHING DIVINER THAN OURSELVES. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton, #NFDB
643:elders serve as conduits between the divine realm and the mundane world, making the abstract truths of spirituality accessible to the community by embodying them in their everyday behavior. ~ Zalman Schachter Shalomi, #NFDB
644:I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
645:The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
646:Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
647:But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. I ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
648:Exclusively of the abstract science, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825)., #NFDB
649:Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
650:the further we move in distance, the more general and abstract our perspective and our interpretation become; and the further we move from our own perspective, the wider the picture we are able to consider ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
651:There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract it's interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
652:Adopting an attitude of universal responsibility is essentially a personal matter. The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in our daily life. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
653:Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake, that even if it hurts you today, even if it hurts others, being honest is still the right thing to do. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
654:He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
655:I want to see abstract art move. Especially in the '30s, you had animators doing innovative work, and I was entranced by that. It's basically what you see when you close your eyes, when you fall asleep. ~ Michel Gondry, #NFDB
656:There is only one '' principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
657:unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone's life. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
658:A culture is not an abstract thing. It is a living, evolving process. The aim is to push beyond standard-setting and asserting human rights to make those standards a living reality for people everywhere. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
659:And before any of that can happen, there must be some major changes in the way society views and values privacy, security, liberty, trust, and a handful of other abstract concepts that are defining this ~ Bruce Schneier, #NFDB
660:And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way. ~ Aspen Matis, #NFDB
661:History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
662:What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
663:I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves...I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion. ~ Daniel Day Lewis, #NFDB
664:I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars. ~ Yves Klein, #NFDB
665:I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman. ~ Jean Michel Basquiat, #NFDB
666:[My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge. ~ Nicolas Provost, #NFDB
667:Soloveitchik’s use redeems the word of redemption itself, sweeps away the more abstract and amorphous idea swirling in its wake, and focuses redemption as the right and the ability to control how you tell your ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
668:These days people believe they can go into art and make a living. We didn't have that. The abstract expressionists were older, by the time they even got a show. Now people come right out of school and sell. ~ Brice Marden, #NFDB
669:The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control. ~ Michael Ignatieff, #NFDB
670:Any serious reading of the Bible means personal involvement in it, not symbol mental agreement with abstract propositions. And involvement is dangerous, because it leaves one open to unforeseen conclusions. ~ Megan McKenna, #NFDB
671:I lost the power of attending to impressions per se, and always abstracted from them and sought the scientific and intellectual and abstract that lay behind them, so that it wouldn't have occurred to me, ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
672:Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in isolation. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
673:...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
674:The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects. ~ John C Wright, #NFDB
675:Women- except in abstract gatherings such as conferences- do not use "we"; men say "women," and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
676:Working on the editorial page had sharpened Whitney's mind and coarsened her feelings, so she treated every subject as theoretical and abstract. Devil's advocate? Whitney could have been the devil's mentor. ~ Laura Lippman, #NFDB
677:3 [trans.] used with an abstract noun so that the phrase formed has the same meaning as the verb related to the noun used, e.g., “lay the blame on” means ‘to blame’: she laid great stress on little courtesies. ~ Erin McKean, #NFDB
678:"All ideas of self-improvement and of becoming or getting something in the future relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves. Our true, nonconceptual self is already the Buddha, and needs no improvement." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
679:But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
680:Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
681:When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone? ~ Jenny Han, #NFDB
682:Zen perceives and feels, and does not abstract and meditate. Zen penetrates and is finally lost in the immersion. Meditation, on the other hand, is outspokenly dualistic and consequently inevitably superficial. ~ D T Suzuki, #NFDB
683:But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
684:in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
685:There had always been the rumour that one of the old heptarchs had squirreled away a collection of heretical calendrical erotica. Just how you made abstract algebra erotic was going to have to remain a mystery. ~ Yoon Ha Lee, #NFDB
686:The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children. ~ Teresa Wright, #NFDB
687:What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas. ~ Ed Askew, #NFDB
688:When we can no longer divide, we are beyond Nature and approach the causal Cause, the abstract Cause. This is why the whole of metaphysics, all creation, is situated between the numbers One and Two. ~ R A Schwaller de Lubicz, #NFDB
689:I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative. ~ Glen Hansard, #NFDB
690:Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit. ~ Alex Grey, #NFDB
691:There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men in their various relations with each other, in whatever circumstances they may be, that they will neither injure nor be injured. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
692:as masters of technical weapons we are fighting the environment as if we still believed ourselves to be strangers on the earth, sent down into this world from a purely abstract, ideational, and spiritual heaven. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
693:Babies are whole people – sentient, aware, intuitive and communicative. They are natural learners, explorers, and scientists able to test hypotheses, solve problems, and understand language and abstract ideas. ~ Janet Lansbury, #NFDB
694:It is not true that everything changes; the things that change are all the manifest and material things. There is something that does not change; and that is precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
695:What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
696:by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
697:Everybody enjoys the freedom he deserves, which is measured by the stature and dignity of his person or by his function, and not by the abstract and elementary fact of merely being a 'human being' or a 'citizen'. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
698:He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in [London]. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Final Problem ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
699:I always wanted to make an abstract photograph. I would photograph walls, sports interiors, marks on the walls people made. Even looking back it makes so much sense. It's like it was a fight against the photograph. ~ Idris Khan, #NFDB
700:Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance. ~ Henry Watson Fowler, #NFDB
701:The design is a really flat primary color with all sorts of abstract geometric shapes, just implying something. And then you'd have your characters running from something with guns. It was very expressionistic. ~ Don Hertzfeldt, #NFDB
702:Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
703:It’s no surprise that readers are better people. Having experienced someone else’s life through abstract eyes, they’ve learned what it’s like to leave their bodies and see the world through other frames of reference. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
704:The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater, and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative. Everything feels less rehearsed. It’s more experimental than classical. ~ Emmanuel Lubezki, #NFDB
705:There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
706:The trouble with us is that we expect too much from the great happenings, the unusual things, and we overlook the common flowers on the path of life, from which we might abstract sweets, comforts, delights. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
707:The underlying attraction of the movement of water and sand is biological. If we look more deeply we can see it as the basis of an abstract idea linking ourselves with the limitless mechanics of the universe. ~ Geoffrey Jellicoe, #NFDB
708:Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
709:[Western] people do not understand that a man's knowledge depends on the level of his being. If knowledge gets far ahead of being, it becomes theoretical and abstract and inapplicable to life and actually harmful. ~ GI Gurdjieff, #NFDB
710:It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
711:The environment is rarely put on tape, or if it is, it's so abstract that most people never realize it. They just don't know what it means. But if you can show it to them, then that's what becomes the main instrument. ~ Ry Cooder, #NFDB
712:Man is subordinate to certain absolute values; there is no delight in the human form leading to its natural reproduction; it is always distorted to fit the more abstract forms which convey intense religious emotion. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
713:On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
714:There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art. ~ Laura Nyro, #NFDB
715:common reference to abstract labor. Marx therefore notes: “Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is intrinsic to commodities, namely labour-time” (Capital, 1:188). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
716:I didn't have a regular school experience and wanted a more abstract way of learning. I started exploring in lots of different creative ways. It gave me the opportunity to travel and play music, so it was good for me. ~ Brie Larson, #NFDB
717:patriarchal academic hierarchies in science and technology are now overspecialized and abstract, perhaps because they have systematically excluded women, as well as minorities, with challenging, alternative views. ~ Hazel Henderson, #NFDB
718:Women- except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences- do not use "we"; men say "women," and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects . ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
719:You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible. ~ David Cronenberg, #NFDB
720:Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all. ~ Donald Judd, #NFDB
721:He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics.... ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
722:I've always had an artistic hand. I took on paint when I started falling in love with the abstract expressionists. I approached it from a physical standpoint, but I've also been honing my compositional eye through film. ~ Billy Zane, #NFDB
723:Shum fan of abstract expressionism—Pollock. Gonna paint walls with yer blood. Splatter red and bone marrow.” There’s a first time for everything. Like meeting a troll who can make a better highbrow art joke than you can. ~ R R Virdi, #NFDB
724:That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent. ~ George Stigler, #NFDB
725:We tell our troubles to someone only to make him suffer, to make him assume them for himself. If we wanted to win him over, we would admit none but abstract worries, the only kind those who love us are eager to hear. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
726:When a person you love dies, it doesn't feel real. It's like it's happening to someone else. It's like someone else's life. I've never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone? ~ Jenny Han, #NFDB
727:When we tell our own story, we teach the values that our choices reveal, not as abstract principals, but as our lived experience. We reveal the kind of person we are to the extent that we let others identify with us. ~ Marshall Ganz, #NFDB
728:I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
729:She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
730:She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
731:That's what I always loved about [Federico] Fellini's films: You see the weird joy of the weird filmmaking family and the abstract craziness that goes along with it, and there's something about it that's quite beautiful. ~ Tim Burton, #NFDB
732:What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
733:For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding. ~ Paul Ricoeur, #NFDB
734:I was struggling to figure out how to combine the abstract and the representational. Painting, I suddenly understood how that aesthetic could fit together. That was a really fun game to figure out how that worked. ~ Margaux Williamson, #NFDB
735:Politicians of all stripes are always in danger at looking at every problem from an abstract point of view or being briefed by officials, academics, or economists who know every science but the science of human nature. ~ Jean Chretien, #NFDB
736:Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very different circumstances, including serious dangers. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
737:But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. ~ Romare Bearden, #NFDB
738:It is usually wise to extend this fidelity to the text, not only to its abstract doctrine, but to its imagery. Let the sermon wear, in the main, the same figurative drapery with the passage on which it is founded. ~ Robert Lewis Dabney, #NFDB
739:It's unfortunate that [Louis] Brandeis was not able to translate or abstract his devotion to cultural pluralism and racial equality as he put it for Jews to enslave people and their descendants and to African Americans. ~ Jeffrey Rosen, #NFDB
740:take our new philosophical insights and repeat them until they become new automatic habits. Philosophy is not merely a process of abstract reflection, but a practice. “We acquire the virtues by practice,” Aristotle wrote. ~ Jules Evans, #NFDB
741:The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
742:Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
743:Abstract can only be conceived of if conventional is experienced beforehand for we define things when we know their opposites. Material reality provides the means through which we can compare, contrast, and distinguish. ~ Raven Grimassi, #NFDB
744:A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
745:An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
746:He saw that the gods and goddesses were erroneously and superstitiously seen as humanoid or anthropomorphic entities whereas in fact there was only one true divinity or godhead, which was pure abstract consciousness. ~ Stephen E Flowers, #NFDB
747:I thought you saw meaning in that sort of thing," said Vorkosigan.
"In the abstract. Most days it's just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold,#NFDB
748:Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients. ~ Paul Rand, #NFDB
749:When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out - so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don't need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily. ~ Caio Fonseca, #NFDB
750:But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written; it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure and it does grow. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
751:If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics. ~ Jim Holt, #NFDB
752:I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. ~ Costa Gavras, #NFDB
753:I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
754:Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face. Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
755:On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light. ~ Freya Stark, #NFDB
756:Qualities like love and compassion are not just abstract virtues that are the property of saints and adepts. Anyone can develop these qualities in themselves by doing spiritual practices. As the Buddha said, Come and see. ~ Joanna Macy, #NFDB
757:The first thing we do is sit around a table and discuss what we could pick up from daily life, from space. That's how it starts, completely abstract. There's no kind of, "Oh, let's do Peru," or "Let's do pleats," you know? ~ Rei Kawakubo, #NFDB
758:A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
759:Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
760:She could be seen around town powdered white and made up in slashes of red around her mouth and blue around her eyes like an abstract of the American flag, some kind of commentary on her country, which of a sort she was. ~ Smith Henderson, #NFDB
761:This is the universal property of the human mind. Abstract rules form the core of everything from computer programs to grammars. Our results show that babies' minds are built to look for such rules - even without being told. ~ Gary Marcus, #NFDB
762:to surpass the unutterable despair expressed in that one chorus, 'Go where glory waits thee!' It was a requiem, a dirge, a moan, a howl, a wail, a lament, an abstract of everything that is sorrowful and hideous in sound. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
763:Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
764:Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
765:He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
766:Thus, far from speaking about abstract formal unities or abstract and formal rules of argumentation, people implicitly think and talk about the complexities and multiplicities that they face in real living social contexts. This ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
767:When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue. ~ Philip Guston, #NFDB
768:Forgiveness is a very abstract term. It doesn’t erase the past. It’s not a magical switch you can flip or a stained rug you can just turn over. It’s merely a scar that covers the deep, dark gash that hate carved in your soul. ~ Aly Martinez, #NFDB
769:Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if—especially if—it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
770:My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
771:Pantheism identifies man with Nature. whether its visible appearance, or its abstract essence. Personalism isolates, separates him from Nature; converts him from a part into the whole, into an absolute essence by himself. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
772:We often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas. ~ Daniel Libeskind, #NFDB
773:When we predicate of any thing an abstract name, we affirm of the thing that it is one or other of these five things; that it is a case of Existence, or of Co-existence, or of Causation, or of Sequence, or of Resemblance. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
774:I like things that reach a little further and are a little more abstract, but I don't think that's what I do naturally well. How I write naturally is probably what's furthest from me, and the most removed from what I understand. ~ Ryan Adams, #NFDB
775:The book was rife with abstract diagrams that blurred the boundaries between art, mathematics, and pornography. Triangles of stacked numbers, columns of those thorny letters, and cross sections of marine biological blasphemy. ~ Douglas Wynne, #NFDB
776:What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. ~ Walter Pater, #NFDB
777:Children born deaf of deaf parents have no language delay at all: being exposed to Sign from birth enables a baby to develop as full a vocabulary as the hearing, not just to describe the world, but to manipulate abstract concepts. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
778:For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation. ~ Sergei Eisenstein, #NFDB
779:Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents. ~ Felix Frankfurter, #NFDB
780:Its glimmerings lighted with the abstract word
A half-visible ground and travelling yard by yard
It mapped a system of the Self and God.
I could not live the truth it spoke and thought. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Satyavan and Savitri,#NFDB
781:Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts. ~ Joseph Stalin, #NFDB
782:No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
783:The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. ~ Kenneth Tynan, #NFDB
784:Those professions which are not so much involved in life itself as concerned with abstract truths are the most dangerous for the young man whose principles are not yet firm and whose convictions are not yet strong and unshakeable. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
785:Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the wilful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,-the vulgar. ~ Leigh Hunt, #NFDB
786:Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
787:I love my mystery, I love the abstract, fuyant world I live in as long as I don’t begin my work, the forcing out of delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously wordless sensations into something you can seize on—perhaps never. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
788:In the 1950s, John Nash disrupted the balance between geometry and analysis when he discovered that the abstract geometric problem of isometric embedding could be solved by the fine “peeling” of partial differential equations. ~ C dric Villani, #NFDB
789:It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
790:The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage, without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made. ~ Charles G Koch, #NFDB
791:When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other. ~ Georg Baselitz, #NFDB
792:In the old waterfall method, the business experts talk to the analysts, and analysts digest and abstract and pass the result along to the programmers, who code the software. This approach fails because it completely lacks feedback. ~ Eric Evans, #NFDB
793:Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
794:The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
795:Vedas are the earliest sacred scriptures of Hinduism and are full of abstract hymns containing esoteric concepts. The Puranas were written later and use stories and characters to make those esoteric concepts more accessible. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
796:What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life. ~ Marlene Dumas, #NFDB
797:When the memory became too faint, too abstract, it would transform itself into an old rotator cuff injury, a pain so thin yet so sharp that he could trace the line of it all the way across his shoulder blade and down his back. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
798:Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be. ~ Rebecca Miller, #NFDB
799:A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
800:But he doesn't understand that memory is abstract and chaotic. Memory isn't straightforward. It surfaces in sounds and images and feelings. He doesn't realised that in getting another person's memory, he will lose parts of himself ~ Cath Crowley, #NFDB
801:Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes? ~ Robert Musil, #NFDB
802:Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB
803:To love God and neighbor is not something abstract, but profoundly concrete: it means seeing in every person and face of the Lord to be served, to serve him concretely. And you are, dear brothers and sisters, in the face of Jesus. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
804:How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers. ~ Ellen Goodman, #NFDB
805:I grew up a faithful person. I never lost faith. I prayed every day all throughout my life. But at some point in life, my faith became fairly abstract. And I lost this belief that we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. ~ Carly Fiorina, #NFDB
806:Only the carrying out stamps the resolve; till then, it is always a mere intention that can be altered; it exists only in reason, in the abstract. Only in reflection are willing and acting different; in reality they are one. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
807:It's very nice to have someone that you can have a completely abstract conversation with and leave the room, feel like everything's fine, and then realize that if you pick it apart, you have absolutely no idea what either of you said. ~ Tim Burton, #NFDB
808:Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate. ~ David Mumford, #NFDB
809:At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
810:Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if—especially if—it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it. There’s ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
811:Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial. You’re exactly right. Absolutely. Hope, however, is limited, and generally abstract, while there are countless trials, and they tend to be concrete. That is also something I had to learn on my own. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
812:Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
813:A more meaningful grasp of essential Christian concepts like forgiveness, peace, love, patience, chastity, hospitality, and so on can enable people to recognize them as vivid and beautiful truths, not just abstract theological points. ~ Holly Ordway, #NFDB
814:I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible. ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
815:"The future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. What we know of the future is made up of purely abstract elements—it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
816:Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals. ~ Kenneth E Boulding, #NFDB
817:Film relates to almost every other form of expression, but poetry is a bit abstract in its strength and sometimes even the white spaces on the page are evocative almost as much as where the text is. Certain poets have played with that. ~ Jim Jarmusch, #NFDB
818:like abstract mathematics. Scientists have studied “brain plasticity,” the ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways based on new experiences. It appears that different types of plasticity are dominant at different ages. ~ John Elder Robison, #NFDB
819:O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself. ~ Louis Aragon, #NFDB
820:We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. ~ Ken Robinson, #NFDB
821:When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me. ~ Damien Hirst, #NFDB
822:Economics is not a true description of one kind of action but an abstract, arbitrary, and therefore erroneous description of all action; and the ‘economic man’ whom it describes is not, in these days, denied to be a fictitious entity ~ R G Collingwood, #NFDB
823:I wondered how my research into the mathematical theory of a game might change my life. In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. ~ Edward O Thorp, #NFDB
824:Sometimes people who feel fear in the human realm drop to a very low level of consciousness in their relationships and seek the safety and security of competence in the impersonal word of machines, mathematics, or abstract thought. ~ Nathaniel Branden, #NFDB
825:These brain regions are used every day for basic cognitive tasks, whether it’s abstract thinking, the ability to change one’s behavior in relation to changing demands in the environment, or the inhibition of inappropriate responses. ~ Frances E Jensen, #NFDB
826:You can’t think of maths just as this abstract thing that exists only in isolation. I genuinely struggle to find a topic where maths can’t offer you at least some use or insight. ~ Hannah Fry, In conversation with Hannah Fry Chalkdust Magazine (2015)., #NFDB
827:In a civilization devoted to the strictly abstract and mathematical ideal of making the most money in the least time, the only sure method of success is to cheat the customer, to sell various kinds of nothingness in pretentious packages. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
828:Sometimes I would open my eyes when we were kissing, I would watch him and I could see it. I could actually see LOVE - not words, not an emotion, not an abstract concept or a subjective state of mind, but a living, breathing thing. ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo, #NFDB
829:The music should highlight nuances within a collection. I always discard my initial music selection, but it's important to get those more obvious ideas on the table, that way you can move on to something more abstract, yet still relevant. ~ Mia Moretti, #NFDB
830:Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings ~ Frank Stella, #NFDB
831:A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot ~ William Boyd, #NFDB
832:For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
833:I was in a lot of pain, you see. But it had been caused by an abstract blade. What I mean is, the pain was physical, the cause wasn’t. I suppose some people would just say I was suffering from a broken heart. Or you might say it’s just life. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
834:Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
835:Thinking about more and more abstract concepts is a bit like the high jump. You have to get yourself over a progressively higher and higher bar, and if nobody explains how to do it, you will keep knocking the bar off and want to give up. ~ Eugenia Cheng, #NFDB
836:At first the difference will be in whatever atmosphere I bring into it. It's not going to be like, 'I really want to do The Daily Show and I'd love to turn it into an abstract musical.' I like the format and the chance to satirize the news. ~ Jon Stewart, #NFDB
837:Guilt was a fascinating thing: it seemed not to weaken over time. If anything it grew stronger as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract. And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity. ~ Michael Grant, #NFDB
838:To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing himself in reveries, a sea-voyage is full of subjects for meditation; but then they are the wonders of the deep and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes. ~ Washington Irving, #NFDB
839:Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
840:Wherever there's hope there's a trial. You're exactly right. Absolutely. Hope, however, is limited, and generally abstract, while there are countless trials, and they tend to be concrete. That is also something I had to learn on my own. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
841:you are good but you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.
is there anything less abstract
than dying everyday and
on the last day? ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
842:even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
843:In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis; we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us. ~ Murray Gell Mann, #NFDB
844:Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
845:It wasn't as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead, it seemed that...expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility instigated a transformation. ~ Vanessa Diffenbaugh, #NFDB
846:Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams. ~ Rudolf Arnheim, #NFDB
847:There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction. ~ Robert Rauschenberg, #NFDB
848:Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. ~ Richard Diebenkorn, #NFDB
849:As I’m debating running for the exit, Nash leans down to whisper at my ear.
“Is something wrong?”
“I feel like the only splash of color in an abstract painting.”
“You are the splash of color. But there’s nothing wrong with that. ~ Michelle Leighton,#NFDB
850:If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead. ~ Yukio Mishima, #NFDB
851:The abstract expressionists had that thing of, subject matter becomes content, content becomes form. And I always thought there was no room for style. I felt with my painting, the style really is the content. The style holds everything together. ~ Alex Katz, #NFDB
852:Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals. ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
853:In the documentary impulse, two species of 'fact' exist side by side: one is coolly objective and the other is fraught, diverse and emotive; one figurative, the other abstract; one prosaic, the other poetic; one factual, the other romantic. ~ Stuart Franklin, #NFDB
854:Nothing in our politics is any longer driven or designed by individual humans who have a name and a face; we have sunk from theism into impersonal and depersonalizing deism, a scheme of rule by alien and implacable abstract metaphysical forces. ~ Kenny Smith, #NFDB
855:The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion. ~ William Kentridge, #NFDB
856:The Human subject is the most important thing. My work is abstract in the sense of having been designed and composed, but it is not abstract in the sense of having no human content I want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away. ~ Jacob Lawrence, #NFDB
857:The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest. ~ Josiah Royce, #NFDB
858:Combien de gens se font abstraits pour para?tre profonds! La plupart des termes abstraits sont des ombres qui cachent des vides. How many people become abstract in order to appear profound! Most abstract terms are shadows that conceal a void. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
859:It is all too easy for a society to measure itself against some abstract philosophical principle or political slogan. But in the end, there must remain the question: What kind of life is one society providing to the people that live in it? ~ Hubert H Humphrey, #NFDB
860:I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
861:More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all--in order to become the public: that abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way, by all participants becoming a third party (an onlooker). ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
862:One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness. ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
863:The smaller the instrument or more hidden it is such as electronics, the more esoteric it becomes and in my mind becomes boring watching someone go like this and that has no direct... It's just a complete abstract motion, not attach to any sound. ~ Dan Deacon, #NFDB
864:Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. ~ William James, #NFDB
865:It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
866:Language like that went down well. Hitler had laced his earlier speeches with more abstract topics like the relationship between national strength and international justice, but he soon found that was not the language the mobs wanted to hear. In ~ David Irving, #NFDB
867:Oberlin being a liberal haven where opposition was king, the coolest clique at school was a group of rugby-playing, neon-wearing lesbians. They dominated every party with their Kate Bush-heavy mix tapes, abstract face paint, and pansexual energy. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
868:Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art. ~ Agnes Martin, #NFDB
869:Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us? ~ Storm Jameson, #NFDB
870:For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life. Another ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
871:From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these. ~ William James, #NFDB
872:I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
873:I am interested in the non-dramatic moments in life. I`m not at all attracted to making films that are about drama. A few years back, I saw a biopic about a famous American abstract expressionist artist. And you know what? It really horrified me. ~ Jim Jarmusch, #NFDB
874:If the world would only build temples to Machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect. The painter and sculptor would have plenty to do, and could, in complete peace and suitably honored, pursue their trade without further trouble. ~ Wyndham Lewis, #NFDB
875:Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
876:Let your works not be interrupted by the stupidities happening in your own country! Work and walk on your true path ignoring any kind of distractions! Abstract yourself from all the primitivenesses surrounding you! Concentrate on your work! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
877:The engine room really is a metaphor for my head, and all the things bangin' around, and I think I share that with a lot of people. A lot of memories, and a lot of hopes, and a lot of just dealing with the day-to-day. Sometimes it gets all abstract. ~ Mike Watt, #NFDB
878:The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions-each branch of our knowledge-passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious: the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
879:What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
880:At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you. ~ Lee Krasner, #NFDB
881:First I’ll tell you about the picture of the universe painted by modern physics: the geometry of the universe is not physical.” “Can you be a little less abstract?” “What if I put it this way: in the universe, apart from empty space, there is nothing. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
882:He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
883:I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way. ~ Karl Ove Knausgard, #NFDB
884:Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
885:And since no difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions, they never agreed in any opinion, and had long, indeed, been accustomed to jeer without anger, each at the other’s incorrigible aberrations. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
886:A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
887:Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
888:I blink rapidly, breaking our reverie and force myself to focus on something,anything, other than his beauty. Or his body. A body I want pressed against mine, limbs and tongues twisted and tangled, our flesh contortioned into X-rated abstract art... ~ S L Jennings, #NFDB
889:Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
890:The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point. ~ Ben Nicholson, #NFDB
891:When you live without someone for as long as I have, love becomes this abstract concept, something you attach to a memory. And when memories are that old, they feel like dreams, and you wonder if any of it was real, or if your mind created it all. ~ Laura Thalassa, #NFDB
892:If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract. ~ Parker J Palmer, #NFDB
893:I love you so much. Those impossible words kept playing in his head, terrifyingly abstract and surreal. He’d wanted to tell her back, he’d tried to but there was something inside, something holding him down, telling him no. Not you. You can’t love. It ~ Lucian Bane, #NFDB
894:It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression. ~ Agnes Martin, #NFDB
895:Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you dont fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract. ~ Rafael Vinoly, #NFDB
896:To love mankind merely in the abstract”, he once said, “is one face of a single coin, and on its other side is hatred of mankind in the abstract. To love in truth is to serve the suffering person before you, and to do what you can to assist him. ~ Michael D O Brien, #NFDB
897:A word is an abstract image, the imaginary thing, or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking power, it is the imagined thought: hence men, when they know the word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
898:Humans abstract and record information in five major ways: with writing, mathematical notation, painting/photography/videography, maps, and clocks—that is, we can abstract and record verbal, numerical, visual, spatial, and temporal information. ~ William J Bernstein, #NFDB
899:In general there is too staccato, too jerky, too hectic and hysterical a use of the sentence. Too dramatic, all highlights, and little or no relief. Too much use of abstract terms, of abstract emotions. Often culminating in slightly ridiculous hyperboles ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
900:I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music. ~ Rafael Vinoly, #NFDB
901:There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in proportion as his interests are abstract; and his elemental life as a unit in the human swarm, in which he must inevitably obey the laws laid down for him. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
902:We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men. ~ George Ripley, #NFDB
903:In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities. ~ Edward O Thorp, #NFDB
904:I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work. ~ William Eggleston, #NFDB
905:The boy Weneluke wove hand patterns with a string, working skillfully into abstract designs on all eight fingers: one of these represented a man and woman facing each other, and, by manipulating each sex, he arrived at a nice parody of copulation. ~ Peter Matthiessen, #NFDB
906:You have to act and this is something that happened in abstract expressionism too, it was a discovery particularly in De Kooning's paintings, great paintings. There's a lot of speed in his work and the speed produces things that only speed can produce. ~ Michael Snow, #NFDB
907:Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject. ~ Seymour Papert, #NFDB
908:What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender. ~ Terry Jones, #NFDB
909:Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can't tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it's the last thing to go. ~ Martin Amis, #NFDB
910:Pot is great for the abstract, for when you don't have to be regimented and for when you don't need parameters. When you're creating a song, there should never be any parameters, so being high is okay because your mind can wander all over the place. ~ Steve Lips Kudlow, #NFDB
911:An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind—yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
912:[...] Death is pretty New York-specific." [...] "I mean the way New Yorkers handle death," he clarified. "They don't know how to mourn for people they only sort-of know. It's too abstract for such an opinionated culture. That's why 9/11 was such a mess. ~ Sloane Crosley, #NFDB
913:I don't know if embarrassed is the right word, about pop, but I prefer the abstract and the distorted in music. And I keep writing these proper melodies and harmonies, and they're the bits that get thrown out of the records! And I have quite a collection. ~ Jason Pierce, #NFDB
914:"In describing the living processes of the psyche, I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
915:In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. ~ Ada Lovelace, #NFDB
916:I thought, enough of this, I'm not an abstract painter, what the hell am I going to do? Should I get a job in a shoe store, sell real estate, or what? I was really depressed by the whole thing, because I felt like a painter, yet I couldn't make paintings. ~ Ralph Goings, #NFDB
917:It seems abstract when you’re dealing with people online, but they are still people, and some of them are not nice people, not the kind you ever want to be in a room with."
Sometimes you don’t even need to be in the same room for the damage to be done. ~ Gayle Forman,#NFDB
918:Joy Rains has a gift. A gift for explaining abstract concepts like meditation through clever analogies and metaphors. FOR THE FIRST TIME in my hectic, harried life I actually UNDERSTAND how meditation is supposed to work and WHY I should give it a TRY! ~ Elisabeth Leamy, #NFDB
919:Mengistu does not understand the meaning of self-determination, either historically or in the abstract. He cannot conceive of a nation as anything but an absolute centralized authority, totalitarianism, for his rule is nothing less than that now. ~ Mengistu Haile Mariam, #NFDB
920:My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
921:Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn't matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
922:In the abstract world of American economists, equations run both ways; they believe that by changing the sign of a variable from plus to minus or from minus to plus or the price and quantity of x or y, the direction of historical movement can be reversed. ~ Robert Gilpin, #NFDB
923:Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
924:Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
925:Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,#NFDB
926:That's what I love about poetry, the more the abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure. Not a 100%. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
927:When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product. ~ Jonathan Ive, #NFDB
928:Abstract reasoning serves rather to fix the immediate cognition of the understanding for reason by setting it down in abstract concepts, that is, by making it clear,e i.e. putting it into a state to be interpreted for others, to make it meaningful.f – ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
929:In abstract mathematics, of course operations alter those particular relations which are involved in the considerations of number and space, and the results of operations are those peculiar results which correspond to the nature of the subjects of operation. ~ Ada Lovelace, #NFDB
930:The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of the" Great Breath," which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three aspects of the Absolute - Abstract Space and Duration being the other two. ~ H P Blavatsky, #NFDB
931:There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
932:There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, only concrete Marxism... The Sinofication of Marxism - that is, making certain that its manifestation is imbued with Chinese peculiarities - is a problem that must be understood and solved by the party without delay. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
933:Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool, or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects--but especially women. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
934:Another sign is that criticism from others doesn’t just hurt your feelings, it devastates you. This is because your sense of God’s love is abstract and has little real power in your life, and you need the approval of others to bolster your sense of value. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
935:But, as I well knew, an understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
936:Humans are in delusion by default, and those who conquer their delusion can understand good and evil. Morality is an arbitrary abstract, it is not good or evil and those who provoke morality a righteous act, are still at the sideways of delusion and conquer. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
937:Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
938:One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, #NFDB
939:It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
940:Spirituality may be abstract and largely internal, but traditionally the word "religion" implies some kind of action, often one that is symbolic or ethical...Personal religion is both an awareness of the sacred and concrete action rising out of that awareness. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
941:Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
942:Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
943:Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
944:That is why an expiring form of money is crucial. Power passed from generation to generation in the abstract form of wealth leads to privilege and corruption. Money must not be hoarded for its own sake but must be continually employed for a fruitful purpose. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
945:Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must override all personal considerations; ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
946:Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), English poet. Aids to Reflection, 'Introductory Aphorisms', No. 27 (1825), #NFDB
947:For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
948:For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. ~ Rudolf Rocker, #NFDB
949:For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility of every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed them, and turn them to social account. ~ Rudolf Rocker, #NFDB
950:I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this. ~ Milton Resnick, #NFDB
951:I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis,” he later said. His intensity, however, made it difficult for him to achieve inner peace; his Zen awareness was ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
952:I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
953:I paint like an abstract painter everything is inside nothing is meant to be, I take tattoos off a people I take anything that's not necessarily going to be timeless. I want to get across what I feel and I just use the figure because I enjoy the figure. ~ Jason Shawn Alexander, #NFDB
954:Radical activists can't ignore the fact that we live in this world, like it or not, and have to make difficult decisions about which paths are the best - or sometimes, the least harmful. There are no abstract formulas. Have to think through each case on its own. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
955:All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
956:I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly. ~ Dennis Hopper, #NFDB
957:If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
958:It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body. ~ James Elkins, #NFDB
959:Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
960:One should not search for an abstract meaning of life ... Life can be made meaningful in a threefold way: first, through what we give to life ... second, by what we take from the world ... third, through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
961:True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
962:That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
963:I understand that words can mean different things to different people, and, further, that people can have different relationships with complex abstract entities such as Buddhism. To me, anyway, the entity in my life that conflicts with my creativity is Buddhism. ~ Quentin S Crisp, #NFDB
964:we must praise God or live in unreality and poverty. We cannot merely believe in our minds that he is loving or wise or great. We must praise him for those things—and praise him to others—if we are to move beyond abstract knowledge to heart-changing engagement. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
965:A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you. ~ Jonathan Stroud, #NFDB
966:I can picture the color of the song, or the shape of it, or who it is that I'm trying to appeal to, in the song, and what I'm trying to, almost, reinforce my feelings for. And I know that sounds sort of vague and abstract, but I've got a handle on it when I'm doing it. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
967:I do not deny the power and the beauty of reductionist science, as exemplified in the axioms and theorems of abstract algebra....But I assert the equal power and beauty of constructive science as exemplified in Godel's construction of an undecidable proposition.... ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
968:This was mere unfounded prejudice--that seems obvious to me--because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of "immigrant" could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
969:We could not learn love in the abstract any more than we could learn patience and the other cardinal virtues. Just as we cannot know the "fellowship of his sufferings" without suffering, we also come to know real fellowship with our fellowmen only by serving them. ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
970:-- and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like. ~ Chuck Klosterman, #NFDB
971:At Columbia there's no performing arts department, so I was searching for it everywhere I could, and I took some photography classes and I ended up becoming fascinated with Eastern Religion, and ultimately it seemed to encompass the more abstract mind that I have. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal, #NFDB
972:He spent the afternoon watching the indicator light turn from red to orange to green and thought about how useless it was to be angry at anybody about an abstract principle...How could any idea that drives a man away from the people who love him be considered sound? ~ Ryan Boudinot, #NFDB
973:Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores. ~ John Searle, #NFDB
974:Twentieth-century British mathematician G.H. Hardy also believed that the human function is to "discover or observe" mathematics rather than to invent it. In other words, the abstract landscape of mathematics was there, waiting for mathematical explorers to reveal it. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
975:[A] merely personal God is an abstract God; but so he ought to be – that is involved in the idea of him; for he is nothing else than the personal nature of man positing himself out of all connection with the world, making itself free from all dependence on nature. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
976:Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long ‘forgotten’ set of purely imitative impressions. ~ Desmond Morris, #NFDB
977:Sawbeaked epitome of bodiless Idea, tossed by gusts of ether, dive Through abstract mists and raid the sea of fact Eat rich strange fish, grow long bright feathers, press Form's flesh around thought's rib, and so derive From the act of beauty, beauty of the act. ~ Philip Jose Farmer, #NFDB
978:Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
979:…the abstract geometrics spasming across the TV screen are settling into a deep crystalline blue, the same as the color from her implant’s diagnostics, which somehow seems natural, as though her history pervaded everything, and the world were the palace of her memory ~ Zachary Mason, #NFDB
980:The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
981:We think that relationship structures should be designed to fit the people in them rather than people chosen to fit some abstract ideal of the perfect relationship. There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as everyone’s having fun and getting their needs met. ~ Dossie Easton, #NFDB
982:Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy. ~ Steven Kotler, #NFDB
983:Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
984:Each kid has a different level of expertise and some of them are very raw and inexperienced and some are incredibly mature and experienced. So you just have to go with what they are rather than have some abstract technique that you're going to try to apply to them. ~ David Cronenberg, #NFDB
985:Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions. .. Try not to use words like "misogyny" and "patriarchy" too often with Chizaleum. We can sometimes be too jargony, and jargon can feel too abstract. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
986:As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies,as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect,but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
987:In a sense, a cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. ~ Donna J Haraway, #NFDB
988:Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
989:Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say. ~ Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (1931)., #NFDB
990:Epicurus as a moral empiricist felt that our immediate feelings are far more cogent and authoritative guides to the good life than abstract maxims, verbal indoctrination, or even the voice of reason itself. Hence he based his ethics on nature, not on convention or on reason. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
991:I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
992:In bed we talked for hours, conversations that spiralled out from observations into grand, abstract theories and back again. (...) I didn't feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say. ~ Sally Rooney, #NFDB
993:'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
994:The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
995:There is very little moral mixture in the 'Antislavery' feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it. ~ George William Curtis, #NFDB
996:Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy. ~ Tim Crane, #NFDB
997:Hope is an abstract word. In fact, it is more than just a word; hope is an abstruse concept, meaning different things to each of us during different times and circumstances of our lives. Even politicians know its hold on the human mind, and the mind of the electorate. ~ Sherwin B Nuland, #NFDB
998:Music, I find, gets you out of a trap [when screenwriting], because it speaks to your emotions directly, it's an abstract thing, it's not concerned with plot or story. And so music really helps - often I'll listen to the music and just write anything, just to get through. ~ Tony Grisoni, #NFDB
999:Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled ... I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
1000:My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
1001:the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.) ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
1002:Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas. ~ Arshile Gorky, #NFDB
1003:God is the shaper of your heart. God does not display his work in abstract terms. He prefers the concrete, and this means that at the end of your life one of three things will happen to your heart: it will grow hard, it will be broken, or it will be tender. Nobody escapes ~ Ravi Zacharias, #NFDB
1004:Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores. ~ John Rogers Searle, #NFDB
1005:The distinctions mentioned above ("everyday" or "rational" versus "religious" or "symbolic") are usually expressed invery abstract terms in anthropological theories. They are construed as corresponding to "styles of reasoning," "modes ofthought," or "intellectual orientations. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1006:When you start to really travel and you get to these abstract like places in the world, you would see certain people's names. It seemed like we could go anywhere. Like when we went to Afghanistan, you'd see in the dressing room Run DMC's name. Certain rappers are like journey men. ~ Ice T, #NFDB
1007:But the science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value; just as logic has its own peculiar truth and value, independently of the subjects to which we may apply its reasonings and processes. ~ Ada Lovelace, #NFDB
1008:Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely. ~ Terri Windling, #NFDB
1009:People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician? ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
1010:We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as “the common good”. The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more. ~ Donna Leon, #NFDB
1011:Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave. ~ Ellen Willis, #NFDB
1012:It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
1013:Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”22 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1014:The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
1015:We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1016:When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.' ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
1017:Faith in the future life is … faith in the truth of the imagination, as faith in God is faith in the truth and infinity of human feeling. … [F]aith in God is only faith in the abstract nature of man, so faith in the heavenly life is only faith in the abstract earthly life. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
1018:God is good, not in some abstract, religious definition of the word "good." Not a "sit still, shut up and say your prayers" good. Not just "good for you" like cough medicine. God is really sweet, yummy to the tummy, delectable and exquisite-taste and see that the Lord is good! ~ John Crowder, #NFDB
1019:I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil -- religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
1020:The spirit listens only when the speaker speaks in gestures. And gestures do not mean signs or body movements, but acts of true abandon, acts of largesse, of humor. As a gesture to the spirit, warriors bring out the best of themselves and silently offer it to the abstract. ~ Carlos Castaneda, #NFDB
1021:To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in. ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
1022:Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey. ~ Roger Ballen, #NFDB
1023:Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1024:Life is a big, fat mess. There’s no order or reason to most of what’ll happen to you before you turn to dust and fade from memory, and there’s nothing you can do about that. All you can do is find someone who turns that abstract chaos into a work of art… and never let them go. ~ Julie Johnson, #NFDB
1025:Terms such as “courage,” “kindness,” “good,” “evil,” or “heroic” are abstract concepts for a child. In order to learn what it means to be “good,” a child needs to be shown, not merely told. In all honesty, I think that is true of the human race, adults as well as children. It ~ Sarah Clarkson, #NFDB
1026:The units of measurement which were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza were those of the Calendar. It was not the meter which they knew about and utilized, but rather the abstract units of time which were in turn expressed and projected as units of length. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
1027:Try not to use words like “misogyny” and “patriarchy” too often with Chizalum. We feminists can sometimes be too jargony, and jargon can sometimes feel too abstract. Don’t just label something misogynistic; tell her why it is, and tell her what would make it not be. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
1028:What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1029:Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
1030:I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape. ~ Jenny Saville, #NFDB
1031:Most people gawked at her because of her exotic appearance or stared with envy at her beauty. However, he always looked at her in a studious way, as if he was trying to piece her together like she was a marble puzzle. A statue he was constructing from parts of her abstract soul. ~ Sarah Noffke, #NFDB
1032:He wondered if the real world was that one in which men fought for policies and principles and died or lived gloriously - or more often miserably - for the sake of an abstract word like patriotism or independence, or if reality belonged to the humble people and the common land. ~ Winston Graham, #NFDB
1033:technologies like big data and analytics, high-speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions made by more abstract and data-driven reasoning, and in turn have increased the value of people with the right engineering, creative, or design skills. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
1034:the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam. ~ David Halberstam, #NFDB
1035:To really be on stage and not know what you're going to say, and to be able to say something that makes people laugh, or do something that's sort of abstract or off the beaten path and have people connect to it by just putting your ideas together, that really makes me happy. ~ Mary Lynn Rajskub, #NFDB
1036:How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole. ~ Emily Carr, #NFDB
1037:I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either. ~ Antoni Tapies, #NFDB
1038:The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1039:Feelings are intangible,” he said. “You can’t see them, can’t touch them. You can hurt and no one would know. But physical pain is real. You can see blood and broken bones. It’s simple in a way feelings are not, and cutting makes the abstract pain of feelings substantial. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson, #NFDB
1040:Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through? ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1041:I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art. ~ Neil Farber, #NFDB
1042:Probably no branch of mathematics has experienced a more surprising growth than has... topology... Considered as a most specialized and abstract subject in the early 1920's, it is today [1938] an indispensable equipment for the investigation of modern mathematical theories. ~ Raymond Louis Wilder, #NFDB
1043:Those very superficial sensualists and profligates who lead the dance of Latin decadence have not seen, among their dancing girls and their pennies, that the disappearance of symbols was a precursor to the ruin of a people; communities only have abstract reasons for existing... ~ Jos phin P ladan, #NFDB
1044:An aphorism is a speculative principle either in science or morals, which is presented in a few words to the understanding; it is the substance of a doctrine, and many aphorisms may contain the abstract of a science. ~ George Crabb, English Synonymes Explained, in Alphabetical Order, (1846) p. 114, #NFDB
1045:I have always seen life personally; my interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person...Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem to the community, then to the country, then to the world. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
1046:The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
1047:Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
1048:The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract. ~ W G Sebald, #NFDB
1049:The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. The Web's ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network. ~ Tim Berners Lee, #NFDB
1050:...where conventional education deals with abstract and impersonal facts and theories, an education shaped by Christian spirituality draws us toward incarnate and personal truths...it is embodied in personal terms, the terms of one who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. ~ Parker J Palmer, #NFDB
1051:Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, #NFDB
1052:You are born, you grow up, you become a wife. But what if it wasn’t this way? What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like? ~ Kate Bolick, #NFDB
1053:Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot, #NFDB
1054:Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
1055:Really! But weren't you fearfully tempted?'
'In the abstract but not in the concrete,' said Ursula. 'When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted—oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot. I'm only tempted NOT to.' The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement. ~ D H Lawrence,#NFDB
1056:It's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled....
It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea. ~ Henry Miller,#NFDB
1057:Love, he told himself, was open to interpretation like any other abstract indulgence but followed the same principles everywhere, irrespective of everything else. One, either won or lost in love, there was no bridge in between, and he decided he had lost, lost to himself, if not to her. ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB
1058:Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
1059:Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. ~ Yves Klein, #NFDB
1060:(By ‘abstract labour’ Marx means work done simply in order to earn a wage, rather than for the worker’s own specific purposes. Thus making a pair of shoes because one wants a pair of shoes is not abstract labour; making a pair of shoes because that happens to be a way of getting money is.) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1061:Christ did not found an abstract religion, a mere school of religious thought. He setup a community of apostles, of teachers, with the task of spreading His message and so giving rise to a society of believers: His Church. He promised the Spirit of truth to His Church and then sent Him. ~ Pope Paul VI, #NFDB
1062:Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common. ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
1063:...approaching the truth affirmed by Christianity as some
abstract, objective assertion to be tested, simply demonstrates
that the questioner is approaching this query as a problem
to be pondered, dissected, and solved, rather than a mystery
to inhabit and be transformed by. ~ Peter Rollins,#NFDB
1064:To satisfy themselves with this, they gladly grasp at words, especially those which denote indefinite, very abstract, and unusual concepts difficult to explain, such, for example, as infinite and finite, sensuous and supersensuous, the Idea of being, Ideas of reason, the Absolute, ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1065:I had been back in Hong Kong for two days. The swelter of late summer here is a physical assault when you’re not used to it. The noise too: taxi horns like air-raid sirens, old ladies bellowing in their raspy banshee voices, relentless. I remembered in the abstract but my body had forgotten. ~ Jason Y Ng, #NFDB
1066:As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
1067:He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realised that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read. ~ Sally Rooney, #NFDB
1068:If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr, #NFDB
1069:It is," says Professor Mathews, "only by continued, strenuous efforts, repeated again and again, day after day, week after week, and month after month, that the ability can be acquired to fasten the mind to one subject, however abstract or knotty, to the exclusion of everything else. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
1070:Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual. ~ Ernst Haeckel, #NFDB
1071:Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it... I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems. ~ John Carmack, #NFDB
1072:Briefly and generally stated, mystical theology or Christian mysticism seeks to describe an experienced, direct, non-abstract, unmediated, loving knowing of God, a knowing or seeing so direct as to be called union with God.”[97] Such an experience of God came through “contemplation”—observing ~ Daryl Aaron, #NFDB
1073:From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there's the political and the technical. I don't believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives. ~ Edward Snowden, #NFDB
1074:Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary? ~ Terry Jones, #NFDB
1075:Though you may have never attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. If this is too abstract, consider this number: 2.5 million. The 2.5 million people who die in the United States every year. ~ Caitlin Doughty, #NFDB
1076:Triumph of hope over experience,” Parks observes. “Nostalgia,” Dr Caldwell says categorically. “The psychological comfort outweighs the logical objections. Everybody needs a security blanket.” Only idiots, Parks thinks. Personally, he tends to see security in much less abstract terms. Gallagher ~ M R Carey, #NFDB
1077:I know the stars are my home. I learned about them, needed them for survival in terms of navigation. I know where I am when I look up at the sky. I know where I am when I look up at the Moon; it's not just some abstract romantic idea, it's something very real to me. See, I've expanded my home. ~ Gene Cernan, #NFDB
1078:Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed. ~ Chuck Thompson, #NFDB
1079:The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time. ~ Derrick Jensen, #NFDB
1080:To take the choice of another ... to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to ... for all we individuals to have ... our choices. ~ China Mieville, #NFDB
1081:Autobiographies are always written as if the author had it all mapped out with perfect foresight, ignoring the risks and uncertainties at that time. This misleads, as much as those beautiful photographs of a past holiday abstract from the heat, the mosquitoes, and the lack of connectivity. ~ Raghuram G Rajan, #NFDB
1082:Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One’s ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
1083:The theoretically interesting category-mistakes are those made by people who are perfectly competent to apply concepts, at least in the situations with which they are familiar, but are still liable in their abstract thinking to allocate those concepts to logical types to which they do not belong) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1084:instead of only the generalities, an example of physical law, so that you have at least one example of the things about which I am speaking generally. In this way I can use this example again and again to give an instance, or to make a reality out of something which will otherwise be too abstract. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1085:I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion. ~ Costa Gavras, #NFDB
1086:It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction. ~ Igor Stravinsky, #NFDB
1087:You're never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line. You have to find associative meaning to get you there. So it's rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards. A kind of strange, three-dimensional, abstract crossword puzzle. ~ Annie Lennox, #NFDB
1088:In the process of trying to steady my gait in a life that shook with
uncertainty, I learned to make peace with the present by unknowingly
breaking love lines to the past. Growing up in a landscape of
improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt
temporary to me. ~ Susan Abulhawa,#NFDB
1089:Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions--these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term "experience. ~ George Henry Lewes, #NFDB
1090:Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
1091:Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting. ~ Gustave Courbet, #NFDB
1092:Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things "which cannot be shared," and if they raise themselves to a point where they adopt an abstract principle superior to their egotisms. In other words, it can only be obtained by a betterment of human morality. ~ Julien Benda, #NFDB
1093:Poe would certainly have applauded Walter Pater’s assertion that ‘all art continuously aspires to the condition of music’ – to that ideally abstract medium whose components are not distorted by material connotation, and are thus freed to create their own unique, transcendent relationships. It ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
1094:Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone? ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1095:The individual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all. ~ William James, #NFDB
1096:That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1097:'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography. ~ Sam Abell, #NFDB
1098:Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1099:The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity—and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
1100:I like crossing the imaginary boundaries people set up between different fields—it's very refreshing. There are lots of tools, and you don't know which one would work. It's about being optimistic and trying to connect things. ~ Maryam Mirzakhani, "A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces", Quanta Magazine (2014)., #NFDB
1101:I'm really creating abstract shapes and relationships that work together. They come together and give the illusion of reality, but they're really abstract shapes. If you look at individual shapes, they aren't the shape of anything, but together they give you the illusion of hills and sun and flowers. ~ John Newman, #NFDB
1102:The way I paint is similar to rock in that you don't stand around and say, 'Gee, what are they talking about?' Rock is simple, blunt, colorful. Same with my paintings. You don't stand back and wonder what it is. That's Jim Morrison, that's a panda, that's a scene on the West Coast. It's not abstract. ~ Grace Slick, #NFDB
1103:…”this is the wish of the majority of the people. The aesthetic appeal of the Park can never be as strong as the demands of home and livelihood. The manatee and the orchids mean something to people in an abstract way, but he former can’t line their purse, nor the latter fill their empty bellies. ~ Michael Grunwald, #NFDB
1104:We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory. ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
1105:Evil is never abstract. It is always concrete, always particular and always vested in individuals. To deny monsters as individuals the right to speak, to actually state their case, is perverse - because I want to hear the Devil speak. I like the idea that a point of view can be made by the dark side. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
1106:If I had to describe what love meant, really, not in the abstract or the sentimental or the way I'd imagined it before, that I'd say it was completely irrational, made up of so many opposites, the kind that couldn't exist without the other: bliss and sadness, courage and fear, adoration and disgust. ~ Jill Bialosky, #NFDB
1107:In most parts of the world, a new idea suppresses and wipes out the old idea, but in India, thanks to the abstract nature of Vedic ideas, new worldviews—be they native ones like Buddhism or Bhakti or foreign ones like Islam and Christianity—simply helped reaffirm the Vedic way in different ways. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
1108:I told you already that Mother Earth is our god, and the only thing that offends our god is waste and pollution, not words and pictures and jokes. I have nothing but sympathy for reverence of God in the abstract. Love of God and life is as natural as the force that holds the planets in their dance. ~ David Duchovny, #NFDB
1109:Man can't handle the chaos. Oh, you can understand it in the abstract, as long as you don't think about it too hard. But at the core of it, whenever humans come against chaos, they deal with it in one of three ways. ... Faced with chaos you will either ignore it, dance around it, or you will go mad. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
1110:The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles - decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of view-points. Ontological guy lines. ~ Greg Egan, #NFDB
1111:The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. ~ John Taylor Gatto, #NFDB
1112:This must change, he argues, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about. Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife. ~ David Epstein, #NFDB
1113:Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken. ~ Anna Julia Cooper, #NFDB
1114:why do we personify time? Is it because we’re afraid to admit that our lives are measured by an abstract force that neither knows nor cares about our entry into existence? Or our departure into death? Time is our mysterious master giving it a face and hands we attempt to transform it into our servant. ~ Robert Bloch, #NFDB
1115:I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music. ~ Anthony Braxton, #NFDB
1116:That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1117:There is no such thing as creativity in the abstract. Likewise, there is no such thing as innovation in the abstract. To describe yourself as an entrepreneur or a disrupter is as meaningless as describing yourself as an athlete or a thinker. Really? What sports do you play? What do you think about? What ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
1118:The concept of 'talent' is formed under completely abstract criteria, having nothing in common with reality. But the reality is such that I don't understand chess as a whole. But then again no one understands chess in its entirety. Perhaps talent is something else, in chess it is conditionality. ~ Alexander Morozevich, #NFDB
1119:Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely. I think of my political ideas as ideas about how I want to interact with other human beings as opposed to abstract theories about how the world should be. ~ Boots Riley, #NFDB
1120:I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept. ~ Jeffrey Kluger, #NFDB
1121:Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
1122:Nature or, that which I see, inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation, still just an external foundation, of things. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
1123:terrorism is interesting to a novelist because it's a crime that's driven by an idea, as opposed to some kind of base materialist impulse. It's not like stealing from someone's house, or even assassinating someone. There are very complex ideological reasons behind these almost abstract acts of violence. ~ Karan Mahajan, #NFDB
1124:I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it’s beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
1125:If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1126:Knowledge and cleverness tend to concern themselves with the wrong sorts of things, and a mind confused by knowledge, cleverness and abstract ideas tends to go chasing after things that don't matter, or that don't even exists, instead of seeing, appreciating, and making use of what is fit in front of it. ~ Benjamin Hoff, #NFDB
1127:Racism was an important moral issue, one that the church needed to confront. Putting a black man in a position of honor and authority was a good thing, and if there was controversy over it, that was not a bad thing thing, either. People needed to work through these things, and not just in the abstract. ~ Timothy B Tyson, #NFDB
1128:She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realize abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself b disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
1129:-She paints some, Stanley said in a vindicatory tone.
-Paints! Did you see the abstract she did for the Army Air Force? the face persisted. -For a psychological test, they used it to pick out the queers, if you were queer the painting didn't look like anything, if you weren't it looked like a snatch. ~ William Gaddis,#NFDB
1130:It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmness; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindness repented of in permanent malignities. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1131:I'm a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it's not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there's a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I'm thinking. I'm not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences. ~ Tommy Davidson, #NFDB
1132:Thus, an instruction to see the moon as irregular, as asymmetrical, is an instruc-
tion to see, metaphorically, that the essence of the divine, which the church is to
serve and protect, is not the abstract, perfect, lifeless doctrine of the institution,
but rather real, imperfect, vital beings. ~ George Lakoff,#NFDB
1133:first grade is the prelude of things to come, a life organized around frontal-lobe capacities: sitting still; keeping sphincters in check; being able to use words rather than acting out; understanding abstract and symbolic ideas; planning for tomorrow; and being in tune with teachers and classmates. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
1134:Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, - and it means nothing else, - the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave. ~ William Cobbett, #NFDB
1135:God as God is the sum of all human perfection; God as Christ is the sum of all human misery. … If God … is … abstract philosophy: … Christ … is … pure suffering - … what makes more impression on the heart than suffering? especially the suffering … of the innocent endured purely for the good of others ..? ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
1136:There is a part of yourself that is not subject to change, it is the silent witness behind the scenes. That is essentially your spirit, the spirit being an abstract but real force. It is as real as gravity. It is as real as time. It is incomprehensible. It is mysterious but it is powerful and it is eternal. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1137:I'm interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface. ~ Euan Uglow, #NFDB
1138:I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'. ~ Igor Stravinsky, #NFDB
1139:It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist. ~ Ernest Fenollosa, #NFDB
1140:I was literally told for 'The Show Goes On' that I shouldn't rap too deep. I shouldn't be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don't need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down. ~ Lupe Fiasco, #NFDB
1141:I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
1142:[I]n the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
1143:I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very
capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to
generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes
there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.
The equivocal clarity of dawn penetrated along the
earthen patio. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,#NFDB
1144:Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas. ~ Robert Longo, #NFDB
1145:Another good reason to create a class is to model an abstract object—an object that isn't a concrete, real-world object but that provides an abstraction of other concrete objects. A good example is the classic Shape object. Circle and Square really exist, but Shape is an abstraction of other specific shapes. ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
1146:He was a great politician of course, and explained his opinions at some length to one of our company; but I only remember that he concluded with two sentiments, one of which was, Somebody for ever; and the other, Blast everybody else! which is by no means a bad abstract of the general creed in these matters. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1147:Jokes are funny only in context. There is no such thing as abstract clever word play. Words have meaning in the world in which we live, not in the abstract. Take away the politics, and there is no joke. The joke wouldn't make any sense. if the joke is funny, it's funny precisely because it's racist and sexist. ~ Robert Jensen, #NFDB
1148:I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words. ~ Gregory Orr, #NFDB
1149:Nothing. Because wasn't that how I felt that day? If you zoom close- if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself- then you lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can't see anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments. English becomes math. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1150:Now he only had an abstract interest in what was surrounding him, as though none of this was happening to him, but he was just reading a book about it. The fate of the main character interested him, of course, but if he was killed then he could just pick another book off the shelf - one with a happy ending. ~ Dmitry Glukhovsky, #NFDB
1151:Reality is a thing of infinite diversity, and defies the most ingenious deductions and definitions of abstract thought, nay, abhors the clear and precise classifications in which we so delight. Reality tends to infinite subdivision of things, and truth is a matter of infinite shadings and differentiations. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1152:Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities. ~ Rudy Rucker, #NFDB
1153:The reason I keep talking about a wife and saying the word wife on stage is because it seems a funny word to me. The more you say it, the more it seems to detach from that person and become this sort of abstract thing: that you would set out to find a wife, that it would be an objective like buying a new car. ~ Stephen Merchant, #NFDB
1154:Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity. ~ Joshua Foer, #NFDB
1155:Indeed, under the protocols of contemporary progressivism, in the abstract being loudly for equality means in the concrete having a lot more things than most anyone else. Modern liberalism has descended into the art of rich people blaming the lower middle class for not being generous enough with money they don’t have. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1156:It is noteworthy and remarkable to see how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract…(where) in the sphere of calm deliberation, what previously possessed him completely and moved him intensely appears to him cold, colorless, and distant: he is a mere spectator and observer. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
1157:When we aren’t personally acquainted with the beings who make up our community, the truth of interdependence becomes an abstraction. And when the connections between us become abstract, we start to doubt they exist. And when that doubt settles in like a rolling fog, we shrug away our responsibility to others. The ~ Ethan Nichtern, #NFDB
1158:I exist unconsciously and I’ll die unwillingly. I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway-house between things, like myself, that are nothing. How disquieting it is to feel, how troubling it is to think, how vain to want! ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1159:If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
1160:Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
1161:To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1162:Here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café, we’ve had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven’t yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract.
We can offer any text as SF. ~ Hal Duncan,#NFDB
1163:Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer—everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well—and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
1164:We value the individual. We probably put too much emphasis on the individual, if it comes right down to it. How many people, in the abstract, would...let's say Paige....how many people would she sacrifice to keep Andy alive? The answer wouldn't make any sense if you were looking at the whole of humanity as equals. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
1165:If sustainability is going to take hold in the corporate sector in a big way - and we need it to - it will be when it produces big profits and faster growth. It won't happen because of an optional executive commitment to an abstract concept. It will happen because sustainability is a great business strategy. And it is ~ Paul Gilding, #NFDB
1166:I'm not religious in any way but I am very spiritual. Music is holy to me. It's like my religion. It's sacred. It feels unearthly; it makes me feel a way that talking to somebody doesn't make me feel, it's something you can't even wrap your head around. It's not abstract, you can't even grasp it - that's what music is to me. ~ BANKS, #NFDB
1167:The man who works recognizes his own product in the world that has actually been transformed by his work. He recognizes himself in it, he sees his own human reality in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself ~ Alexandre Kojeve, #NFDB
1168:The man who works recognizes his own product in the world that has actually been transformed by his work. He recognizes himself in it, he sees his own human reality in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself ~ Alexandre Koj ve, #NFDB
1169:And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is… Well, it’s just you. And when you go, it’s gone. Nothing abstract about it. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
1170:And when I say permanent afternoon, you know, I’m talking like crystal clear, crispy blue sky. All the sudden you didn’t need to sleep as much because it just was difficult. And how that translated into my creative process I still am not quite sure, but it made my relationship to sleep a kind of abstract you know bizarre… ~ DJ Spooky, #NFDB
1171:There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1172:They make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves by looking for deep thoughts and ideas everywhere and putting them into everything. just have the courage to
give yourself up to first impressions..don’t think all the time that
everything must be pointless if it lacks an abstract thought or idea ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#NFDB
1173:And maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses—any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.
You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,#NFDB
1174:All things whatsoever God in his infinite wisdom has seen fit and proper to reveal to us, while we are dwelling in mortality, in regard to our mortal bodies, are revealed to us in the abstract, and independent of affinity of this mortal tabernacle, but are revealed to our spirits precisely as though we had no bodies at all. ~ Sam Smith, #NFDB
1175:Life's kind of like a painting. A really bizzare, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is just a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. ~ Cecelia Ahern, #NFDB
1176:Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes. ~ William James, #NFDB
1177:Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations. ~ Philip Glass, #NFDB
1178:Of course, they didn't give names or dates, they spoke in what might be called abstract terms, but despite the seemingly detached presentation of their misfortunes, the conversation and the walk only sank deeper into a state of melancholy, to such a degree that after two hours they both felt as if they were suffocating. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
1179:Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1180:... landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
1181:One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1182:I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy. ~ Wynton Marsalis, #NFDB
1183:The poets say that youth is the day of the fevered blood, the hour of love, the moment of passion; and that with age comes the cooling baths of wisdom, whereby the fever is cured. The poets are wrong. I did not know love until late in my life, when I could no longer grasp it. Youth is ignorant, and its passion is abstract. ~ John Williams, #NFDB
1184:The world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found. ~ Eugene Wigner, #NFDB
1185:Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value; and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
1186:In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes. ~ Michael Behe, #NFDB
1187:Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things. You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, filmmaking becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
1188:When the most abstract and "useless" disciplines have been cultivated for a time, they are often seized upon as practical tools by other departments of science. I conceive that this is no accident, as if one bought a top hat for a wedding, and discovered later when a fire broke out, that it could be used as a water bucket. ~ James R Newman, #NFDB
1189:A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exit in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things. ~ Ernest Fenollosa, #NFDB
1190:For millions of Arabs and Muslims, this universe of abstract systems, this world of Western freedom and individualism, constitutes the soullessness of modernity. The attack on the World Trade Center, in this interpretation, was not so much an attack on the United States, but on modernity—secular, non-tribal modernity—itself. ~ Morris Berman, #NFDB
1191:I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1192:No. It was time to stop talking about the “slavedays system” as if it were an abstract thing. Time to stop thinking of it as some historical hangover—a bad idea dreamed up centuries ago, which Britain was regrettably still stuck with. It was a group of people, right now, making a choice every single day to let all this continue. ~ Vic James, #NFDB
1193:Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might. ~ Johan Huizinga, #NFDB
1194:The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. ~ William James, #NFDB
1195:I think it's important to recognize that you can't have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience.... In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details then I think we've struck the right balance. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1196:Our position as the policing agency within fiction gave us licensed access to abstract technology. One blast from the eraserhead in Bradshaw’s rifle and the Minotaur would be reduced to the building blocks of his fictional existence: text and a bluish mist—all that is left when the bonds that link text to meaning are severed. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
1197:The southern German has the imagination and emotionality to subscribe to a fanatic ideology, but he is ordinarily inhibited from excesses by his natural humaneness. The Prussian does not have the imagination to conceive in terms of abstract racial and political theories, but when he is told to do something, he does it. ~ Arthur Seyss Inquart, #NFDB
1198:We [Americans] move about the world arrogantly, calling wars when we want, overthrowing governments when we want. There is a price to be paid for it -- look at 9/11. [That] wasn't just bin Laden. Bin Laden didn't come from the abstract. He came from somewhere, and if you look where ... you'll see America's hand of villainy. ~ Harry Belafonte, #NFDB
1199:The walls of his last lodging were distempered in drab and ornamented with abstract designs in chocolate, grey, and bottle-green, such as Western plumbers and decorators loved to create in the latter half of the last century, and its windows were curtained with the intensely vulgar dark green printed velvet used in wagons-lits. ~ Rebecca West, #NFDB
1200:By his own assessment, he was no genius. He had "no great quickness of apprehension or wit" or "power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought." On the many occasions when I share those feelings, I find it encouraging to review those words because that Englishman did okay for himself—his name was Charles Darwin. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
1201:Lenelle Moïse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart. ~ Erin McKeown, #NFDB
1202:Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells. ~ Harold Abelson, #NFDB
1203:It is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are going on right now, somewhere far away. We think, "Well, what are you gonna do?" In a way, that little instinct, that "What are you gonna do?" is the most dangerous thing in the world. ~ Ben H Winters, #NFDB
1204:My paintings are inspirational for they allow the observer to experience infinite viewpoints and perceptions. They are not abstract for they represent what is actually more real than what our eyes are able to see. They allow the viewers to be inspired by taking their own perception beyond their senses and their surroundings. ~ Freydoon Rassouli, #NFDB
1205:Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as "abstract" when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch, #NFDB
1206:She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
1207:Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
1208:Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
1209:Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel's initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of Carrie Buck. Yet in this brief flash of six decades, the gene had transformed from an abstract concept in a botanical experiment to a powerful instrument of social control. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1210:Sometimes it happens that the computer's assessment is very abstract. It's correct, but it's not useful for a practical game. You have to prove the assessment with very strong moves and if you don't find all of these strong moves you may lose very quickly. For a computer this is not a problem, but for humans it is not so easy. ~ Vassily Ivanchuk, #NFDB
1211:breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity. ~ David Epstein, #NFDB
1212:Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
1213:How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
1214:People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1215:The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
1216:Good-nature is that benevolent and amiable temper of mind which disposes us to feel the misfortunes and enjoy the happiness of others, and, consequently, pushes us on to promote the latter and prevent the former; and that without any abstract contemplation on the beauty of virtue, and without the allurements or terrors of religion. ~ Henry Fielding, #NFDB
1217:He has forgotten how to hope. This hell of the present is his Kingdom at last. All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to the abject and magnificent shelter of man’s heart. None of them is settled. But all are transfigured. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1218:There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world. ~ Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, as quoted in George Edward Martin, The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane, Springer (1998 [1975]), p. 225; also in Stanley Gudder, A Mathematical Journey, McGraw-Hill (1976), p. 36., #NFDB
1219:The trouble with much of the advice business is getting today about the need to be more vigorously creative is, essentially, that its advocates have generally failed to distinguish between the relatively easy process of being creative in the abstract and the infinitely more difficult process of being innovationist in the concrete. ~ Theodore Levitt, #NFDB
1220:We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
1221:The message that society sends to black women is that their hair does not belong to them but is fair game to be discussed, mocked, judged, used, and abused, and it serves as a home for people's preconceived notions about blackness, as if it is an abstract concept that is not connected to living, breathing, and feeling human beings. ~ Phoebe Robinson, #NFDB
1222:You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action. ~ William James, #NFDB
1223:believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics. ~ John Elder Robison, #NFDB
1224:Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
~ Ezra Pound,#NFDB
1225:The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics. ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
1226:When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1227:I suppose I was aware, in an abstract way, that there were men and women upon this earth who served in this capacity, as chocolate engineers. In the same way that I was aware that there are job titles out there such as bacon taster and sex surrogate, which is to say, job titles that made me want to weep over my own appointed lot in life. ~ Steve Almond, #NFDB
1228:It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing...for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality... It was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
1229:Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if—especially if—it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it. There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
1230:Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt? ~ Miranda July, #NFDB
1231:Paul gives clear, practical guidelines for the believers in Rome. The Christian life is not abstract theology unconnected with life, but it has practical implications that will affect how we choose to behave each day. It is not enough merely to know the gospel; we must let it transform our lives and let God impact every aspect of our lives. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1232:That’s right. People. It’s all people. People and their stupid fucking groups. Show me an individual decision maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I’ll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I’ll take them all down if I can. But don’t expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate. ~ Richard K Morgan, #NFDB
1233:The essence of capitalism is expressed in two of its basic features: a) profit maximization and b) market competition. In their abstract formulations none of them was supposed to have anything conspiratorial against the poor. But in real life they turn out to be the "killers" of the poor - by making rich the richer and poor the poorer. ~ Muhammad Yunus, #NFDB
1234:I believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics. ~ John Elder Robison, #NFDB
1235:If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
1236:In order to make all go well, if you are considering hiring a senior person do not chase an abstract rationale like “adult supervision” or “becoming a real company.” A weak definition of what you are looking for will lead to a bad outcome. The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area. ~ Ben Horowitz, #NFDB
1237:It is said that the human brain divides its functions. The right brain is devoted to sensory impressions, emotions, colors, music. The left brain deals with abstract thought, logic, philosophy, analysis.
My definition of a great movie: While you’re watching it, it engages your right brain. When it’s over, it engages your left brain. ~ Roger Ebert,#NFDB
1238:Men agree that justice in the abstract is proportion, but they differ in that some think that if they are equal in any respect they are equal absolutely, others that if they are unequal in any respect they should be unequal in all. The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1239:There's that great Irish joke: a man is lost in the countryside, stops a passer-by: 'how do I get to Dublin?'. The passer-by says 'well, I wouldn't start from here'. Rather than starting by talking in the abstract about materialism, dualism, 'material stuff' and things like that in regard to the mind, I would rather start from somewhere else. ~ Tim Crane, #NFDB
1240:We all have our own takes on things. To being yourself. The abstract, the whole thing that I play with, seems to result in seeing through your lenses, and once you express how you see things to others, you start to see there are similarities between all people. It's kind of like, no matter how far you go, you're still where you started, in a way. ~ Q Tip, #NFDB
1241:Anthropologists can speculate about human behavior; archaeologists, about patterns of settlement; philosophers and theologians, about the motivations of “humanity” as an undifferentiated mass. But the historian’s task is different: to look for particular human lives that give flesh and spirit to abstract assertions about human behavior. ~ Susan Wise Bauer, #NFDB
1242:I love lyrics. I've always been averse to the straight lyric idea. I guess a big part of it is, that songs that are literary always turn me off. Because they feel so abstract. Like a song. What is a song? We have to remember what the function of a concert and the function of playing a song for people are. It's all become really abstracted. ~ Ian Svenonius, #NFDB
1243:Only when we see the depth of our sin will we be electrified by the wonder of grace. Prayer: Lord, the deeper the darkness, the more visible and beautiful the stars. And the more I admit my sin, the more your grace becomes a reality rather than an abstract idea. Only then does your grace humble me and affirm me, cleanse me and shape me. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1244:There are two sides to each man’s life: his personal life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental, swarmlike life, where man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed for him. Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1245:It is impossible to analyze “the meaning of life” in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1246:The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expression--it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for anynoun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective. ~ J L Austin, #NFDB
1247:The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
1248:As a general habit and general tendency, I prefer not to bog a piece down with a great number of transitory, contemporary references, because in the end, I'm concerned, not in an abstract way, but an actual way, with creating a world which has a universality to it - even though what goes on is made up of texture and detail, contemporary detail. ~ Mike Leigh, #NFDB
1249:It is impossible to analyze "the meaning of life" in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1250:The Constitution does not protect the sovereignty of States for the benefit of the States or state governments as abstract political entities, or even for the benefit of the public officials governing the States. To the contrary, the Constitution divides authority between federal and state governments for the protection of individuals. ~ Sandra Day O Connor, #NFDB
1251:The faith I was finding was jagged and more difficult. It wasn't about abstract theological debates: Does God exist? Are sin and salvation predestined? Or even about political/ideological ones: Is capital punishment a sin? Is there a scriptural foundation for accepting homosexuality? It was about action. Taste and see, the Bible said, and I did. ~ Sara Miles, #NFDB
1252:Bob Rubin Trade: payoff in a skewed domain where the benefits are visible (and rewarded with some compensation) and the detriment is rare (and unpunished owing to absence of skin in the game). Can be generalized to politics, anything where the penalty is weak and the victims are abstract and distributed (say taxpayers or shareholders). ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
1253:I'm a bit of an abstract figure that people can project their fantasies on; it's pretty much what we all are, otherwise we wouldn't be stars, and people wouldn't be interested. But people project things on you that have nothing to do with what you really are, or they see a little something and then exaggerate it. And you can't really control that. ~ Salma Hayek, #NFDB
1254:You're asking me to define an abstract concept that no one has managed to explain since time began. You sort of sprang it on me," Gansey said. "Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don't want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don't want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her. Why? ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1255:I love when rappers have a off-beat, very abstract timing, and he certainly did.And any rapper who really approaches rapping with the art form of songwriting melodically - I know a bunch of rappers who actually go in before they write the lyrics and come up with the melody. And you can hear and feel that difference so much when that's the case. ~ Solange Knowles, #NFDB
1256:We abstract injustice, allowing ourselves to believe we no longer have a direct hand in it. We make injustice impersonal; if everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible. But justice should not be abstracted to a corporate concept that justifies ongoing individual injustice. Justice is social and corporate, but it requires a personal face. ~ Soong Chan Rah, #NFDB
1257:I have always been resistant to doctrine, and any spirituality I had experienced thus far in my life had been much more abstract and not aligned with any recognized religion. For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious. ~ Eric Clapton, #NFDB
1258:statistical indices such as the Gini coefficient give an abstract and sterile view of inequality, which makes it difficult for people to grasp their position in the contemporary hierarchy (always a useful exercise, particularly when one belongs to the upper centiles of the distribution and tends to forget it, as is often the case with economists). ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1259:How can U say one style is better than another. You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you"ve given up something. ... I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. - Andy Warhol, 1963 ~ Legs McNeil, #NFDB
1260:Many centuries after the Buddha, the Chinese Chan (Zen) patriarch Yunmen (c. 860–949) was asked: “What are the teachings of an entire lifetime?” Yunmen replied: “An appropriate statement.”6 For Yunmen, what counts is whether your words and deeds are an appropriate response to the situation at hand, not whether they accord with an abstract truth. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
1261:The modern world is ruled by larger and more impersonal forces, from faceless bureaucracies to abstractions such as “inflation,” or “the rule of law.” Where abstract forces take over the work of coercion from the landlord, the executioner, and the overseer, it is not surprising that there should emerge cosmologies ruled by equally abstract forces. ~ David Christian, #NFDB
1262:The populace consists of individuals and free men, while the state is made up of numbers. When the state dominates, killing becomes abstract. Servitude began with the shepherds; in the river valleys it attained perfection with canals and dikes. Its model was the slavery in mines and mills. Since then, the ruses for concealing chains have been refined. ~ Ernst J nger, #NFDB
1263:In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. ~ Roger Bacon, #NFDB
1264:turn green, and the silver black. Absentmindedly, I said, “Unless they’re polished, their colors will fade.” “Like a person.” “Pardon?” I returned my gaze to her profile. “People need to be polished, to be stroked, touched,” her tone was abstract, “and when they’re not polished, their colors fade. They fade, they change, warp, become something different. ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
1265:...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life... ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
1266:I don't know, Adam! You're asking me to define an abstract concept that no one has managed to explain since time began. You sort of sprang it on me. Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don't want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don't want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1267:In schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged. —A CERTAIN SHOP TEACHER WHOSE NAME I HAVE LOST ~ Matthew B Crawford, #NFDB
1268:I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world. ~ Tod Machover, #NFDB
1269:other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs.” In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
1270:Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1271:I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief—nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder. It’s a compulsion with you, and now it’s coming home to you— ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
1272:That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in―a symbol―for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden metaphor? ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
1273:Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either "have" or "have not." In fact, there is no such thing as "freedom" except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1274:The abstract, especially in those rough sketches, is very important to me, perhaps because of my advertising background, where layout is so important. Sometimes those first few lines cut the paper into such satisfying shapes that I don't want to go on, but I always do, adding nostrils and nipples and bootstraps until I have filled the paper up as usual. ~ Tom of Finland, #NFDB
1275:The Spin’s not just some abstract phenomenon—you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong you steal that courage away again, and now it’s worse because they’ve seen the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they’ve ever been. ~ Robert Charles Wilson, #NFDB
1276:When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
1277:That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in-a symbol-for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor? ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
1278:That’s what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you’re not sure what the poet’s talking about. You may have an idea, but you can’t be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in—a symbol—for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor? ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
1279:All I was likely to discover at this point wasn’t just how distant were the paths we’d taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me—a loss I didn’t mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we’ve stopped thinking of things we’ve lost and may never have cared for. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
1280:In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land. ~ Barbara Holland, #NFDB
1281:The difference between being subtle and abstract is the difference between knowing and saying it in a gentler way and not knowing and saying it in a way that will let you off the hook. To be abstract with the word is all right if you use it like paint and seek the pure word, but it is difficult, in the language, to have near purity without near meaning. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1282:But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective. ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB
1283:It isn’t enough to know, in the abstract, that thoughts continually arise or that one is thinking at this moment, for such knowledge is itself mediated by thoughts that are arising unrecognized. It is the identification with these thoughts—that is, the failure to recognize them as they spontaneously appear in consciousness—that produces the feeling of “I.” One ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1284:Out of time we cut “days” and “nights,” “summers” and “winters.” We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. —William James, “The World We Live In ~ Ellen J Langer, #NFDB
1285:Centralize property in the hands of a few and the millions are under bondage to property - a bondage as absolute and deplorable as if their limbs were covered with manacles. Abstract all property from the hands of labor and you thereby reduce labor to dependence; and that dependence becomes as complete a servitude as the master could fix upon his slave. ~ Lewis Henry Morgan, #NFDB
1286:If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
1287:I suspect that any worthwhile exploration of these deep questions about living requires going beyond abstract discussions to the vivid presentation of possibilities. If readers are to be prompted to serious examination of their lives, anatomy isn't enough. We have to be stimulated to imagine, in some detail, what it would be like to live in particular ways. ~ Philip Kitcher, #NFDB
1288:It is because he is so aware of the impact of social forces that he seeks to
abstract from them, in search of the inner core of human identity and the truths
one would discover, given the freedom to explore and the capacity to penetrate na-
ture’s workings and the meanings of the messages nature seems silently but insis-
tently to signal. ~ Lenn Evan Goodman,#NFDB
1289:They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1290:A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
1291:I just really enjoying creating in general; I used to also write stories and play music and do different crafts, but illustration ended up being the creative outlet that I focused on for my career. I feel like illustration gives me the flexibility to tackle more abstract or loose ideas, as well as just enjoy the process of putting time into developing a skill. ~ Julie Dillon, #NFDB
1292:I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups - (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1293:Many centralized, allegedly abstract cognitive activities may in fact make use of sensorimotor functions in exactly this kind of covert way. Mental structures that originally evolved for perception or action appear to be co-opted and run “off-line,” decoupled from the physical inputs and outputs that were their original purpose, to assist in thinking and knowing. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1294:The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are. ~ Thucydides, #NFDB
1295:To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1296:Because you get it, you know? You get that the colors and the lines and the curves aren’t trying to be like everything else in the world. You understand that the abstract art is standing out against the norm because it’s the only way abstract art knows how to stand. And you get so fucking happy because it’s so beautiful. And unique. And edgy. And…abstract. ~ Brittainy C Cherry, #NFDB
1297:Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively. ~ Oliver Heaviside, #NFDB
1298:Traveling through Fog Looking back, we cannot see, except for its blurring lights like underwater stars and moons, our starting-place. Behind us, beyond us now is phantom territory, a world abstract as memories of earth the traveling dead take home. Between obscuring cloud and cloud, the cloudy dark ensphering us seems all we can be certain of. Is Plato’s cave. ~ Robert Hayden, #NFDB
1299:A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
1300:I don't think poverty provides that much of an obstacle to education as one thinks. I think the bigger obstacle to education is the fact that it's a very hard thing to do for a first-generation schoolgoer. Because not to have parents at home who can help you, motivate you, is a problem even when the parents are in the abstract very keen on children being educated. ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
1301:The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1302:Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either "have" or "have not." In fact, there is no such thing as "freedom" except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1303:The example of syllogism that he had learned in Kiseveter's logic - Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal - had seemed to him all his life correct only as regards Caius, but not at all as regards himself. In that case it was a question of Caius, a man, an abstract man, and it was perfectly true, but he was not Caius, and was not an abstract man. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1304:All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1305:When the vivid reality which is meant by these rather abstract words is truly possessed by us, when that which is unchanging in ourselves is given its chance, and emerges from the stream of succession to recognise its true home and goal, which is God—then, though much suffering may, indeed will, remain; apprehension, confusion, instability, despair, will cease. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
1306:Indonesian people are living in constant fear, in horror. Often they do not realize it, because this state of mind, this 'living in fear', is considered 'biasa'. This fear, also explains why almost nobody rebels, or is willing to start a rebellion against the regime. People are paralyzed by an abstract fear, which actually has its roots in ignorance and insecurity. ~ Andre Vltchek, #NFDB
1307:Instead—out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need—we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle,” travel becomes just another accessory—a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture. ~ Rolf Potts, #NFDB
1308:People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
1309:There’s an old saying that the difference between abstract knowledge and real wisdom is that “wisdom is knowledge with the knower left in.” It is taking the truth into all your relationships. It is to ask, “What does this mean for my relationship to God? to myself? to this or that person or group? to this or that behavior or habit? to my friends, to the culture? ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1310:The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
1311:Fate, fortune, chance: all snares of life. You want to be, eh? There’s this catch: in abstract, you cannot just be. The being must be trapped in a form, and for some time it has to stay in it, here or there, this way or that. And everything, as long as it lasts, bears the penalty of its form, the penalty of being this way and no longer being able to be otherwise. ~ Luigi Pirandello, #NFDB
1312:There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It's mere vomiting. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1313:These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not "money"; they were symbols for an idea which spread through these people, all through their world. But things were not money, any more than water shared was growing-closer. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old-One's thoughts--money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
1314:When we are in front of an abstract painting, we have the license to interpret in any way we want. Or music—music is a medium that we might not understand, but that we feel and enjoy. But in the case of cinema many expect to receive a clear and unified message, but what I’m suggesting is that a film could be experienced as a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
1315:Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite. ~ Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910), p. 5., #NFDB
1316:Touring was an abstract idea for me in the beginning. I didn't know where it was going to take me, but I knew that I wanted to go and play for lots of people. I always had that image in my mind. I had no idea what the touring experience was like, and how it was going to unfold, but I knew that I wanted to tour. Then it just started happening slowly started happening. ~ Justin Nozuka, #NFDB
1317:Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism".,#NFDB
1318:There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is – revolting. It's mere vomiting. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1319:Although objectively greater demands are placed on this authority, it operates less as a public opinion giving a rational foundation to the exercise of political and social authority, the more it is generated for the purpose of an abstract vote that amounts to no more than an act of acclamation within a public sphere temporarily manufactured for show or manipulation. ~ Jurgen Habermas, #NFDB
1320:Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? He eliminated all of the activities he used as crutches and began to focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1321:Maths was "the one true thing," according to Nancy.
"Not love?" Teddy said.
"Oh, love, of course," Nancy said, in an offhanded way. "Love is crucial, but it's an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can't be manipulated." An unsatisfactory answer, surely, Teddy thought. It seemed to him that love should be the absolute, trumping everything. Did it? For him? ~ Kate Atkinson,#NFDB
1322:out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need—we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle,” travel becomes just another accessory—a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase in the same way we buy clothing and furniture. Not ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1323:The extent of the suffering of wild animals is literally unimaginable.140 We have a function in our minds for imagining suffering—remembering a dog bite, perhaps, or another nasty injury. And we have an abstract multiplication function in our minds as well. But this doesn’t get us even close to understanding the amount of suffering that occurs in nature in a single minute. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1324:I love monsters. If I go to a church, I'm more interested in the gargoyles than the saints. I really don't care much about the idea of normal - that's very abstract to me. I think that perfection is practically unattainable but imperfection is right at hand. So that's why I love monsters: because they represent a side of us we should actually embrace and celebrate. ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
1325:The favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in the axe. The Evolutionist says, "Where do you draw the line?" the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it HERE: exactly between your head and body." There must at any given moment be an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something eternal if there is to be anything sudden. Therefore ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1326:The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. Time thus proves to be a stream of energy filled with qualities and not, as our philosophy would have it, an abstract concept or precondition of knowledge. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1327:The presentation of mathematics in schools should be psychological and not systematic. The teacher, so to speak, should be a diplomat. He must take account of the psychic processes in the boy in order to grip his interest, and he will succeed only if he presents things in a form intuitively comprehensible. A more abstract presentation is only possible in the upper classes. ~ Felix Klein, #NFDB
1328:We have to face the possibility that we won’t all live long enough to lose our hair or become those crotchety old folks who yell at dumb kids like us. Good people die and bad people don’t always get what they deserve. Death stops being this abstract concept that happens to other people and becomes something that could happen to the people we love. Or even to us. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson, #NFDB
1329:Without the reference points of pleasure and pain, people invent imaginary and abstract standards for ethics that are divorced from reality and generate vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. Pleasure is the only >real< ethical guide. It returns our conversations about ethics to the natural context where these conversations belong: the well-being of sentient beings. ~ Hiram Crespo, #NFDB
1330:It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. On the other hand, abstract belief is largely impossible; it is the concrete, the actuality of the cup, the candle, the sacrificial stone, which hardens belief; the statue is nothing until it cries, the philosophy is nothing until the philosopher is martyred. ~ Shirley Jackson, #NFDB
1331:Man is a knot into which relationships are tied, and my ties serve me hardly at all. What is this me that has broken down? What is the secret of substitutions? Whence comes is that gesture, a word, can give rise to endless ripples in a human destiny? Whence comes it that in other circumstances I should be overwhelmed by what seems to me now remote and abstract? ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
1332:The meanings that God calls us to in our lives are never abstract. Though the call may ask us to redefine, or refine what we know as life, it does not demand a renunciation of life in favor of something beyond it. Moreover, the call itself is always composed of life. That is, it is not some hitherto unknown voice to which we respond; it is life calling to life." ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
1333:For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth! ~ Max Stirner, #NFDB
1334:I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree. ~ Giorgio Morandi, #NFDB
1335:Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes- we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
1336:The greatest cost of the specialization of technological life - and out of which all other damages are birthed - is arguably our separation from the practical and enriching sense of ourselves as embodied beings. When we are alienated from the wisdom of the body, our lives become theoretical and abstract, and we are distanced from the direct, felt sense of living. ~ Richard Strozzi Heckler, #NFDB
1337:All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. ~ Richard Diebenkorn, #NFDB
1338:Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes - we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
1339:The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
1340:The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gaveus relgions which coule not possible maintained without belief and obedience: ... we find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to swquare their beliefs with the laws of life. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, #NFDB
1341:This New Age is marking the dawn of a new world-thought. That new thought is a new cosmic concept of the value of man to man. The whole world is discovering that all mankind is one and that the unity of man is real – not just an abstract idea. Mankind is beginning to discover that the hurt of any man hurts every man, and, conversely, the uplift of any man uplifts every man ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
1342:Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable trauma). ~ Simon Reynolds, #NFDB
1343:The hardest part of design is getting the requirements right, which means ensuring that the right problem is being solved, as well as that the solution is appropriate. Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
1344:I am caught in a terrific bind of characterologically and rationally needing to think in the most comprehensive terms possible, forming a continuous system of argument with a gradient that runs from concrete to abstract, and unfortunately being caught also in a culture in which hardly anyone seems capable of applying himself to understand such a demanding form of argumentation. ~ Kenny Smith, #NFDB
1345:Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively. ~ Eric Drooker, #NFDB
1346:The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed. ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
1347:Any event or group of events may be viewed from different degrees of abstraction. A man jumps from a bridge. The psychologists make abstraction from everything except the mental state which prompted the suicide; the biologists abstract from everything except the dying organism; while the physicists are interested in the man, not as mind, or as organism, but as a falling body. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
1348:And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experience. ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
1349:With an abstract idea it is possible to enter into a relation of formal knowledge, to become enthusiastic about it, and perhaps even to put it into practice; but it can never be followed in personal obedience. Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1350:Bonaventure’s theology is never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. He is all cosmic optimism and hope! Once it lost this kind of mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than being included in—and delighting in—an all-pervasive plan that is already in place. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
1351:Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells. ~ Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #NFDB
1352:The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
1353:Intelligence is not a virtue. The capacity for abstract thought, unless applied to some problem in need of resolution, is merely an abstract thought in itself. The world is replete with those who, by birth or education or both, possess the ability to draw logical conclusions from their observations, yet choose not to observe, or to rely solely on the observations of others. ~ Nathaniel Dean James, #NFDB
1354:It is an abstract change without object. Am I the one who has changed? (...) I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place. This is what has given my life such a jerky, incoherent aspect. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
1355:I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1356:Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you’re alone in the house, to ensure an intruder isn’t hiding there? Now, if you really believed the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But it’s more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only halfheartedly. That’s denial. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1357:Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
1358:Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, "to the least of these my brethren." Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
1359:Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws — i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1360:We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
1361:A small but typical example of how ‘philosophy’ sends out new shoots is to be found in the case of Georg Cantor, a nineteenth-century German mathematician. His research on the subject of infinity was at first written off by his scientific colleagues as mere ‘philosophy’ because it seemed so bizarre, abstract and pointless. Now it is taught in schools under the name of set-theory. ~ Anthony Gottlieb, #NFDB
1362:Brutes abstract not. -- If it may be doubted, whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas, that way, to any degree; this, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
1363:Back in the days when I was a teenager, Before I had status and before I had a pager, You could find The Abstract listening to hip-hop, My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop, I said, well daddy don't you know that things go in cycles, The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin' like Michael, It's all expected, things are for the lookin', If you got the money, Quest is for the bookin'... ~ Q Tip, #NFDB
1364:How frequently do you look in the mirror? Does your face please you? Are you disgusted to detect familial features? Do you worship or hate your ancestors? Do you consider your image erotic? Do you pretend that you are a star's child? If you squint, does your reflection become abstract? Is abstraction a transcendental escape from identity or a psychotic spasm of depersonalization? ~ Wayne Koestenbaum, #NFDB
1365:My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with? ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
1366:He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! ~ Peter Shaffer, #NFDB
1367:Such altruism, generated in the seclusion of one's own thoughts, becomes a subtle means of evading concrete inter-personal responsibility and of justifying to oneself a life of peaceful uninvolved isolation from others. We proclaim to ourselves our love and compassion for such abstract entities as 'humanity' or 'all sentient beings' in order to avoid having to love any one person. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
1368:He has no interest in pursuing an abstract argument to demonstrate a purely theoretical truth. His practical reason is ethical. Its first principle could be stated thus: Do no evil, Take up what is good, Purify the mind— This is the teaching of buddhas.11 In seeing conditioned arising as a “ground,” Gotama implies that insight into conditionality provides “grounds” on which to act. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
1369:The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. Man creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas. It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history. ~ Geoffrey Jellicoe, #NFDB
1370:We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. ~ Alan Turing, #NFDB
1371:One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
1372:The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1373:Obama's attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants 'someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,' he said, but someone who has 'empathy.' In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law. ~ Michael Barone, #NFDB
1374:The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset. ~ Michael Haneke, #NFDB
1375:There is a fervent joy in taking action. There is a non-abstract importance in what we are doing. The balance between right and wrong is always in question, and the only way to ensure we tip toward justice is to make sure our weight is firmly planted on the side of right. We are driving down to add our weight to the scale. We are singing because voices add as much weight as bodies do" -A ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1376:Esoteric Philosophy...denies Deity no more than it does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract Ens. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever-Unknowable. ~ H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 (1888), #NFDB
1377:In mathematical science, more than in all others, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries, and in the succeeding one, perhaps, by proper simplification and reduction to tables, furnish their ready and daily aid to the artist and the sailor. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
1378:I watched a little longer, hoping for some clue, but Rita only ignored me even more thoroughly. I like a good puzzle as much as anybody else, but this one seemed much too abstract for me, and in any case I had more important answers to find. So I decided it was just one more thing I didn’t understand about human behavior, and I opened the door and trotted out into the late afternoon heat. I ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
1379:Love is something too abstract and indistinguishable. It is dependent we perceived and experienced by us. If we did not exist, it does not exist. And we are so changing ... Then love can only be too. Love ignites, passes away, breaks, breaks us, revives ... we revived. Love may be eternal, but not us, it makes us eternal ... Beyond our death, love that we awake continues to fulfill its way. ~ Julie Maroh, #NFDB
1380:The Norse runes and the Hebrew alphabet are simple letters for spelling words, but also deep symbols of cosmic significance.
This magical sense is preserved in our word for teaching children how to
manipulate letters to make words: spelling. When you "spell" a word correctly, you are in effect casting a spell, charging these abstract, arbitrary symbols with meaning
and power. ~ Christopher Vogler,#NFDB
1381:One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
1382:The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise. ~ Gabor Mate, #NFDB
1383:Here's a summary list of the valid reasons to create a class: Model real-world objects Model abstract objects Reduce complexity Isolate complexity Hide implementation details Limit effects of changes Hide global data Streamline parameter passing Make central points of control Facilitate reusable code Plan for a family of programs Package related operations Accomplish a specific refactoring ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
1384:Human suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it contains.[...] It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain? ~ Henri Barbusse, #NFDB
1385:The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers -- distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings. ~ Peter Cameron, #NFDB
1386:The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise. ~ Gabor Mate, #NFDB
1387:Thinking about all of this, I feel a sudden rush of anticipation, an abstract yearning. Unfamiliar as it is, I do remember it. I experienced this feeling as a little girl the night before Christmas, and later when I was applying to college, and even later when I moved to New York. It’s a longing for things to come, possibilities unfolding before me, the charged expectation of change. ~ Christina Baker Kline, #NFDB
1388:A stupid indifference about what would happen to him gradually crept up on Artyom. Now he only had an abstract interest in what was surrounding him, as though none of this was happening to him, but he was just reading a book about it. The fate of the main character interested him, of course, but if he was killed then he could just pick another book off the shelf – one with a happy ending. ~ Dmitry Glukhovsky, #NFDB
1389:Her work was indeed elliptical, she left out everything that was essential, including logic and meaning. Her words neither described nor observed things. They were just words scattered across the page. This was braininess of the highest order, the verbal equivalent of the white canvas passed off as a painting; so abstract that to have expected some sense from it would have insulted the artist. ~ Michael Nava, #NFDB
1390:To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead, This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1391:Abstractions offer the ego lots of payoffs: We can remain seemingly in control; we can live in our heads; we can avoid loving in general or loving anyone in particular; we can avoid all humor, paradox and freedom. Even God is not free to act outside of our abstract theological conclusions, yet that is exactly what God does every time God forgives and shows mercy, which is not rational at all. I ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
1392:Sex, of course, remains our continuing preoccupation. As you and I know, the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else. What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration, without any taint of guilt, of every aspect of sexual psychopathology. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
1393:A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1394:If I would had been born years earlier, I would have been in all the Westerns. It's just the way that the industry goes. But now, we are in an age of a lot of different kinds of fears, and you have the science fiction and horror genres doing our morality plays the same way that they would have done in Westerns. I absolutely accept it. In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings. ~ Lance Henriksen, #NFDB
1395:Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1396:you asked me if I believed in eternal love. Love is something way too abstract and indefinable. It depends on what we perceive and what we experience. If we don't exist, it doesn't exist. And we change so much; love must change as well.
Love catches fire, it trespasses, it breaks, we break, it comes back to life...we come back to life. Love may not be eternal but, it can make us eternal... ~ Julie Maroh,#NFDB
1397:He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio. “The language of peace. You dig?” I did. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
1398:It is no abstract thing—the state of your heart is the state of your home. You cannot harbor resentment secretly toward your children and expect their hearts to be submissive and tender. You cannot be greedy with your time and expect them to share their toys. And perhaps most importantly, you cannot resist your opportunities to be corrected by God and expect them to receive correction from you. ~ Rachel Jankovic, #NFDB
1399:Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
1400:People ask me this a lot, what a song's about.... I do think analyzing a song can be interesting, although it doesn't necessarily get to the point. It's a whole other side activity. I do like making a thing into pictures. If I get an abstract idea and all the words in it don't represent tangible things, I might try to take the idea and make it into a picture, create a little scene there, an image. ~ Tom Verlaine, #NFDB
1401:The artists catch what's in the air. It's not because the artist "felt like it" or is a guru who channels the truth of the universe in some opaque, abstract way, or even in a realistic painting. The comics artist is someone who has the humility to set himself up in public culture and to communicate with the reader. If your image doesn't make sense, it's your problem, and I shouldn't publish it. ~ Francoise Mouly, #NFDB
1402:We are to engage in this behavior not out of duty to an abstract ethic, but because the life of the one who came under all humanity on Calvary is pumping kingdom life through our veins. We are part of the growing revolutionary kingdom he began and is continuing to grow. It is a kingdom that looks like him, a kingdom in which the greatest is the one who serves others (Matt. 20:26; Luke 22:26–27). ~ Gregory A Boyd, #NFDB
1403:What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?’ (By ‘abstract labour’ Marx means work done simply in order to earn a wage, rather than for the worker’s own specific purposes. Thus making a pair of shoes because one wants a pair of shoes is not abstract labour; making a pair of shoes because that happens to be a way of getting money ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1404:When it comes to religion, rituals bind us together so forcefully because they make the abstract beliefs we share seem more concrete. “When you hold a particular belief you can feel pretty strongly about it,” he says. “But if it is incorporated into a ritual, it makes it a far more powerful kind of experience, because it is something that you not only think about in your brain but feel in your body. ~ Jo Marchant, #NFDB
1405:Directing, to me, starts even before we get to the set. Directing is a fluid, an abstract thing. It's not done only purely in the moment. It's an idea that you plant before. It's a location that you show. It's something I whisper in someone's ear. It's a freeform thing. It only takes me a week to write the script, but it's years that you're thinking about it. The execution is really the fast part. ~ Harmony Korine, #NFDB
1406:I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
1407:I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
1408:One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth. ~ John Berger, #NFDB
1409:A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1410:No one else writes like Gord Downie, so it's difficult to compare him. He can work in the abstract and still somehow be really specific. He lets parts of his consciousness in that most writers aren't able to do, myself included. I don't feel like I have that access to the surreal and the somehow beautifully meaningful non-sequitur - that fits perfectly. I can never figure that out, how he does that. ~ John K Samson, #NFDB
1411:A lot of abstract painters seem to be doing everything all at once now. And so these different styles are jibing and not so jibing, and they're clashing. But they all seem to be working in their own domain. Whereas back in the '60s, man, it was kind of a dull world. It was a vital world. But it was kind of contained and not too recognized by the public. Now art is absolutely recognized by the public. ~ Edward Ruscha, #NFDB
1412:When I make films I'm very intuitive; I'm instinctive. When you are shooting there's little time to think about abstract ideas, it's about getting things done, getting them right, and trying to channel the energies and get the best of whatever you have on your set. It's only once the film is finished that it's like, "Okay, let's try to figure out what happened." Try to figure out exactly what I did. ~ Olivier Assayas, #NFDB
1413:He said there were going to be literary parties. I tried to imagine a literary party and was unable to. It was a very abstract effort, like trying to imagine a triangle or a cube. Wearing a suit made me feel even more abstract. I had a mental picture of me inside my suit, inside a party, inside a building, inside San Francisco. I didn't know what I was doing, inside so many things that were unlike me. ~ Larry McMurtry, #NFDB
1414:What I want to express is a feeling-various emotions that I am experiencing at the time-whether it is anger or hope or anything else, and from different angles. I construct a collection and it takes concrete form. That's probably what appears conceptual to people because it never starts out with any specific historical or geographical reference. My point of departure is always abstract and multileveled. ~ Rei Kawakubo, #NFDB
1415:For many individuals, as they approach the limit of their abilities, mathematics loses its fun aspect. When a topic is undeveloped, it is recreational to many. As the theory is developed and becomes more abstract, fewer persons find it recreational. ~ Charles W. Trigg, in "What is Recreational Mathematics? Definition by example: paradigms of topics, people and publications", Mathematics Magazine 51(1), 1978, pp. 18-21., #NFDB
1416:It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea… ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1417:Like a stool which needs three legs to be stable, mathematics education needs three components: good problems, with many of them being multi-step ones, a lot of technical skill, and then a broader view which contains the abstract nature of mathematics and proofs. One does not get all of these at once, but a good mathematics program has them as goals and makes incremental steps toward them at all levels. ~ Richard Askey, #NFDB
1418:I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy. ~ W B Yeats,#NFDB
1419:Those who imagined him as sounds, spinning him, straightening him, reorganizing him in the air, and ordering him to sing to himself. Those who would lie in bed at night, imagining him hovering above them as abstract numbers and complex geometric forms that intricately converged into each other, giving him the worst headache ever, and he suffered in silence for the sake of their sense of mathematical harmony. ~ Yoav Blum, #NFDB
1420:A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. ~ Gilles Deleuze, #NFDB
1421:We depend on manly characteristics to keep us safe. Every single one of the dead firemen heroes on 9/11 were men. This was one group where liberals didn't ask why there wasn't a more pleasing gender balance, because the Upper West Side is not fireproof. What happens in combat in some distant field is abstract to liberals, but they can understand the need to have strong, brave men in their fire department. ~ Kate O Beirne, #NFDB
1422:I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
1423:Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy. ~ Robert C Solomon, #NFDB
1424:The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research -- namely, practical action. Whenever man is truly concerned with obtaining concrete results, whenever he is hard pressed by reality, he abandons abstract speculation and reverts to a mode of response that becomes increasingly cautious and conservative as the forces he hopes to subdue, or at least to outrun, draw ever nearer. ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
1425:This was not the velvet embracing desert sky at El Geneina; this was infinite space. The idea of no boundaries, no end, is terrifying in the abstract and much worse if you are looking at it. The far-off stars were an icy crust; the darkness beyond the stars was more than I could handle. The machinery that keeps me going is not geared to cope with infinity and eternity as so clearly displayed in that sky. ~ Martha Gellhorn, #NFDB
1426:It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
1427:Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what makes up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person’s soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore we never love anyone, but only qualities. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1428:A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
1429:Although she was a logical, practical person, she believed that in books there existed a kind of magic. Between the aging covers on these shelves, contained in tiny, abstract black marks on sheets of paper, were voices from the past. Voices that reached into the future, into Claire's own heart and mind, to tell her what they knew, what they'd learned, what they'd seen, what they'd felt. Wasn't that magic? ~ Christi Phillips, #NFDB
1430:Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there. ~ Glenn Ligon, #NFDB
1431:In view of this, and Marx’s later description of the work as settling accounts with his ‘former philosophic conscience’, it might be thought that his early interest in alienation has now been replaced by a more scientific approach. It has not. Henceforth Marx makes more use of historical data and less use of abstract philosophical reasoning about the way the world must be; but his interest in alienation persists. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1432:When you fight, you don't fight for abstract values like the flag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy. You fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But you go on. You fight, so that his death isn't meaningless, his sacrifice isn't for nothing. ~ Richard Marcinko, #NFDB
1433:He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1434:Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
1435:To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation. ~ Michael J Fox, #NFDB
1436:What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the questions behind the five geometric revolutions of world history. It started with a little scheme hatched by Pythagoras: to employ mathematics as the abstract system of rules that can model the physical universe. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
1437:At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which ... offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character. ~ Max Horkheimer, #NFDB
1438:Evolutionary dynamics has no need of vast abstract spaces, like all the possible viable animals, DNA sequences, sets of proteins, or biological laws. Better, as the theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration in time by the biosphere of what can happen next: the “adjacent possible.” The same goes for the evolution of technologies, economies, and societies. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1439:[Jimi Hendrix] dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio.
“The language of peace. You dig?” I did. ~ Patti Smith,#NFDB
1440:Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death? ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1441:Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war theater-all are complexes of numerous interrelated activities. Differences may exist in the goals to be achieved, the particular processes involved, and the magnitude of effort. Nevertheless, it is possible to abstract the underlying essential similarities in the management of these seemingly disparate systems. ~ George Dantzig, #NFDB
1442:It occurred to her, suddenly, that the Chinese took poets as concubines. Their poets slept with warlords. They wrote with gold ink. They ate orchids and smoked opium. They were consecrated by nuance, by birds and silk and the ritual birthdays of gods and nothing changed for a thousand years. And afternoon was absinthe yellow and almond, burnt orange and chrysanthemum. And in the abstract sky, a litany of kites. ~ Kate Braverman, #NFDB
1443:Within a social structure, a familial structure, or a cultural structure of various kinds, there is a substitute for actual freedom. I mean, actual freedom is a very abstract notion; we have no idea what it means, except within a context - freedom to do what? So within these social structures, freedom becomes defined as power, your ability to make choices, and the power relationship within a family, any family. ~ Katherine Dunn, #NFDB
1444:But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics. ~ Jonah Goldberg, #NFDB
1445:laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories, because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1446:Still, winter is an abstract season: it is low on colors, even in Italy, and big on the imperatives of cold and brief daylight. These things train your eye on the outside with an intensity greater than that of the electric bulb availing you of your own features in the evening. If this season doesn't necessarily quell your nerves, it still subordinates them to your instincts; beauty at low temperatures is beauty. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
1447:to the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens,' the complexities of human life are reduced to produce theories that are 'always consoling in their simplicity”
bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story ~ Bren Brown,#NFDB
1448:We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories. ~ Roger Schank, #NFDB
1449:But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1450:God as an object of thought … is always a remote being; the relation … is an abstract one, … So long as we have not met a being face to face, we are always in doubt whether he is really such as we imagine him; … Christ … is the … certainty that God is what the soul desires and needs him to be. … [O]nly in Christ is the last wish of religion realised, … [W]hat god is in essence, … Christ is in actual appearance. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
1451:People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying. ~ Stanley Kubrick, #NFDB
1452:In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data. Our objective is to abstract patterns from Nature (right-hemisphere thinking), but many proposed patterns do not in fact correspond to the
data. Thus all proposed patterns must be subjected to the sieve of critical analysis (left-hemisphere thinking). ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1453:I respect the social graces enormously. How to pass the food. Don't yell from one room to another. Don't go through a closed door without a knock. Open the doors for the ladies. All these millions of simple household behaviors make for a better life. We can't live in constant rebellion against our parents - it's just silly. I'm very well mannered. It's not an abstract thing. It's a shared language of expectations. ~ Jack Nicholson, #NFDB
1454:[T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1455:To function efficiently - to function at all - we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statement of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavor and lawful profit. And we have maps. ~ Barry Unsworth, #NFDB
1456:It's different when you talk about immigration in the abstract... It's very different when you sit in front of a family, and [undocumented] children who grew up in this country, and who go to the same school you once went to... They thought if we only enforce the law, people will self-deport... It's not going to happen. The solution is not the status quo, or deportation when you're talking about breaking up families. ~ Mike Coffman, #NFDB
1457:I BOUGHT THIS house for the door. The house itself was a ruin, but I had to have that door. Over the years, I’ve painted it many times, all different ways: abstract, representational, blue, black, brown. I’ve painted it in the hot green of summer, in the dead of winter, clouds rushing past it, a lone yellow leaf drifting down. I painted the door open only once. Just before he died. In every picture after, it was closed. ~ Dawn Tripp, #NFDB
1458:Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth. ~ Kehinde Wiley, #NFDB
1459:Sometimes I'll have an end in mind, but it's always false, always corny, just a dumb idea anyone could have, sitting on a barstool. An abstract thesis with no real life inside it. And then I start writing and the writing itself confounds me, taking away the comfort of knowing the end in advance. How is that even possible? Doesn't the conclusion come at the end? How can you begin with one - that seems odd, right? ~ Charles D Ambrosio, #NFDB
1460:We might treat a rabbit as a pet or become emotionally attached to a goose, but we had come from cities and supermarkets, where flesh was hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures. A shrink-wrapped pork chop has a sanitized, abstract appearance that has nothing whatever to do with the warm, mucky bulk of a pig. Out here in the country there was no avoiding the direct link between death and dinner. ~ Peter Mayle, #NFDB
1461:A quick glance at the curves describing income and wealth inequality or the capital/income ratio is enough to show that politics is ubiquitous and that economic and political changes are inextricably inter- twined and must be studied together. This forces one to study the state, taxes, and debt in concrete ways and to abandon simplistic and abstract notions of the economic infrastructure and political superstructure. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1462:If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long. ~ William James, #NFDB
1463:judgment is the most important faculty we have. An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind—yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. And if we wonder how such an absurdity can arise, we find it in the assumptions, or the evolution, of neurology itself. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
1464:Life holds many, many, many mysteries, abstract things we all think about. In a film when things get abstract, some people don't appreciate that and they want to leave the theater. Others love to dream, get lost, try to figure things out. I'm one of those people. I like a film, a story that holds concrete things but also abstractions. So when ideas come along that have those things, I'm falling in love and going to work. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
1465:We’d talked in abstract ways about how each of us viewed marriage, and it worried me sometimes how different those views seemed to be. For me, getting married had been a given, something I’d grown up expecting to do someday—the same way having children had always been a given, dating back to the attention I’d heaped on my baby dolls as a girl. Barack wasn’t opposed to getting married, but he was in no particular rush. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
1466:When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
1467:Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
1468:Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1469:Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
1470:These experiments demonstrate the conceptual synesthesia connecting our ideas of the concrete experience of space and the abstract experience of time. Our concept of physical motion through space is scaffolded onto our concept of chronological motion through time. Experiencing one-indeed, merely thinking about one-influences our experience of and thoughts about the other, just as the theory of embodied cognition suggests. ~ James Geary, #NFDB
1471:Broome introduced Flynn to Erin. Erin nodded and then put her head back down. Erin had never been good with the families of victims. “They’re broken,” Erin had told him before. Broome looked now into Flynn’s eyes and thought “shattered” was more accurate. “Broken” suggested something clean and all the way through and fixable. But what happened to them was messier, more abstract, filled with shards and no hope of recovery. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1472:Dexter Palmer
"(T)he true enemy of humanity was not Evil, an abstract idea personified by some sort of crimson-faced creature dancing in flames, but Chance, that smoky million-handed monster forever fitting its tiny fingers into the fissures of your life, working tear it apart, loosening the fatal screw, turning that first cell cancerous, sending lightning to strike the tree that you chose for shelter from the storm. ~ Dexter Palmer,#NFDB
1473:Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics. ~ Walter Pater, #NFDB
1474:That which has essential value for man, which he esteems the perfect, the excellent, in which he has true delight, - that alone is God to him. … Therefore, the feeling, sensitive man believes only in a feeling, sensitive God, … [T]hat alone is holy to man which lies deepest within him, which is … the basis, the essence of his individuality. To the feeling man a God without feeling is an empty, abstract, negative God[.] ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
1475:But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography—much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1476:At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
1477:He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software’s approximations and short-cuts. This body didn’t want to evaporate. This body didn’t want to bail out. It didn’t much care that there was another – “more real” – version of itself, elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure. ~ Greg Egan, #NFDB
1478:Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB
1479:There are several kinds of truths, and it is customary to place in the first order mathematical truths, which are, however, only truths of definition. These definitions rest upon simple, but abstract, suppositions, and all truths in this category are only constructed, but abstract, consequences of these definitions ... Physical truths, to the contrary, are in no way arbitrary, and do not depend on us. ~ Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, #NFDB
1480:There is a singular strand running through history, always renewing itself, that of fanatics for the general good and for the written law. Logical to the point of inhumanity, pitiless towards others as towards themselves, these servants of abstract gods and of absolute law accept the role of executioners, because they wish to be the last executioner. They deceive themselves because, once dead, the world no longer obeys them. ~ Maurice Druon, #NFDB
1481:The very act of thinking about power in our lives and experiences creates a process of revelation and self-analysis that may even make us look at ourselves in a new light... thinking about power and its complex manifestations may not simply lead to a better understanding of the abstract complexities of society, but may have an effect on one?s own image and identity. Perhaps a warning label should be placed on the cover. ~ Kenneth E Boulding, #NFDB
1482:What Warden Matsumoto had said about people like them was accurate. They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1483:Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it - a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves. ~ Jane Goodall, #NFDB
1484:In consequence of this perversion of the word Being, philosophers looking about for something to supply its place, laid their hands upon the word Entity, a piece of barbarous Latin, invented by the schoolmen to be used as an abstract name, in which class its grammatical form would seem to place it: but being seized by logicians in distress to stop a leak in their terminology, it has ever since been used as a concrete name. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1485:Metacognitive disorders can be interpreted in terms of early, historical views in which the frontal cortex is considered responsible for abstract reasoning, planning, and problem solving (see Goldstein, 1936; Halstead, 1947). Such complex, high-level characterizations of metacognition do not lend themselves easily to contributions of specific cognitive (or brain) components that mediate performance on metacognitive tasks. As such ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1486:This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
1487:They that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, Good-nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and, according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies. ~ Bernard de Mandeville, #NFDB
1488:The culturally specific, in particular, the American porch play that American writers have cherished and loved for many years in terms of their new writing, has seemed to have very little relevance to a much more fast-flowing, abstract, experimental drama that has been emerging in [the UK]. The porch play, not to mention that thing of, Oops, I wasn't loved enough by my father, somehow didn't have the relevance in this country. ~ Stephen Daldry, #NFDB
1489:All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
1490:But their chauffeur knew exactly where they were, and how much distance was required to bring the Benz to a halt. With the expertise of a Hollywood stunt driver, the butler wrenched the wheel and nailed the brakes, bringing them to a park between a GTO Trez had an immediate hard-on for…and a Hummer that looked like an abstract sculpture rather than anything that was drivable. “Maybe he made his mistakes on that one,” Trez said dryly. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
1491:Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
1492:What it needed was a subtle but significant change in presentation. The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk—a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career—to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1493:In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, money was everywhere, not only as an abstract force but above all as a palpable, concrete magnitude. Writers frequently described the income and wealth of their characters in francs or pounds, not to overwhelm us with numbers but because these quantities established a character’s social status in the mind of the reader. Everyone knew what standard of living these numbers represented. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1494:In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate 'things' and 'events' are realities of nature is an illusion. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB
1495:In the civil society, the individual is recognized and accepted as more than an abstract statistic or faceless member of some group; rather, he is a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience. He is free to discover his own potential and pursue his own legitimate interests, tempered, however, by a moral order that has its foundation in faith and guides his life and all human life through the prudent exercise of judgment. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
1496:Awakening of the kundalini is realization of your pure abstract intelligence, the type that is not conditioned by your fears, emotions and worries. It is your pristine nature. When you are able to tap into this latent source of energy, you truly become the master of your universe. You can manifest whatever you wish in your life because your scale of consciousness is no longer limited to your body alone; it envelops the whole universe. If ~ Om Swami, #NFDB
1497:Star-watching: at night the stars of Alastor Cluster blaze in profusion. The atmosphere refracts their light; the sky quivers with beams, glitters, and errant flashes. The Trills go out into their gardens with jugs of wine; they name the stars and discusses localities. For the Trills, for almost anyone of Alastor, the night sky was no abstract empyrean, but rather a view across prodigious distances to known places: a vast luminous map. ~ Jack Vance, #NFDB
1498:"The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger. ~ Kenny Smith, #NFDB
1499:It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1500:It was always like this. Anazâr would walk into the arena, blinking back the sun, and he would think, Dying today, that would be fitting; that would be the pleasing fulfillment of an incomplete pattern. And then he would press the edge of his left thumb against his blade, letting the little cut bloom into pain, awakening his animal self, and death was no longer abstract, no longer a concept, and then he would have to fight, have to live. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
120 Integral Yoga
40 Philosophy
40 Occultism
40 Christianity
31 Poetry
24 Psychology
23 Yoga
13 Fiction
8 Science
8 Mysticism
6 Theosophy
6 Hinduism
5 Integral Theory
4 Education
3 Cybernetics
1 Thelema
1 Sufism
1 Kabbalah
1 Buddhism
1 Baha i Faith
1 Alchemy
131 Sri Aurobindo
38 Nolini Kanta Gupta
36 The Mother
23 Plotinus
20 Carl Jung
18 Satprem
15 Sri Ramakrishna
15 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
12 H P Lovecraft
11 William Wordsworth
11 Aleister Crowley
10 James George Frazer
10 A B Purani
9 Paul Richard
8 William Butler Yeats
8 Plato
7 Jordan Peterson
5 Vyasa
5 Swami Krishnananda
5 Rudolf Steiner
5 Aldous Huxley
4 Swami Vivekananda
4 Sri Ramana Maharshi
4 Jorge Luis Borges
3 Robert Browning
3 Norbert Wiener
3 George Van Vrekhem
3 Alice Bailey
2 Walt Whitman
2 Saint Augustine of Hippo
2 Ken Wilber
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Jean Gebser
2 Friedrich Nietzsche
2 Edgar Allan Poe
37 The Synthesis Of Yoga
16 The Life Divine
14 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
12 Lovecraft - Poems
11 Wordsworth - Poems
11 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
10 The Golden Bough
10 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
9 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
8 Yeats - Poems
8 Savitri
8 Essays Divine And Human
7 The Future of Man
7 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
7 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
7 Mysterium Coniunctionis
7 Maps of Meaning
7 Magick Without Tears
6 The Problems of Philosophy
6 The Human Cycle
6 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
6 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
5 Vishnu Purana
5 The Study and Practice of Yoga
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 The Phenomenon of Man
5 The Perennial Philosophy
5 Talks
5 Letters On Poetry And Art
5 Isha Upanishad
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
4 Letters On Yoga I
4 Labyrinths
4 Essays On The Gita
4 Agenda Vol 03
4 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
3 Vedic and Philological Studies
3 The Practice of Psycho therapy
3 Theosophy
3 Record of Yoga
3 Preparing for the Miraculous
3 Liber ABA
3 Letters On Yoga II
3 Cybernetics
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
3 Browning - Poems
3 Bhakti-Yoga
3 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
3 Aion
3 Agenda Vol 02
2 Words Of Long Ago
2 Whitman - Poems
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 The Essentials of Education
2 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
2 Selected Fictions
2 Questions And Answers 1956
2 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
2 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
2 On Education
2 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
2 Hymn of the Universe
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
2 Agenda Vol 09
2 Agenda Vol 07
2 Agenda Vol 01
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mystic realities cannot be reached by the scientific consciousness, because they are far more subtle than the subtlest object that science can contemplate. The neutrons and positrons are for science today the finest and profoundest object-forces; they belong, it is said, almost to a borderl and where physics ends. Nor for that reason is a mystic reality something like a mathematical abstraction, -n for example. The mystic reality is subtler than the subtlest of physical things and yet, paradoxical to say, more concrete than the most concrete thing that the senses apprehend.
Furthermore, being so, the mystic domain is of infinitely greater potency than the domain of intra-atomic forces. If one comes, all on a sudden, into contact with a force here without the necessary preparation to hold and handle it, he may get seriously bruised, morally and physically. The adventure into the mystic domain has its own toll of casualtiesone can lose the mind, one can lose one's body even and it is a very common experience among those who have tried the path. It is not in vain and merely as a poetic metaphor that the ancient seers have said
--
The mystic's knowledge is a part and a formation of his life. That is why it is a knowledge not abstract and remote but living and intimate and concrete. It is a knowledge that pulsates with delight: indeed it is the radiance that is shed by the purest and intensest joy. For this reason it may be that in approaching through the heart there is a chance of one's getting arrested there and not caring for the still higher, the solar lights; but this need not be so. In the heart there is a golden door leading to the deepest delights, but there is also a diamond door opening up into the skies of the brightest luminosities.
For it must be understood that the heart, the mystic heart, is not the external thing which is the seat of emotion or passion; it is the secret heart that is behind, the inner heartantarhdaya of the Upanishadwhich is the centre of the individual consciousness, where all the divergent lines of that consciousness meet and from where they take their rise. That is what the Upanishad means when it says that the heart has a hundred channels which feed the human vehicle. That is the source, the fount and origin, the very substance of the true personality. Mystic knowledge the true mystic knowledge which saves and fulfilsbegins with the awakening or the entrance into this real being. This being is pure and luminous and blissful and sovereignly real, because it is a portion, a spark of the Divine Consciousness and Nature: a contact and communion with it brings automatically into play the light and the truth that are its substance. At the same time it is an uprising flame that reaches out naturally to higher domains of consciousness and manifests them through its translucid dynamism.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
One day the priest of the Radhakanta temple accidentally dropped the image of Krishna on the floor, breaking one of its legs. The pundits advised the Rani to install a new image, since the worship of an image with a broken limb was against the scriptural injunctions. But the Rani was fond of the image, and she asked Sri Ramakrishna's opinion. In an abstracted mood, he said: "This solution is ridiculous. If a son-in-law of the Rani broke his leg, would she discard him and put another in his place? Wouldn't she rather arrange for his treatment? Why should she not do the same thing in this case too? Let the image be repaired and worshipped as before." It was a simple, straightforward solution and was accepted by the Rani. Sri Ramakrishna himself mended the break. The priest was dismissed for his carelessness, and at Mathur Babu's earnest request Sri Ramakrishna accepted the office of priest in the Radhakanta temple.
^No definite information is available as to the origin of this name. Most probably it was given by Mathur Babu, as Ramlal, Sri Ramakrishna's nephew, has said, quoting the authority of his uncle himself.
--
As he read in college the rationalistic Western philosophers of the nineteenth century, his boyhood faith in God and religion was unsettled. He would not accept religion on mere faith; he wanted demonstration of God. But very soon his passionate nature discovered that mere Universal Reason was cold and bloodless. His emotional nature, dissatisfied with a mere abstraction, required a concrete support to help him in the hours of temptation. He wanted an external power, a guru, who by embodying perfection in the flesh would still the commotion of his soul. Attracted by the magnetic personality of Keshab, he joined the Brahmo Samaj and became a singer in its choir. But in the Samaj he did not find the guru who could say that he had seen God.
In a state of mental conflict and torture of soul, Narendra came to Sri Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar. He was then eighteen years of age and had been in college two years. He entered the Master's room accompanied by some light-hearted friends. At Sri Ramakrishna's request he sang a few songs, pouring his whole soul into them, and the Master went into samadhi. A few minutes later Sri Ramakrishna suddenly left his seat, took Narendra by the hand, and led him to the screened verandah north of his room. They were alone. Addressing Narendra most tenderly, as if he were a friend of long acquaintance, the Master said: "Ah! You have come very late. Why have you been so unkind as to make me wait all these days? My ears are tired of hearing the futile words of worldly men. Oh, how I have longed to pour my spirit into the heart of someone fitted to receive my message!" He talked thus, sobbing all the time. Then, standing before Narendra with folded hands, he addressed him as Narayana, born on earth to remove the misery of humanity. Grasping Narendra's hand, he asked him to come again, alone, and very soon. Narendra was startled. "What is this I have come to see?" he said to himself. "He must be stark mad. Why, I am the son of Viswanath Dutta. How dare he speak this way to me?"
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
sists in its abstracts; the poorest tongues have
wealth of Concretes.
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Greatness is magnetic and in a sense contagious. Wherever manifested, greatness is claimed by humanity as something that reveals the possibility of the race. The highest utility of greatness is not merely to attract us but to inspire us to follow it and rise to our own highest spiritual stature. To the majority of men Truth remains abstract, impersonal and far unless it is seen and felt concretely in a human personality. A man never knows a truth actively except through a person and by embodying it in his own personality. Some glimpse of the Truth-Consciousness which Sri Aurobindo embodied may be caught in these Evening Talks.
***
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1 Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
Mandukya Upanishad 4.
--
Mind finds fully its force and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances as the means of a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with the difficulties of the material world the ethical development of the individual is firmly shaped and the great schools of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science and experience.
This mixing with life may, however, be pursued for the sake of the individual mind and with an entire indifference to the forms of the material existence or the uplifting of the race. This indifference is seen at its highest in the Epicurean discipline and is not entirely absent from the Stoic; and even altruism does the works of compassion more often for its own sake than for the sake of the world it helps. But this too is a limited fulfilment. The progressive mind is seen at its noblest when it strives to elevate the whole race to its own level whether by sowing broadcast the image of its own thought and fulfilment or by changing the material life of the race into fresh forms, religious, intellectual, social or political, intended to represent more nearly that ideal of truth, beauty, justice, righteousness with which the man's own soul is illumined. Failure in such a field matters little; for the mere attempt is dynamic and creative. The struggle of Mind to elevate life is the promise and condition of the conquest of life by that which is higher even than Mind.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort, - God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal
32
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed it would be wrong to associate any cold ascetic nudity to the spiritual body of Sri Aurobindo. His poetry is philosophic, abstract, no doubt, but every philosophy has its practice, every abstract thing its concrete application,even as the soul has its body; and the fusion, not mere union, of the two is very characteristic in him. The deepest and unseizable flights of thought he knows how to clo the with a Kalidasian richness of imagery, or a Keatsean gusto of sensuousness:
. . . . .O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning!
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is not merely by addressing the beloved as your goddess that you can attain this mysticism; the Elizabethan did that in merry abundance,ad nauseam.A finer temper, a more delicate touch, a more subtle sensitiveness and a kind of artistic wizardry are necessary to tune the body into a rhythm of the spirit. The other line of mysticism is common enough, viz., to express the spirit in terms and rhythms of the flesh. Tagore did that liberally, the Vaishnava poets did nothing but that, the Song of Solomon is an exquisite example of that procedure. There is here, however, a difference in degrees which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name and form, as the body to render concrete, living and vibrant, near and intimate what otherwise would perhaps be vague and abstract, afar, aloof. But this mundane or human appearance has a value in so far as it is a support, a pointer or symbol of the spiritual import. And the mysticism lies precisely in the play of the two, a hide-and-seek between them. On the other hand, as I said, the greater portion of Vaishnava poetry, like a precious and beautiful casket, no doubt, hides the spiritual import: not the pure significance but the sign and symbol are luxuriously elaborated, they are placed in the foreground in all magnificence: as if it was their very purpose to conceal the real meaning. When the Vaishnava poet says,
O love, what more shall I, shall Radha speak,
--
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The spirit of the age demands this new gospel. Mankind needs and awaits a fresh revelation. The world and life are not an illusion or a lesser reality: they are, if taken rightly, as real as the pure Spirit itself. Indeed, Spirit and Flesh, Consciousness and Matter are not antinomies; to consider them as such is itself an illusion. In fact, they are only two poles or modes or aspects of the same reality. To separate or divide them is a one-sided concentration or abstraction on the part of the human mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression through Matter; human life too reaches its highest term, its summum bonum, in embodying the spiritual consciousness here on earth and not dissolving itself in the Transcendence. That is the new Dispensation which answers to the deepest aspiration in man and towards which he has been travelling through the ages in the course of the evolution of his consciousness. Many, however, are the prophets and sages who have set this ideal before humanity and more and more insistently and clearly as we come nearer to the age we live in. But none or very few have expressed it with such beauty and charm and compelling persuasion. It would be carping criticism to point out-as some, purists one may call them, have done-that in poetising and aesthetising the spiritual truth and reality, in trying to make it human and terrestrial, he has diminished and diluted the original substance, in endeavouring to render the diamond iridescent, he has turned it into a baser alloy. Tagore's is a poetic soul, it must be admitted; and it is not necessary that one should find in his ideas and experiences and utterances the cent per cent accuracy and inevitability of a Yogic consciousness. Still his major perceptions, those that count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual realisation.
Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as Beauty, the spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of ecstasy. This experience is the very core of Vaishnavism and for which Tagore is sometimes called a Neo-Vaishnava. The Vaishnava sees the world pulsating in glamorous beauty as the Lila (Play) of the Lord, and the Lord, God himself, is nothing but Love and Beauty. Still Tagore is not all Vaishnava or merely a Vaishnava; he is in addition a modern (the carping voice will say, there comes the dilution and adulteration)in the sense that problems exist for himsocial, political, economic, national, humanitarianwhich have to be faced and solved: these are not merely mundane, but woven into the texture of the fundamental problem of human destiny, of Soul and Spirit and God. A Vaishnava was, in spite of his acceptance of the world, an introvert, to use a modern psychological phrase, not necessarily in the pejorative sense, but in the neutral scientific sense. He looks upon the universe' and human life as the play of the Lord, as an actuality and not mere illusion indeed; but he does not participate or even take interest in the dynamic working out of the world process, he does not care to know, has no need of knowing that there is a terrestrial purpose and a diviner fulfilment of the mortal life upon earth. The Vaishnava dwells more or less absorbed in the Vaikuntha of his inner consciousness; the outer world, although real, is only a symbolic shadowplay to which he can but be a witness-real, is only a nothing more.
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The gospel of strength that Vivekananda spread was very characteristic of the man. For it is not mere physical or nervous bravery, although that too is indispensable, and it is something more than moral courage. In the speeches referred to, the subject-matter (as well as the manner to a large extent) is philosophical, metaphysical, even abstract in outlook and treatment: they are not a call to arms, like the French National Anthem, for example; they are not merely an ethical exhortation, a moral lesson either. They speak of the inner spirit, the divine in man, the supreme realities that lie beyond. And yet the words are permeated through and through with a vibration life-giving and heroic-not so much in the explicit and apparent meaning as in the style and manner and atmosphere: it is catching, even or precisely when he refers, for example, to these passages in the Vedas and the Upanishads, magnificent in their poetic beauty, sublime in their spiritual truth,nec plus ultra, one can say, in the grand style supreme:
Yasyaite himavanto mahitv
01.10 - Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is another aspect of personality as viewed by Berdyaev which involves a bias of the more orthodox Christian faith: the Christ is inseparable from the Cross. So he says: "There is no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering. Suffering is inherent in God too, if he is a personality, and not merely an abstract idea. God shares in the sufferings of men. He yearns for responsive love. There are divine as well as human passions and therefore divine or creative personality must always suffer to the end of time. A condition of anguish and distress is inherent in it." The view is logically enforced upon the Christian, it is said, if he is to accept incarnation, God becoming flesh. Flesh cannot but be weak. This very weakness, so human, is and must be specially characteristic of God also, if he is one with man and his lover and saviour.
Eastern spirituality does not view sorrow and sufferingevilas an integral part of the Divine Consciousness. It is born out of the Divine, no doubt, as nothing can be outside the Divine, but it is a local and temporal formation; it is a disposition consequent upon certain conditions and with the absence or elimination of those conditions, this disposition too disappears. God and the Divine Consciousness can only be purity, light, immortality and delight. The compassion that a Buddha feels for the suffering humanity is not at all a feeling of suffering; pain or any such normal human reaction does not enter into its composition; it is the movement of a transcendent consciousness which is beyond and purified of the normal reactions, yet overarching them and entering into them as a soothing and illumining and vivifying presence. The healer knows and understands the pain and suffering of his patient but is not touched by them; he need not contract the illness of his patient in order to be in sympathy with him. The Divine the Soulcan be in flesh and yet not smirched with its mire; the flesh is not essentially or irrevocably the ooze it is under certain given conditions. The divine physical body is composed of radiant matter and one can speak of it even as of the soul that weapons cannot pierce it nor can fire burn it.
01.10 - Principle and Personality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We do not speak like politicians or banias; but the very truth of the matter demands such a policy or line of action. It is very well to talk of principles and principles alone, but what are principles unless they take life and form in a particular individual? They are airy nothings, notions in the brain of logicians and metaphysicians, fit subjects for discussion in the academy, but they are devoid of that vital urge which makes them creative agencies. We have long lines of philosophers, especially European, who most scrupulously avoided all touch of personalities, whose utmost care was to keep principles pure and unsullied; and the upshot was that those principles remained principles only, barren and infructuous, some thing like, in the strong and puissant phrase of BaudelaireLa froide majest de la femme strile. And on the contrary, we have had other peoples, much addicted to personalitiesespecially in Asiawho did not care so much for abstract principles as for concrete embodiments; and what has been the result here? None can say that they did not produce anything or produced only still-born things. They produced living creaturesephemeral, some might say, but creatures that lived and moved and had their days.
But, it may be asked, what is the necessity, what is the purpose in making it all a one man show? Granting that principles require personalities for their fructuation and vital functioning, what remains to be envisaged is not one personality but a plural personality, the people at large, as many individuals of the human race as can be consciously imbued with those principles. When principles are made part and parcel of, are concentrated in a single solitary personality, they get "cribbed and cabined," they are vitiated by the idiosyncrasies of the man, they come to have a narrower field of application; they are emptied of the general verities they contain and finally cease to have any effect.
0 1956-10-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I am facing the same difficulties as before my departure to Hyderabad, and I have made the same mistakes. The main reason for this state is that, on the one hand, words and ideas seem to have lost all power over me, and on the other, the vital elan which led me thus far is dead. So upon what shall my faith rest? I still have some faith, of course, but it has become totally abstract. The vital does not cooperate, so I feel all withered, suspended in a void, nothing seems to give me direction anymore. There is no rebelliousness in me, but rather a void.
In this state, I am ceaselessly thinking of my forest in Guiana or of my travels through Africa and the ardor that filled me with life in those days. I seem to need to have my goal before me and to walk towards it. Outer difficulties also seem to help me resolve my inner problems: there is a kind of need in me for the elements the sea, the forest, the desert for a milieu with which I can wrestle and through which I can grow. Here, I seem to lack a dynamic point of leverage. Here, in the everyday routine, everything seems to be falling apart in me. Should I not return to my forest in Guiana?
0 1959-01-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
X knows very little about your true work and what Swami has been able to explain to him is rather inadequate, for I do not believe that he himself understands it very well. So I shall have to try to make myself understood quite clearly to X and tell him exactly and simply what it is you need. The word transformation is too abstract. Each mantra has a very specific actionat least I believe soand I must be able to tell X in a concrete way the exact powers or capacities you are now seeking, and the general goal or the particular results required. Then he will find the mantra or mantras that apply.
My explanations will have to be simple, for X speaks English with difficulty, thus subtleties are out of the question. (I am teaching him a little English while he is teaching me Sanskrit, and we manage to understand each other rather well all the same. He understands more than he can speak.)
0 1961-06-06, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And when the body makes this movement (gesture of stepping back from physical appearances)what to call it? This movement of fusion (is it fusion?), of no longer being a separate body, of being the Divine there is something which. There is a sort of abstraction of something (and even that is putting it too concretely). And sometimes it succeeds, the body floats in the Light; sometimes its only partial. Sometimes all the inner consciousness is there, full and total but HERE things remain as they are, stupid, stupid, utterly stupid! Blind, in shifting sands, painful (and its not a thought, its not even a sensation; I dont know what it is).
And THERE the conscious will can do nothing. Nothing. All it could do it has done, and it continues to do all it can at each minute, and its nothing, it is not THATwhat is it??
0 1961-12-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He has understood NOTHING, felt nothing in this book, finding it too abstract. In a word, they wont accept it without extensive modifications and explanations.
May your will be done,
0 1961-12-20, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Dear Sir I must begin by telling you that although this text is an excellent essay, it is not, in its present form, a book for the Spiritual Masters series. Let us enumerate the reasons for this. First of all, the general impression is of an abstract text. I can straight-away imagine your reaction to this and I dread misunderstandings! But putting myself in the readers place, since, once again, it does involve a collection intended for a wide public that we are beginning to know well, I can assure you that this public will not be able to follow page after page of reflections upon what one is bound to call a philosophical and spiritual system. Obviously this impression is caused primarily by the fact that you have begun with twenty-one pages where the reader is assumed to already know of Sri Aurobindos historical existence and the content of the Vedas and the Upanishads, plus I dont know how many other notions of rite, truth, divinity, wisdom, etc., etc. In my view, and the solution is going to appear cruel to you, for you certainly value these twenty-one pages [on the Secret of the Veda], they should purely and simply be deleted, for everything you say there, which is very rich in meaning, can only become clear when one has read what follows. There are many books in which readers can be asked to make the effort entailed in not understanding the beginning until they have read the end: but not books of popular culture. One could envisage an introduction of three or four pages to situate the spiritual climate and cultural world in which Sri Aurobindos thought has taken place, provided, however, that it is sufficiently descriptive, and not a pre-synthesis of everything to be expounded upon in what follows. In a general way you are going to smile, finding me quite Cartesian! But the readership we address is more or less permeated by a widespread Cartesianism, and you can help them, if you like, to reverse their methodology, but on the condition that you make yourself understood right from the start. Generally, you dont make enough use of analysis and, even before analysis, of a description of the realities being analyzed. That is why the sections of pure philosophical analysis seem much too long to us, and, even apart from the abstract character of the chapter on evolution (which should certainly be shorter), one feels at a positive standstill! After having waited patiently, and sometimes impatiently, for some light to be thrown on Sri Aurobindos own experience, one reads with genuine amazement that one can draw on energies from above instead of drawing on them from the material nature around oneself, or from an animal sleep, or that one can modify his sleep and render it conscious master illnesses before they enter the body. All of that in less than a page; and you conclude that the spirit that was the slave of matter becomes again the master of evolution. But how Sri Aurobindo was led to think this, the experiences that permitted him to verify it, those that permit other men to consider the method transmittable, the difficulties, the obstacles, the realizationsdoesnt this constitute the essence of what must be said to make the reader understand? Once again, it is the question of a pedagogy intimately tied in with the spirit of the collection. Let me add as well that I always find it deplorable when a thought is not expressed purely for its own sake, but is accompanied by an aggressive irony towards concepts which the author does not share. This is pointless and harms the ideas being presented, all the more so because they are expressed in contrast with caricatured notions: the allusions you make to such concepts as you think yourself capable of evoking the soul, creation, virtue, sin, salvationwould only hold some interest if the reader could find those very concepts within himself. But, as they are caricatured by your pen, the reader is given the impression of an all too easily obtained contrast between certain ideas admired and others despised. Whereas it would be far more to the point if they corresponded to something real in the religious consciousness of the West. I have too much esteem for you and the spiritual world in which you live to avoid saying this through fear of upsetting you.
Amen.
0 1962-07-07, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But after this prologue, I intend to tackle the problem practically, to speak of the moment when people reach the limits of the mind, when they start going round in circles and find nothing; then I will tell them of zones beyond the mind, and of what can be discovered when one goes within: mental silence. Ill talk about a practical discipline. That was my idea. My idea isnt to give an abstract explanation but to take up yoga from a practical angle: try to do this, and heres what you may expectmental transformation, change in the vital, dreams, etc. All practical things. Id like to explore the psychological aspect.
Thats good. From the standpoint of the Work, of what you create, of course its very good, very interesting; it needs to be said, it MUST be said. But is the gentleman who wrote you that letter capable of understanding anything of it? Thats where I put a question mark.
0 1962-07-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Their main complaint was, You are abstract. So if we want to be concrete, we have to speak of experiences.
No, to them concrete means telling what Sri Aurobindo did physically. Thats what they call concrete. Psychology is something abstract for them.
Oh, I dont know what to do!
Here, Ill give you an example: A. wrote to tell me, If you know how to get in touch with Agni,1 let me know, because I need him! I gave the natural reply, that whats needed is aspiration for progress, a will for perfection, and that you kindle the fire by burning your desires. I told him this in a way I call very concrete. Well, he answered (laughing), Ohhh! Youre living in abstractions. Thats not what I want, I want a living goda personality, you see!
Thats how people are.
Psychology: thats abstract. What they want is: on such and such a date he went to this place, saw these people and did thisall the most external and banal sorts of things. Even yoga boils down to: he sat down and stayed there for so many hours, he had this vision, he tried out that method, he did asanas and breathing exercises. That, for them, is concrete. That and that alone. Psychology is thoroughly abstractthoroughly. Its unreal to them.
But Ive tried to be as concrete as possible! Like cutting up a rat on a dissecting table to see whats inside it.
0 1962-09-26, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I would especially like to understand the difference between the overmind and the Supermindto understand it concretely, not abstractly.
The overmind isnt part of the intellect. Its the domain of the gods.
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Beyond the musical zone lies thought: thoughts, organized thoughts for plays and books, abstractions for philosophies. But what used to interest me particularly were the combinations that give birth to novels or plays.
That is the third zone.
0 1963-08-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The "doctor" is not an abstraction here, but the person who watches and will watch over Mother up to the end.
After "death" or at the time of "death."
0 1966-02-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thons idea (which also fits with the teaching here in India in which they say it was the sense of separation that created the whole DisorderDeath, Falsehood and all the rest), Thons idea was that those first four Emanations, that is, Consciousness, Love, Life, and Truth (Love was the last, I think, but I no longer remember what he said), those four individual emanated Beings, according to him, in full consciousness of their power and existence, cut themselves off from their Origin. In other words, they wanted to depend only on themselves, they didnt even feel the need to keep the connection with their Origin (I am putting it very materially). So then, that cut is what instantly caused Consciousness to become Unconsciousness, Love to become Suffering (it wasnt Loveit was actually Ananda which became Suffering), Life to become Death and Truth to become Falsehood. And they hurled themselves into the creation like that. Then, there was a second creation, which was the creation of the gods, to mend the mischief caused by those four (the story is told in almost a childlike way in order not to be abstract, in order to become concrete). The gods are the second emanation and they came to mend. In India and everywhere, they were given various names and functions, and they are found in the Overmind region, that is to say, above the physical quaternary, the material quaternary. And the function of those gods is to mend the damage wrought by the others. And the region in which the others (the first Emanations) concentrated is the vital region.
All this can be translated philosophically, intellectually and so on. It is told as a story so that the most physical intellectuality may understand. But in principle, its the separation from the Origin that created the whole Disorder. And, as far as I know, in India too the Upanishads say the same thing; Sri Aurobindo, at any rate, says that Disorder came with the sense of Separation. So those are different ways of saying the same thing. In one case, seen in a certain way, its a willed separation; in the other case, its an inevitable consequenceinevitable consequence of of what? I dont know.
0 1966-06-29, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because otherwise, we are lost in abstractions.
Yes, and with abstractions, you use words that mean something else, thats all.
But how do YOU perceive consciousness?
0 1968-03-13, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mentally, we can explain everything, but that doesnt mean anything at all: for the body, the material consciousness, its abstract. When the material consciousness catches hold of something, it knows it A HUNDRED TIMES BETTER than we can know it mentally. When it knows, it has the power: knowing gives it the power. Thats what is being slowly, slowly worked out. For an ignorant consciousness its slow and painful but for the true consciousness, its not that! Pain, joy, all that is such an absurd way of seeing thingsof feeling and seeing things.
There is an increasingly concrete perception that everything that there is nothing that doesnt hold its own joy of being, because thats THE way of being: without joy of being, there is no being. But its not what we mentally understand by joy of being. Its something which is hard to express. And this perception of suffering and joy (almost of evil and good), all of that is necessities of the work to enable it to be done in a certain field of unconsciousness. Because true consciousness is something entirely, totally different. Thats what the consciousness of the cells is now learning, and learning through a concrete experience; and all those appreciations of what is good and what is evil, of what is suffering and what is joy, all that seems misty. But the thing the Truth the concrete thing still hasnt been caught. Its on the way, one feels its on the way, but its not there yet. If one had it one would be the all-powerful master. And possibly one cannot have it until the world in its totality, or to a sufficient extent, is ready for the transformation.
0 1968-03-16, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This morning, there was an experience; it seemed an extraordinary revelation, and its something that was always known. So you mentalize it the moment you mentalize it, it becomes clear, but thats no longer it! You see, we say this creation is the creation of equilibrium,2 and that in fact it is mental error which makes us want to choose one thing and reject another that all things must be together: what we call good, what we call evil, what we call right and what we call wrong, what we find pleasant and what we find unpleasantall that must be together. And this morning, there was the discovery that through Separationthis Separation which has been described in all kinds of different ways, sometimes pictorially, sometimes simply in an abstract way, sometimes philosophically, sometimes all that is just explanations, but there is something, which probably is simply Objectification (Mother gestures as if to push the universe forward, out of the Nonmanifest) But thats still one way to explain. This so-called Separation, what is it exactly? We dont know (or perhaps we do, after all). It in fact created (to put it in colors) black and white, night and day (thats already more mixed but black and white too are mixed), its the tendency to create two poles: the pleasant or good thing, and the unpleasant or bad one. And as soon as you want to return to the Origin, the two tend to merge together again. And it is in perfect equilibrium, that is, where no division is possible anymore and the one has no influence over the other, where the two have become one again, its there that lies this famous Perfection which we are trying to rediscover.
Rejection of the one and acceptance of the other is childishness. Its ignorance. All mental translations, like that of an Evil eternally evil, giving birth to the idea of hell, or that of a Good eternally good all that, all of it is childishness.
0 1969-07-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know that I sent my Sannyasin to Paris, and the publisher of the Gold-Washer didnt want it. He found it was speculations, abstractions.2
Oh! Is this gentleman of yours an idiot?
--
But the very strange thing is that for those people all that we find abstract and false, they find concrete and true!
Yes.
--
"All that is the most vital and important for you will appear to be abstractions and speculations." A friend of Satprem's in the same publishing house gave him this explanation: "Were you writing about Vietnam, the Black problem, LSD, the Third World or Marcuse, we would a priori be interested, even if we disagreed with you. But capital letters frighten us. Social peace is a topic; Peace isn't."
Gallimard, who will not reply.
0 1971-04-17, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One could say that it is far more difficult to go from the mental to the supramental life than to go from a certain psychic emotion in life something that is like a reflection, a luminous emanation of the divine Presence in matterto the supramental consciousness; it is much easier to go from that into the supramental consciousness than to go from the highest intellectual speculation to any supramental vibration. Perhaps it is the word that misleads us! Perhaps it is because we call it supramental that we expect to reach it through a higher intellectual mental activity. But the reality is quite different. With this very high and pure and lofty intellectual activity, one seems to go towards a kind of cold, powerless abstraction, an icy light that is surely very remote from life and still further away from the experience of the supramental reality.
The new substances that is spreading and acting in the world contains a warmth, a power, a joy so intense that all intellectual activity seems cold and dry beside it. And that is why the less one talks about these things, the better it is. A single instant, a single impulse of deep and true love, a single minute of deep communion with the divine Grace brings you much closer to the goal than all possible explanations.
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The next step of Descent is the Mind where the original unity and identity and harmony are disrupted to a yet greater degree, almost completely. The self-delimitation of consciousness which is proper to the Supermind and even to the Overmind, at least in its higher domainsgives way to self-limitation, to intolerant egoism and solipsism. The consciousness withdraws from its high and wide sweep, narrows down to introvert orbits. The sense of unity in the mind is, at most, a thing of idealism and imagination; it is an abstract notion, a supposition and a deduction. Here we enter into the very arcana of Maya, the rightful possession of Ignorance. The individualities here have become totally isolated and independent and mutually conflicting lines of movement. Hence the natural incapacity of mind, as it is said, to comprehend more than one object simultaneously. The Super mind and, less absolutely, the Overmind have a global and integral outlook: they can take in each one in its purview all at once the total assemblage of things, they differentiate but do not divide the Supermind not at all, the Overmind not categorically. The Mind has not this synthetic view, it proceeds analytically. It observes its object by division, taking the parts piecemeal, dismantling them, separating them, and attending to each one at a time. And when it observes it fixes itself on one point, withdrawing its attention from all the rest. If it bas to arrive at a synthesis, it can only do so by collating, aggregating and summing. Mental consciousness is thus narrowly one pointed: and in narrowing itself, being farther away from the source it becomes obscurer, more and more outward gazing (parci khni) and superficial. The One Absolute in its downward march towards multiplicity, fragmentation and partiality loses also gradually its subtlety, its suppleness, its refinement, becomes more and more obtuse, crude, rigid and dense.
Between the Overmind and the Mind proper, varying according to the degree of immixture of the two, according to the degree of descent and of emergence of one and the other respectively, there are several levels of consciousness of which three main ones have been named and described by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more direct, intense, synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where consciousness is slower, duller, more uncertain, more disintegrated. The lower the consciousness descends the more veiled it becomes, losing more and more the directness, the sureness, the intensity and force and the synthetic unity native to the highest ranges of our consciousness and being.
--
The next stage of devolution is the Mind proper. There or perhaps even before, on the lower reaches of the Overmind, the gods have become all quite separate, self-centred, each bounded in his own particular sphere and horizon. The overmind gods the true godsare creators in a world of balanced or harmoniously held difference; they are powers that fashion each a special fulfilment, enhancing one another at the same time (parasparam bhvayantah). Between the Overmind and the Mind there is a class of lesser godsthey have been called formateurs; they do not create in the strict sense of the term, they give form to what the anterior gods have created and projected. These form-makers that consolidate the encasement, fix definitely the image, have most probably been envisaged in the Indian dhynamrtis. But in the Mind the gods become still more fixed and rigid, stereotyped; the mental gods inspire exclusive systems, extreme and abstract generalisations, theories and principles and formulae that, even when they seek to force and englobe all in their cast-iron mould, can hardly understand or tolerate each other.
Mind is the birth-place of absolute division and exclusivismit is the own home of egoism. Egoism is that ignorant modea twist or knot of consciousness which cuts up the universal unity into disparate and antagonistic units: it creates isolated, mutually exclusive whorls in the harmonious rhythm and vast commonalty of the one consciousness or conscious existence. The Sankhya speaks of the principle of ego coming or appearing after the principle of vastness (mahat). The Vast is the region above the Mind, where the unitary consciousness is still intact; with the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in the asuraAsura, the mentalised vital being.
02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An abstract phantasm mould of mental make, -
It feels what earthly bodies cannot feel
02.05 - The Godheads of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Into abstract emptiness brought clash and clasp:
Parent of an expanding universe
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Of sparing lines limned by an abstract art
In a rare scanted light with faint dream-brush
02.09 - The Way to Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To have union, one must unitedivision can never lead to unity. Also this unity is established automatically and irrevocably, not by any abstract sense of justice and equality, nor by any romantic or imaginative feeling of fraternity, but by a dynamic living together. A common political and civic and economic life creates a field of force that can draw together into a harmonious working the most contrary and refractory elements.
We have said, however, time and again, that the present war is a great opportunity offered by Nature and Providence, opportunity that comes only once in a way; it is precisely the field of which we speak, the field par excellence, which can compel all centrifugal elements to come together, labour together, enjoy and suffer together and turn and transmute them into the very strongest centripetal components.
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
--
Or see truth nude in a bright abstract haze.
68.64
02.11 - New World-Conditions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, there can be no doubt that the British wish, are even eager, to have a settlement with India: they wish to have an India free and united and strong and they are willing to lend their help as far as lies in their power and competence,not because it is an ideal, something good in the abstract and therefore worth pursuing and they are altruistic or philanthropic by nature, but because it is a matter of self-interest to them, it is a thing to be done because of the actual life conditions. A strong free and friendly India is an asset they wish to build and conserve. They feel that the old-world methods of one-sided exploitation is neither possible nor desirable any longer; they must move with the moving times. And, as I have already said, they do not move principally by ideas and notions and brain formations, they are in closer touch with life forces and are more easily responsive to these.
True, there are contrary voices. But as one swallow does not make a summer, even so, many such voices cannot perpetuate the past. The name, even the form of Imperialism is there, but the substance of it is how much changed, if one goes behind! The British Empire, as it stands today, is composed of three strands, we may say: the first, the front line, consists of Canada and Australia, the second, of Ireland, Egypt and Irak, and the third, mainly of India. This graded pattern shows that it is something fluid and even progressive, there is nothing rigid and final about it. The very nature of the composition seems to exert a pressure working for an equality, an equilibrium of partnership building up a genuine Commonwealth. The model is catching. An Imperialistic Russia, that has found a new avatara in Stalin, has become a champion of federalism, as the best way of preserving the imperial integrity!
02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By an abstract purity of godless sight,
By a percept nude, intolerant of forms,
--
An abstract of the living Divinity.
Here the mind's wisdom stopped; it felt complete;
02.12 - Mysticism in Bengali Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Bengali poetry was born some time towards the end of an era of decline in the Indian consciousness, almost towards the close of what is called the Buddhist period, but it was born with a veritable crown on its head. For it was sheer mystic poetry, mystic in substance, mystic in manner and expression. The poets were themselves mystics, that is to say spiritual seekers, sadhaks they were called Siddhas or Siddhacharyas. They told of their spiritual, rather occult experiences in an occult or oblique manner, the very manner of the ancient Vedic Rishis, in figures and symbols and similes. It was a form of beauty, not merely of truthof abstract metaphysical truth that rose all on a sudden, as it were, out of an enveloping darkness. It shone for a time and then faded slowly, perhaps spread itself out in the common consciousness of the people and continued to exist as a backwash in popular songs and fables and proverbs. But it was there and came up again a few centuries later and the crest is seen once more in a more elevated, polished and dignified form with a content of mental illumination. I am referring to Chandidasa, who was also a sadhak poet and is usually known as the father of Bengali poetry, being the creator of modern Bengali poetry. He flourished somewhere in the fourteenth century. That wave too subsided and retired into the background, leaving in interregnum again of a century or more till it showed itself once more in another volume of mystic poetry in the hands of a new type of spiritual practitioners. They were the Yogis and Fakirs, and although of a popular type, yet possessing nuggets of gold in their utterances, and they formed a large family. This almost synchronised with the establishment and consolidation of the Western Power, with its intellectual and rational enlightenment, in India. The cultivation and superimposition of this Western or secular light forced the native vein of mysticism underground; it was necessary and useful, for it added an element which was missing before; a new synthesis came up in a crest with Tagore. It was a neo-mysticism, intellectual, philosophical, broad-based, self-conscious. Recently however we have been going on the downward slope, and many, if not the majority among us, have been pointing at mysticism and shouting: "Out, damned spot!" But perhaps we have struck the rock-bottom and are wheeling round.
For in the present epoch we are rising on a new crest and everywhere, in all literatures, signs are not lacking of a supremely significant spiritual poetry being born among us.
02.13 - In the Self of Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A sapphire firmament of abstract Thought
Escaped into a formless Vacancy.
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance. It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature as it was positive and affirmative. For its fundamental character that which gave it its very namewas a protest against, a turning away from whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.
The Graeco-Latin culture was essentially and predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture also, in spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the religion itself, as has been pointed out, is deeply humanistic, in the sense that it brought salvation and heaven close to the level of human frailtythrough the miracle of Grace and the humanity of Christand that it envisaged a kingdom of heaven or city of God the body of Christformed of the brotherhood of the human race in its solidarity.
The Indian outlook, it is said, is at a double remove from this type of humanism. It has not the pagan GrrecoRoman humanism, nor has it the religious humanism of Christianity. Its spirit can be rendered in the vigorous imagery of Blake: it surrounds itself with cold floods of abstraction and the forests of solitude.
The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that man has for man; and even his love for the bird or an inanimate object is also a very human feeling, transferred to another receptacle and flowing in another direction. Itis a play of the human heart, only refined and widened; there is no change in kind.
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The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
There is indeed a gradation in the humanistic attitude that rises from grosser and more concrete forms to those that are less and less so. At the lowest rung and the most obvious in form and nature is what is called altruism, or philanthropy, that is to say, doing good to others, some good that is tangible and apparent, that is esteemed and valued by the world generally. In altruism refined and sublimated, when it is no longer a matter chiefly of doing but of feeling, from a more or less physical and material give and take we rise into a vital and psychological sympathy and intercommunion, we have what is humanism proper. Humanism is transfigured into something still higher and finer when from the domain of personal or individual feeling and sympathy we ascend to cosmic feeling, to self-identification with the All, the One that is Many. This is the experience that seems to be behind the Buddhistic compassion, karu
03.03 - A Stainless Steel Frame, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the old worldnot so old however, for the landslide started in fact with the First World Warevil there was and abundantly in man and in man's society, but it was not accepted as virtue or even as an acceptable or inevitable thing. It was tolerated, suffered, and generally with a heavy heart. Indeed the heart was sound, it was the flesh only that was weak. There was an idealism, an aspiration and although one could not always live up to it, yet one did not deny it or spurn it; one endeavoured as best one could, even though in leisure hours, in the inner mind and consciousness at least, to obey and follow its dictates. It is the Nazi theory of life that broughtto the very forefront and installed in the consciousness ofman Evil as Good, Falsehood as Truth. That is pragmatism with a vengeance. Whatever leads to success, to worldly success, that is to say, brings you wealth, prosperity, power to rule over men and things, enriches you in your possessionvittena, as the Upanishad terms it that is Good, that is Truth. All the rest are mental conceptions, notions, abstractions, day-dreams meant to delude you, take you away from the road to your fulfilment and achievement. That is how we have listened to the voice of Mephistopheles and sold away our soul.
The government of a country is, as we know, the steel frame that holds together the life of its people: it is that that gives the primary stability and security, scope and free play to all its activities. In India it was the pride of the British that they built up such a frame; and although that frame sometimes seemed almost to throttle the nation in its firm and rigid grip, still today we are constrained to recognise that it was indeed a great achievement: Pax Britannica was in fact a very efficient reality. The withdrawal of the power that was behind us has left the frame very shaky; and our national government is trying hard to set it up again, streng thening, reinforcing, riveting wherever and however necessary. But the misfortune is that the steel has got rusted and worn out from inside.
03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, the Japanese, as a people, have developed to a consummate degree the sense of beauty, especially as applied to life and living. No other people, not even the old-world Greeks, possessed almost to a man, as do these children of the Rising Sun, so fine and infallible an sthetic sensibility,not static or abstract, but of the dynamic kinduniformly successful in making out of their work-a-day life, even to its smallest accessories, a flawless object of art. It is a wonder to see in japan how, even an unlettered peasant, away in his rustic environment, chooses with unerring taste the site of his house, builds it to the best advantage, arranges everything about it in a faultless rhythm. The whole motion of the life of a Japanese is almost Art incarnate.
Or take again the example of the British people. The practical, successful life instinct, one might even call it the business instinct, of the Anglo-Saxon races is, in its general diffusion, something that borders on the miraculous. Even their Shakespeare is reputed to have been very largely endowed with this national virtue. It is a faculty which has very little to do with calculation, or with much or close thinking, or with any laborious or subtle mental operationa quick or active mind is perhaps the last thing with which the British people can be accredited; this instinct of theirs is something spontaneous, almost aboriginal, moving with the sureness, the ruthlessness of nature's unconscious movements,it is a tact, native to the force that is life. It is this attri bute which the Englishman draws from the collective genius of his race that marks him out from among all others; this is his forte, it is this which has created his nation and made it great and strong.
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There was no department of life or culture in which it could be said of India that she was not great, or even, in a way, supreme. From hard practical politics touching our earth, to the nebulous regions of abstract metaphysics, everywhere India expressed the power of her genius equally well. And yet none of these, neither severally nor collectively, constituted her specific genius; none showed the full height to which she could raise herself, none compassed the veritable amplitude of her innermost reality. It is when we come to the domain of the Spirit, of God-realisation that we find the real nature and stature and genius of the Indian people; it is here that India lives and moves as in her own home of Truth. The greatest and the most popular names in Indian history are not names of warriors or statesmen, nor of poets who were only poets, nor of mere intellectual philosophers, however great they might be, but of Rishis, who saw and lived the Truth and communed with the gods, of Avataras who brought down and incarnated here below something of the supreme realities beyond.
The most significant fact in the history of India is the unbroken continuity of the line of her spiritual masters who never ceased to appear even in the midst of her most dark and distressing ages. Even in a decadent and fast disintegrating India, when the whole of her external life was a mass of ruins, when her political and economical and even her cultural life was brought to stagnation and very near to decomposition, this undying Fire in her secret heart was ever alight and called in the inevitable rebirth and rejuvenation. Ramakrishna, with Vivekananda as his emanation in life dynamic and material, symbolises this great secret of India's evolution. The promise that the Divine held out in the Gita to Bharata's descendant finds a ready fulfilment in India, in Bharata's land, more perhaps than anywhere else in the world; for in India has the. Divine taken birth over and over again to save the pure in heart, to destroy the evil-doer and to establish the Right Law of life.
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance.It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature, on one side, as it was positive and affirmative on the other. For its fundamental character that which gave it its Very namewas a protest against a turning away from, whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.
The Grco-Latin culture was essentially and predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture too, in spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the religion itself, as has been pointed out, was deeply humanistic, in the sense that it brought salvation and heaven close to the level of human frailtythrough the miracle of Grace and the humanity of Christand that it envisaged a kingdom of heaven or city of God the body of Christformed of the brotherhood of the human race in its solidarity.
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With cold floods of abstraction and
the forests of solitude.
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The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with the creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression, the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, to have the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
There is, indeed, a gradation in the humanistic attitude that rises from grosser and more concrete forms to those that are less and less so. At the lowest rung and the most obvious in form and nature is what is called altruism, or more especially, philanthropy, that is to say, doing good to others, some good j that is tangible and apparent, that is esteemed and valued by the world generally. In an altruism refined and sublimated, when it is no longer a matter primarily of doing but of feeling, when, from a more or less physical and material give and take, we rise into a vital and psychological sympathy and inter communion, we have what is humanism proper. Humanism is transfigured into something still higher and finer when, from the domain of personal or individual feeling" and sympathy, we ascend to cosmic feeling, to self-identification with the All, the One that is Many. This is the experience that seems to be behind the Buddhistic compassion, karu.
03.06 - Here or Otherwhere, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But is not The Gita's solution somewhat different? Sri Krishna urges Arjuna to be in the very thick of a deadly fight, not a theoretical or abstract combat, but take a hand in the direst man-slaughter, to do the deed (even like Macbeth) but yogically. Yes, The Gita's position seems to be thatto accept all life integrally, to undertake all necessary work (kartavyam karma) and turn them Godward. The Gita seeks to do it in its own way which consists of two major principles: (1) to do the work, whatever it may be, unattachedwithout any desire for the fruit, simply as a thing that has to be done, and (2) to do it as a sacrifice, as an offering to the supreme Master of works.
The question naturally turns upon the nature and the kind of workwhe ther there is a choice and selection in it. Gita speaks indeed of all works, ktsna-karmakt, but does that really mean any and every work that an ignorant man, an ordinary man steeped in the three Gunas does or can do? It cannot be so. For, although all activity, all energy has its source and impetus in the higher consciousness of the Divine, it assumes on the lower ranges indirect, diverted or even perverted formulations and expressions, not because of the inherent falsity of these so-called inferior strata, the instruments, but because of their temporary impurity and obscurity. There are evidently activities and impulsions born exclusively of desire, of attachment and egoism. There are habits of the body, urges of the vital, notions of the mind, there are individual and social functions that have no place in the spiritual scheme, they have to be rigorously eschewed and eliminated. Has not the Gita said, this is desire, this is passion born of the quality of Rajas? . . . There is not much meaning in trying to do these works unattached or to turn them towards the Divine. When you are unattached, when you turn to the Divine, these 'Simply drop away of themselves. Yes, there are social duties and activities and relations that inevitably dissolve and disappear as you move into the life divine. Some are perhaps tolerated for a period, some are occasions for the consciousness to battle and surmount, grow strong and pass beyond. You have to learn to go beyond and new-create your environment.
03.09 - Buddhism and Hinduism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Buddhists deny likewise the real existence of general ideas: according to them only individuals are real existences, general ideas are mere abstractions. The Hindus, on the other hand, like Plato who must have been influenced by them, affirm the reality of general ideas-although real need not always mean material.
(IV) The Vedic Rishis declared with one voice that all existence is built upon delight, all things are born out of delight and move from delight to delight, and delight is their final culmination. Buddha said misery is the hallmark of things created; sorrow is the marrow and pith and the great secret of existence. Sabbe samkhara anichcha. Sabbe samkhara dukkha. Sabbe dhamma anatta.1
03.09 - Sectarianism or Loyalty, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet there is a question. While attempting to be too liberal and catholic one may happen to turn a dilettante. Dilettante is one who takes an interest, an aesthetic, a dispassionate and detached interest in all things. His interest is intellectual, something abstract and necessarily superficial; it is not a vital interest, not a question of his soul, an urgent problem of his living.
A spiritual interest is nothing if it is not in this way a question that touches life to its core. That means a definite goal and appropriate means to reach that goal, and that again necessarily involves a choice, a process of acceptance and rejection. The goal is also called the ista, the godhead that one seeks, the Divine that is fulfilled in oneself. Being a personality, an individual, one has to choose, one can best follow the line of evolution and growth and fulfilment of that personality and individuality that is the call of the Psyche, the direction of the Jiva. In other words, one has to be loyal and faithful to one's nature and being. That is why it is said: Better to perish while fulfilling one's own law of life than to flourish by fulfilling another's law. By being curious about another's Dharmait is this kind of curiosity that led to the original fall of man, according to the Bible that is to say, if one is vitally curious, allows oneself to be influenced and so affected and diverted by what is an outside and foreign force, because not in the line of one's own truth and development, one asks for a mixture and intervention which bring confusion, thwart the growth and fulfilment, as that falsifies the nature.
03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Hamlet is the third stage; it is a vision of sattva-guna and a creation attempted by that vision. The human consciousness that was imprisoned in the vital mind, is released here into the higher or pure mind. The soul escapes from its sheath of sheer hunger and desire and egoism and self-aggrandisementyearns for light, more light. Lear is a dark mass of unconsciousness, crude and violent, even like the naked and raging elements into whose arms he is thrown; Macbeth is the beginning of consciousness in which one is conscious of one's own self alone, and keenly and deliberately attached to it,here light has dawned, but a lurid light. Hamlet is consciousness that is seeking to transcend the barrier of the little self and its narrow and vulgar appetites and impulses. Man here comes into touch with something that is impersonal, other-regarding, afar; he has grown interests that are not merely mundane, utilitarian, pragmatic, self-centred, but abstract, metaphysical, beyond the individual's own and immediate concern: he has now ideals and aspirationshe is a seeker of the true, the good, the beautiful. He has been initiated into the divinedaivanature. Culture, refinement, sensibility, understandingall the graces of a truly rational being make Hamlet the very flower of an evolving humanity.
Over against the personality of Hamlet stands another which represents false height, the wrong perfection, the counterfeit ideal. Polonius is humanity arrested in its path of straight development and deviated into a cut-de-sac of self-conceit and surface urbanity, apparent cleverness and success and pretentious and copy-book morality. When one has outgrown the barbarian, one runs the risk of becoming a snob or philistine. It is a side table-land, as it were, on mid-heights, the standard perhaps of a commoner humanity, but which the younger ideal has to transcend or avoid or even to destroy, so that it may find itself and live its own life. To the philistine too the mere biological man is a taboo, but he seeks to confine human nature into a scheme of codes and maxims and lifeless injunctions and prohibitions. He is also the man of Reason but without the higher inflatus, the living and creative Something More the poetry, the vision, the dream that would transfigure the merely pragmatic, practical, worldly wise the bourgeoisinto the princely aristocratic idealist, elevate the drab terre terre To-day into the glory of a soaring To-morrow.
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If we look at Europe once again and cast a glance at its origins, we find at the source the Grco-Roman culture. It was pre-eminently a culture based upon the powers of mind and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one the earlierphase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intuitive mind; his was applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race; finely sensitive and yet very self-consciousearth-bound and mind-boundas a creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination that is yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his poetic genius. In the post-Roman age this bias for mental consciousness or the play of reason and intellectual understanding moved towards the superficial and more formal faculties of the brain ending in what is called scholasticism: it meant stagnation and decadence. It is out of this slough that the Renaissance raised the mind of Europe and bathed it with a new light. That movement gave to the mind a wider scope, an alert curiosity, a keener understanding; it is, as I have said, the beginning of that modern mentality which is known as the scientific outlook, that is to say, study of facts and induction from given data, observation and experience and experiment instead of the other scholastic standpoint which goes by a priori theorising and abstraction and deduction and dogmatism.
We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances: but it regained and re-established and carried to a new degree the spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human motives and preoccupations, a rational understanding of man and the mechanism of the world. The original intuitive fiat, the imaginative brilliance, the spirit of adventure (in the mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the epoch gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation, organisation, stabilisation the classical age. The seventeenth century Europe marked another peak of Europe's civilisation. That is the Augustan Age to which we have referred. The following century marked a further decline of the Intuition and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century terre terre rationalism. Great figures still adorned that agestalwarts that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it a kind of stagnant nobility or already leaned towards the new light that was dawning once more. Pope and Johnson, Montesquieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The nineteenth century brought in another crest wave with a special gift to mankind; apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint of the emotive and aspiring personality that seeks in and through the cosmic panorama and dreams of
04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Mind of Reason is a kind of steel-frame for other movements of consciousness pure ideas, imaginations or instinctive and sensory notions, or even secret intimations and visions of deeper truths and greater realitiesto take body, to find a local habitation and name and be firmly stabilised for experience or utilisation in physical life. There was indeed a hiatus in the human consciousness of the earlier period. Take, for example, the earliest human civilisation at its best, of which we have historical record, the Vedic culture of India: human consciousness is here at its optimum, its depth and height is a thing of wonder. But between that world, an almost occult world and this world of the physical senses there is a gap. That world was occult precisely because of this gap. The physical life and mind could translate and represent the supra-physical only in figures and symbols; the impact was direct, but it expressed itself in hieroglyphs. Life itself was more or less a life of rites and ceremonies, and mind a field of metaphors and legends and parables. The parable, the myth was an inevitability with this type of consciousness and in such a world. The language spoken was also one of images and figures, expressing ideas and perceptions not in the abstract but as concrete objects, represented through concrete objects. It is the Mind of Reason that brought in the age of philosophy, the age of pure and abstract ideas, of the analytic language. A significant point to note is that it was in the Greek language that the pre-position, the backbone almost of the analytical language, started to have an independent and autonomous status. With the Greeks dawned the spirit of Science.
In India we meet a characteristic movement. As I said the Vedas represented the Mythic Age, the age when knowledge was gained or life moulded and developed through Vision and Revelation (Sruti, direct Hearing). The Upanishadic Age followed next. Here we may say the descending light touched the higher reaches of the Mind, the mind of pure, fundamental, typical ideas. The consciousness divested itself of much of the mythic and parabolic apparel and, although supremely immediate and intuitive, yet was bathed with the light of the day, the clear sunshine of the normal wakeful state. The first burgeoning of the Rational Mind proper, the stress of intellect and intellectuality started towards the end of the Upanishadic Age with the Mahabharata, for example and the Brahmanas. It flowered in full vigour, however, in the earlier philosophical schools, the Sankhyas perhaps, and in the great Buddhist illuminationBuddha being, we note with interest, almost a contemporary of Socrates and also of the Chinese philosopher or moralist Confuciusa triumvirate almost of mighty mental intelligence ruling over the whole globe and moulding for an entire cycle human culture and destiny. The very name Buddha is significant. It means, no doubt, the Awakened, but awakened in and through the intelligence, the mental Reason, buddhi. The Buddhist tradition is that the Buddhist cycle, the cycle over which Buddha reigns is for two thousand and five hundred years since his withdrawal which takes us, it seems, to about 1956 A.D.
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The old intellectualism generally and on the whole, was truly formal and even to a great extent verbal. In other words, it sought to find norms and categories in the mind itself and impose them upon, objects, objects of experience, external or internal. The first discovery of the pure mind, the joy of indulging in its own free formations led to an abstraction that brought about a cleavage between mind and nature, and when a harmony was again attempted between the two, it meant an imposition of one (the Mind) upon another (Matter), a subsumption of the latter under the former. Such scholastic formalism, although it has the appearance of a movement of pure intellect, free from the influence of instinctive or emotive reactions, cannot but be, at bottom, a mythopoeic operation, in the Jungian phraseology; it is not truly objective in the scientific sense. The scientific procedure is to find Nature's own categories the constants, as they are called and link up mind and intellect with that reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say another thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider here and which does not change the fundamental position. We say then that the objectivity of the scientific outlook, as distinguished from the abstract formalism of old-world intellectualism, has given a new degree of mental growth and is the basis of themechanistic methodology of which we have been speaking. '
Indeed, what we lay stress upon is the methodology of modern scientific knowledge the apparatus of criticism and experimentation.
05.03 - Satyavan and Savitri, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Its glimmerings lighted with the abstract word
A half-visible ground and travelling yard by yard
05.05 - Man the Prototype, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The essential appearance of Man is, as we have said, the prototype of the actual man. That is to say, the actual man is a projection, even though a somewhat disfigured projection, of the original form; yet there is an essential similarity of pattern, a commensurability between the two. The winged angels, the cherubs and seraphs are reputed to be ideal figures of beauty, but they are nothing akin to the Prototype, they belong to a different line of emanation, other than that of the human being. We may have some idea of what it is like by taking recourse to the distinction that Greek philosophers used to make between the formal and the material cause of things. The prototype is the formal reality hidden and imbedded in the material reality of an object. The essential form is made of the original configuration of primary vibrations that later on consolidate and become a compact mass, arriving finally at its end physico-chemical composition. A subtle yet perfect harmony of vibrations forming a living whole is what the prototype essentially is. An artist perhaps is in a better position to understand what we have been labouring to describe. The artist's eye is not confined to the gross physical form of an object, even the most realistic artist does not hold up the mirror to Nature in that sense: he goes behind and sees the inner contour, the subtle figuration that underlies the external volume and mass. It is that that is beautiful and harmonious and significant, and it is that which the artist endeavours to bring out and fix in a system or body of lines and colours. That inner form is not the outer visible form and still it is that form fundamentally, essentially. It is that and it is not that. We may add another analogy to illustrate the point. Pythagoras, for example, spoke of numbers being realities, the real realities of all sensible objects. He was evidently referring to the basic truth in each individual and this truth appeared to him as a number, the substance and relation that remain of an object when everything concrete and superficial is extractedor abstractedout of it. A number to him is a quality, a vibration, a quantum of wave-particles, in the modern scientific terminology, a norm. The human prototype can be conceived as something of the category of the Pythagorean number.
The conception of the Purusha at the origin of things, as the very source of things, so familiar to the Indian tradition, gives this high primacy to the human figure. We know also of the cosmic godhead cast in man's mouldalthough with multiple heads and feetvisioned and hymned by sages and seers. The gods themselves seem to possess a human frame. The Upanishads say that once upon a time the gods looked about for a proper body to dwell in, they were disappointed with all others; it is only when the human form was presented that they exclaimed, This is indeed a perfect form, a perfect form indeed. All that indicates the feeling and perception that there is something eternal and transcendent in the human body-frame.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is the world that we see really like? Is it mental, is it material? This is a question, we know, philosophers are familiar with, and they have answered and are still answering, each in his own way, taking up one side or other of the antinomy. There is nothing new or uncommon in that. The extraordinary novelty comes in when we see today even scientists forced to tackle the problem, give an answer to it,scientists who used to smile at philosophers, because they seemed to assault seriously the windmills of abstract notions and airy concepts, instead of reposing on the terra firmaof reality. The tables are turned now. The scientists have had to start the same business the terra firmaon which they stood as on the securest rock of ages is slipping away under their feet and fast vanishing into smoke and thin air. Not only that, it is discovered today that the scientist has always been a philosopher,' without his knowledgea crypto-philosopher,only he has become conscious of it at last. And furthermirabile dictum!many a scientist is busy demonstrating that the scientist is, in his essence, a philosopher of the Idealist school!
Physical Science in the nineteenth century did indeed develop or presuppose a philosophy of its own; it had, that is to say, a definite outlook on the fundamental quality of things and the nature of the universe. Those were days of its youthful self-confidence and unbending assurance. The view was, as is well-known, materialistic and deterministic. That is to say, all observation and experiment, according to it, demonstrated and posited:
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Again, the generalised law of relativity (that is to say, laws governing all motions, even accelerated motion and hot merely uniform motion) that sought to replace the laws of gravitation did away also with the concepts of force and causality: it stated that things moved not because they were pulled or pushed but because they followed the natural curve of space (they describe geodesics, i.e., move in the line of least distance). Space is not a plain surface, smooth and uniform, but full of dimples and hollows, these occurring in the vicinity of masses of matter, the sun, for instance, (although one does not see how or why a mass of matter should roll down the inclined plane of a curved surface without some kind of push and pull the problem is not solved but merely shifted and put off). All this means to say that the pattern of the universe is absolutely geometrical and science in the end resolves itself into geometry: the laws of Nature are nothing but theorems or corollaries deduced and deducible from a few initial postulates. Once again, on this line, of enquiry also the universe is dissolved into abstract and psychological factors.
Apart from the standpoint of theoretical physics developed by Einstein, the more practical aspect as brought out in Wave Mechanics leads us into no less an abstract and theoretical domain. The Newtonian particle-picture, it is true, has been maintained in the first phase of modern physics which specialised in what is called Quantum Mechanics. But waves or particlesalthough the question as to their relative validity and verity still remains opendo not make much difference in the fundamental outlook. For in either view, the individual unit is beyond the ken of the scientist. A wave is not a wave but just the probability of a wave: it is not even a probable wave but a probability wave. Thus the pattern that Wave Mechanics weaves to show the texture of the ultimate reality is nothing more than a calculus of probabilities. By whichever way we proceed we seem to arrive always at the same inevitable conclusion.
So it is frankly admitted that what Science gives is not a faithful description of actuality, not a representation of material existence, but certain conventions or convenient signs to put together, to make a mental picture of our sensations and experiences. That does not give any clue to what the objective reality mayor may not be like. Scientific laws are mental rules imposed upon Nature. It may be asked why does Nature yield to such imposition? There must be then some sort of parallelism or commensurability between Nature and the observing Mind, between the pattern of Nature and the Mind's scheme or replica of it. If we successfully read into Nature things of the Mind, that means that there must be something very common between the two. Mind's readings are not mere figments, hanging in the air; for they are justified by their applicability, by their factual translation. This is arguing in a circle, a thorough-going mentalist like Eddington would say. What are facts? What is life? Anything more than what the senses and the mind have built up for us?
05.13 - Darshana and Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We shall take the case of one such philosopher and try to illustrate our point. We are thinking of Whitehead. The character of European philosophical mind is well exemplified in this remarkable modern philosopher. The anxiety to put the inferences into a strict logical frame makes a naturally abstruse and abstract procedure more abstruse and abstract. The effort to present suprarational truths in terms of reason and syllogism clouds the issues more than it clarifies them. The fundamental perception, the living intuition that is behind his entire philosophy and world outlook is that of an Immanent God, a dynamic evolving Power working out the growth and redemption of mankind and the world {the apotheosis of the World, as he puts it). It is the theme which comes last in the development of his system, as the culminating conclusion of his philosophy, but it is the basic presupposition, the first principle that inspires his whole outlook, all the rest is woven and extended around this central nucleus. The other perception intimate to this basic -original perception and inseparable from it is a synthetic view in which things that are usually supposed to be contraries find their harmony and union, viz.,God and the World, Permanence and Flux, Unity and Multiplicity, the Universal and the Individual. The equal reality of the two poles of an integral truth is characteristic of many of the modern philosophical systems. In this respect Whitehead echoes a fundamental conclusion of Sri Aurobindo.
There is another concept in Whitehead which seems to be moulded after a parallel concept in Sri Aurobindo: it is with regard to the working out of the process of creation, the mechanism of its dynamism. It is almost a glimpse into the occult functioning of the world forces. Whitehead speaks of two principles that guide the world process, first, the principle of limitation, and second, the principle of ingress. The first one Sri Aurobindo calls the principle of concentration (and of exclusive concentration) by which the infinite and the eternal limits himself, makes himself finite and temporal and infinitesimal, the universal transforms itself into the individual and the particular. The second is the principle of descent, which is almost the corner-stone in Sri Aurobindo's system. There are layers of reality: the higher forces and formulations enter into the lower, work upon it and bring about a change and transformation, purification and redemption. All progress and evolution is due to this influx of the higher, the deeper into , the lower and superficial plane of existence.
08.08 - The Mind s Bazaar, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I propose to give you a task. You have ideas on things. You must surely have ideas on the world, life, the why of existence and the whence and the whither, wherefore we are here, our present occupation, our future realisation, etc., etc. Now try to put all these ideas in front of you and then arrange them. Will you find it easy? Surely it will amuse you and you will discover amazing things. First of all, the very work itself of exposition, that is to say, simply placing the ideas side by side in front of you, all the ideas that you have on a given subject, as if you were writing out a composition given in your class, will bring to you funny revelations. If you did not already have the habit of holding to a central idea, a central immutable truth, if that were possible, around which you arranged all the collateral ideas, organised them in a logical order, if, I say, you did not do anything like that before, you would find yourself, if not in a sad, at least in a comic situation. You can't imagine how many contradictory thoughts you are thinking in the course of an hour without the least surprise! For example, take this subject: "what is the goal towards which life is moving?" or "why do men take birth only to die?"take a subject a little general and even somewhat abstract like this and not the problem of why football today and not basket-ballthings can be easily explained away there and then try to line up all your ideas on the matter; you will see how queer the affair is.
How to distinguish between an idea that is one's own and an idea coming from elsewhere (a book or a person)?
100.00 - Synergy, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
generalizations are timeless, i.e., eternal. Because the metaphysical is abstract,
weightless, sizeless, and eternal, metaphysical experiences have no endurance
10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And reason's pragmatic grope or abstract sight,
Or the technique of a brief hour's success
10.04 - Transfiguration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the mental world we meet abstractions, lifeless ideas, forms without a soul. In reality, however, all movements in man, all forces in nature are more than mere movements and forces, they are personalities, embodiments of conscious beings. Indeed the Puranic tradition has elaborated this conception almost to its extreme limit. Those people crowded the world with an infinite number of Gods and Goddesses. They speak of 33 crores of Gods. The earth is the playfield of all godlings.
In this way we come very far from the Supreme Brahman, the Mayavadin's inane Unity. The Puranic multiplicity is perhaps a corrective of the Vedantin's empty Absolute.
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
Finally, in the study of the etheric body and prana comes comprehension of the method of logoic manifestation, and therefore much of interest to the metaphysician, and all abstract thinkers. The etheric body of man holds hid the secret of his objectivity. It has its correspondence on the archetypal plane,the plane we call that of the divine manifestation, the first plane of our solar system, the plane Adi. The matter of that highest plane is called often the "sea of fire" and it is the root of the akasha, the term applied to the substance of the second plane of manifestation. Let us trace the analogy a little more in detail, for in its just apprehension will be found much of illumination and much that will serve to elucidate problems both macrocosmic and microcosmic. We will begin with man and his etheric body.
The etheric body has been described as a network, permeated with fire, or as a web, animated with golden light. It is spoken of in the Bible as the "golden bowl." [80] It is a composition of that matter of the physical plane which we call etheric, and its shape is brought about by the fine interlacing strands of this matter being built by the action of the lesser Builders into the form or mould upon which later the dense physical body can be moulded. Under the Law of Attraction, the denser matter of the physical plane is made to cohere to this vitalised form, and is gradually built up around it, and within it, until the interpenetration is so complete that the two forms make but one unit; the pranic emanations of the etheric body itself play upon the dense physical body in the same manner as the pranic emanations of the sun play upon the etheric body. It is all one vast system of transmission and of interdependence within the system. All receive in order to give, and to pass on to that which is lesser or not so evolved. Upon every plane this process can be seen.
--
All these bodies the body of a man, a planetary Logos, and a solar Logosare the product of desire originating on the planes of abstract mind, whether cosmic, systemic, or mind in the three worlds, whether cosmic desire-mind or human desire-mind, and all their bodies are "Sons of Necessity," as H. P. B. so aptly expressed it. [xxxv]35, [xxxvi]36
2. Eight Statements.
--
Eighth. When the "will to live" vanishes, then the "Sons of Necessity" cease from objective manifestation. This is logically inevitable, and its working out can be seen in every case of entifed objectivity. When the Thinker on his own plane withdraws his attention from his little system within the three worlds and gathers within himself all his forces, then physical plane existence comes to an end and all returns within the causal consciousness; this is as much an abstraction in the three worlds of the Thinker as the Absolute is in the threefold solar system of the Logos. This demonstrates on the physical plane in the withdrawing from out of the top of the head of the radiant etheric body and the consequent disintegration of the physical. The framework goes and the dense physical form falls apart; the pranic life is abstracted bodily from out of the dense sheath, and the stimulation of the fires of matter ceases to be. The latent fire of the atom remains; it is inherent, but the form is made by the action of the two fires of matteractive and latent, radiatory and inherentaided by the fire of the second Logos, and when they are separated the form falls apart. This is a picture in miniature of the essential duality of all things acted upon by Fohat.
[86]
--
Again in the solar system itself similar action will eventuate at the close of a Mahamanvantara. The Logos will withdraw within Himself, abstracting His three major principles. [xxxvii]37 His body of manifestation the Sun [87] and the seven sacred Planets, all existing in etheric matterwill withdraw from objectivity and become obscured. From the usual physical standpoint, the light of the system will go out. This will be succeeded by a gradual inbreathing until He shall have gathered all unto Himself; the etheric will cease to exist, and the web will be no more. Full consciousness will be achieved, and in the moment of achievement existence or entified manifestation will cease. All will be reabsorbed within the Absolute; pralaya, [xxxviii]38 or the cosmic heaven of rest will then ensue, and the Voice of the Silence will be heard no more. The reverberations of the WORD will die away, and the "Silence of the High Places" will reign supreme.
II. THE NATURE OF PRANA
--
Fourth. The four planetary Logoi [lii]50 of Harmony, Knowledge, abstract Thought and Ceremonial, who [113] are in Their totality the Quaternary of Manas while in process of evolution, and who pass under Their influence all the sons of men.
Fifth. The Deva Lords of the four planes of Buddhi, or the plane of spiritual Intuition, Manas, or the mental plane, Desire, and the Physical, who are likewise allied to the human evolution in a closer sense than the higher three.
--
The fourth subplane of the monadic plane is in a very real sense the place of transition from off the egoic ray (whichever that ray may be) on to the monadic ray; these three major rays are organised on the three higher subplanes of the monadic plane in the same way that the three abstract subplanes of the mental are the group of transference from off the personality ray on to the egoic.
The four lesser rays blend with the third major ray of active intelligence on the mental plane and on the atmic plane. The four Logoi or planetary Spirits work as one, on the atmic plane.
--
First. The life that had animated the physical form (both dense and etheric) and which had its starting point in the permanent atom and from thence "pervaded the moving and the unmoving" (in God, the Heavenly Man, and the human being, as well as in the atom of matter) is withdrawn entirely within the atom upon the plane of abstraction. This "plane of abstraction" is a different one for the entities involved:
a. For the physical permanent atom, it is the atomic level.
--
In the system, the same process is followed by the solar Logos; from His high place of abstraction, He ceases to be attracted by His body of manifestation. He withdraws His interest and the two pairs of opposites, the spirit and the matter of the vehicle, dissociate. With this dissociation the solar system, that "Son of Necessity," or of desire, ceases to be, and passes out of objective existence.
Third. This leads finally, to the scattering of the atoms of the etheric body into their primordial condition. The subjective life, the synthesis of will and love taking active form, is withdrawn. The partnership is dissolved. The form then breaks up; the magnetism that has held it in coherent shape is no longer present, and dissipation is complete. Matter persists, but the form no longer persists.
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The Mahadeva aspect or the first Logos (who embodies cosmic will) is controlled by the Law of Synthesis, the cosmic law governing the tendency to unification; only in this case, it is not the unification of matter and Spirit, but the unification of the seven into the three, and into the one. These three figures primarily stand for Spirit, [148] for quality, for principle, and not so primarily for matter, although matter, being inspired by spirit, conforms. The Law of Synthesis has a direct connection with One Who is still higher than our Logos, and is the law of control exercised by Him upon the Logos of our system. This is a spiritual relationship that tends to abstraction or to that synthesis of the spiritual elements that will result in their conscious return (the whole point lying in that word "conscious") to their cosmic point of synthesis, or of unification with their source. Their source is the ONE ABOUT WHOM NAUGHT MAY BE SAID, as we have earlier seen.
Therefore, in connection with the first Logos, we can sum up as we did with the other Logoi:
--
b. His function is, by means of will, to hold them in manifestation for the desired period, and later to abstract them, and blend them again with their spiritual source. Hence the necessity of remembering that fundamentally, the first Logos controls the cosmic entities or extra-systemic beings; the second Logos controls the solar entities; the third Logos controls the lunar entities and their correspondences elsewhere in the system.
This rule must not be carried too far in detail as long as man's mind is of its present calibre. The mystery lies in the realisation that all is carried on in a divine co-operation that has its base outside the system. Hence too the fact that the first Logos is called the Destroyer, because He is abstraction, if viewed from below upwards. His work is the synthesis of Spirit with Spirit, their [149] eventual abstraction from matter, and their unification with their cosmic source. Hence also He is the one who brings about pralaya or the disintegration of form,the form from which the Spirit has been abstracted.
If we carry the analogy down to the microcosm a glimpse can be gained of the same idea and hence ability to comprehend with greater facility. The Ego (being to the man on the physical plane what the Logos is to His system) is likewise the animating will, the destroyer of forms, the producer of pralaya and the One Who withdraws the inner spiritual man from out of his threefold body; he draws them to himself the centre of his little system. The Ego is extra-cosmic as far as the human being on the physical plane is concerned, and in the realisation of this fact may come elucidation of the true cosmic problem involving the Logos and "the spirits in prison," as the Christian puts it.
--
By the time the fifth round is reached, three-fifths of the human family will have attained this point and will have their five senses fully functioning on the three planes in the three worlds, leaving the two other planes to be subjugated during the remaining two rounds. I would here point out a fact that is little realised, that in this fivefold evolution of man and in this solar system, the two remaining rounds in any planetary cycle, and the sixth and seventh root-races in those cycles are always synthetic; their function is to gather up and synthesise that which has been achieved in the earlier five. For instance, in this root-race, the sixth and seventh sub-races will synthesise and blend that which the earlier five have wrought out. The analogy lies in the fact that in this solar system the two higher planes (the logoic-and the monadic) are synthetic. One is the synthesising plane for the Logos from whence He abstracts the essence in manifestation; the other for the Monad, from whence the Monad abstracts and garners the fruits of objectivity.
We will therefore only concern ourselves here with those centres which relate to the evolution of the subtler bodies, the evolution of the psyche, and not with those connected with the evolution and propagation of the dense physical body. These centres are five in number:
--
In the two lower planes in the three worlds the astral and the physical the five subplanes of human endeavour are the five highest. The two lowest subplanes, the sixth and seventh, are what we might express as "below the threshold," and concern forms of life beneath the human altogether. We have a corroborating analogy in the fact that the two earliest root-races in this round are not definitely human, and that it is the third root-race which is really human for the first time. Counting, therefore, from the bottom upwards it is only the third subplane on the physical and the astral planes which mark the commencement of human effort, leaving five subplanes to be subdued. On the mental plane the five lower subplanes have to be subjugated during purely human evolution. When the consciousness is centred on the fifth subplane (counting from below upwards) then the planes of abstractionfrom the standpoint of man in the three worldssupervene the two subplanes of synthesis, demonstrating through the synthesis of the five senses. In the evolution of the Heavenly Man we have exactly the same thing: the five planes of endeavour, the five lower planes of the solar system, and the two higher planes of abstraction, the spiritual or monadic and the divine, or logoic.
[188]
--
It can be noted that we have not summed up the two planes of abstraction on the atmic and the buddhic planes, the reason being that they mark a degree of realisation which is the property of initiates of higher degree [189] than that of the adept, and which is beyond the concept of the evolving human unit, for whom this treatise is written.
We might here, for the sake of clarity, tabulate the five different aspects of the five senses on the five planes, so that their correspondences may be readily visualised, using the above table as the basis:
--
d. Tasting. He tastes then finally and discriminates, for taste is the great sense that begins to hold sway during the discriminating process that takes place when the illusory nature of matter is in process of realisation. Discrimination is the educatory process to which the Self subjects itself in the process of developing intuition that faculty whereby the Self recognises its own essence in and under all forms. Discrimination concerns the duality of nature, the Self and the not-self, and is the means of their differentiation in the process of abstraction; the intuition concerns unity and is the capacity of the Self to contact other selves, and is not a faculty whereby the not-self is contacted. Hence, its rarity these days owing to the intense individualisation of the Ego, and its identification with the forma necessary identification at this particular time. As the sense of taste on the higher planes is developed, it leads one to ever finer distinctions till one is finally led through the form, right to the heart of one's nature.
e. Smelling is the faculty of keen perception that eventually brings a man back to the source from whence he came, the archetypal plane, the plane where his true home is to be found. A perception of difference has been cultivated that has caused a divine discontent within the [202] heart of the Pilgrim in the far country; the prodigal son draws comparisons; he has developed the other four senses, and he utilises them. Now comes in the faculty of vibratory recognition of the home vibration, if it might be so expressed. It is the spiritual counterpart of that sense which in the animal, the pigeon and other birds, leads them back unerringly to the familiar spot from whence they originally came. It is the apprehension of the vibration of the Self, and a swift return by means of that instinct to the originating source.
1.00f - DIVISION F - THE LAW OF ECONOMY, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
1. abstraction,
2. Spiritual liberation,
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
well-schooled and respected. How convenient, then, that the demands of revenge and abstract justice
dovetailed! It was only right to obtain recompense from those more fortunate than me.
--
understood them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them presumed that I could adopt them, as if
they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of
10.15 - The Evolution of Language, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Language in the beginning must have been an echo or a graphic expression of man's sense-bound mind. But as the mind developed, became more and more rational and intellectual, language also tended to become more and more abstract and intellectualised. Even so at its best, language could be the vehicle and embodiment of man's mental and intellectual world.
But man moves on, his mind opens on new horizons, his consciousness is not tethered to sense-experiences nor even limited to the region of thought and ideation built or grown in accordance with the mode and schema of sense-experiences.
1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
as commonly envisaged in the abstract theory of moral and meri-
torious acts, is not greatly enhanced by the growth of human
--
significance, confining it entirely within the abstract domain of
purely supernatural action? Without the process of biological evo-
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
thing horribly alive into the beautiful abstraction of the Trinity
idea. But the reconciliation might have taken place on a quite
--
experience arises. But what I conveyed were only abstract
40 Reitzenstein interprets the "Shepherd" of Hernias as a Christian rejoinder to
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
I certain it is desirable that there should be. However, _I_ should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one mans gain is not anothers loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindh and in its public buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In
Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest mans field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric and hea thenish build splendid temples; but what you might call
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
In summary, it should be said that our description does not deal with a new image of the world, nor with a new Weltanschauung, nor with a new conception of the world. A new Image would be no more than the creation of a myth, since all imagery has a predominantly mythical nature. A new Weltanschauung wouldbe nothing else than a new mysticism and irrationality, as mythical characteristics are inherent in all contemplation to the extent that it is merely visionary; and a new conception of the world would be nothing else than yet another standard rationalistic construction of the present, for conceptualization has an essentially rational and abstract nature.
Our concern is with a new reality - a reality functioning and effectual integrally, in which intensity and action, the effective and the effect co-exist; one where origin, by virtue of presentiation, blossoms forth anew; and one in which the present is all-encompassing and entire. Integral reality is the worlds transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both.
1.01 - Introduction, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
And even that which is visible may dwell beyond the range of our perceptions if it exceeds our proportions. The vaster it is in its totality, the less ephemeral in its duration, the less is it perceptible to us. Thus the earth which we inhabit is visible to our eyes solely in its details and we can compass the knowledge of it in its totality only by a method of abstraction and by an appeal to means that belong to the order of mathematical or geometrical perceptions and are borrowed, therefore, from faculties of consciousness which are supersensuous. The same law holds good with greater reason for that which we call, without knowing where it commences or ends, the universe.
And towards what does our Science tend, if not towards the indirect discovery, surpassing the means of observation with which our senses provide us, of realities more and more essential and permanent, less and less incidental and, because incidental, therefore visible?
1.01 - Maitreya inquires of his teacher (Parashara), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[3]: Brahma, in the neuter form, is abstract supreme spirit; and Īśvara is the Deity in his active nature, he who is able to do or leave undone, or to do any thing in any other manner than that in which it is done.
[4]: Pumān which is the same with Puruṣa, incorporated spirit. By this and the two preceding terms also the commentator understands the text to signify that Viṣṇu is any form of spiritual being that is acknowledged by different philosophical systems, or that he is the Brahma of the Vedānta, the Īśvara of the Pātañjala, and the Puruṣa of the Sā
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
even if he is atheistic and well-educated; even if his abstract notions and utterances appear iconoclastic.
He neither kills, nor steals (or, if he does, he hides his actions, even from his own awareness), and he tends,
--
belief intellectually. We have become trapped by our own capacity for abstraction: it provides us with
accurate descriptive information, but serves to undermine our belief in the utility and meaning of existence.
--
It has become more or less evident that pure, abstract rationality, for example, ungrounded in tradition
the rationality which defined Soviet-style communism from inception to dissolution appears absolutely
--
systems do not work, even though they make abstract sense (even more sense than alternative, currently
operative, incomprehensible, haphazardly evolved systems). Some patterns of interpersonal interaction
--
the following question: how can the current state of experience be conceptualized in abstraction, with
regards to its meaning? [which means its (subjective, biologically-predicated, socially-constructed)
1.01 - Necessity for knowledge of the whole human being for a genuine education., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Rather than groping about in abstractions, lets just look at specifics; we shall examine one particular characteristic in human nature the temperament. Lets begin by looking not at a childs temperament, which of course offers us no choicewe have to educate each human being regardless of temperament (and well speak later about the childrens temperaments)but lets begin rather by looking at the teachers temperament. The teacher enters the school and meets the child with a very specific tem- peramentcholeric, sanguine, melancholic, or phlegmatic. The question is: As educators, what can we do to control our own temperaments; how can we perhaps educate ourselves in relation to our own temperament? To answer this question we must first look directly at the fundamental question: How does a teachers temperament affect the child, just by being what it is?
The Choleric Temperament
1.01 - On knowledge of the soul, and how knowledge of the soul is the key to the knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Know then, beloved, that the varieties of food you eat descend to the stomach, and thence to the liver, and that in the liver they are mixed and brought to the form of blood. Upon the Liver may be seen something black and frothy which is called black bile. The spleen attracts the black bile and changes it into itself. The blood being still mixed with water, has no consistence, and the kidneys draw the water from the blood and purify it. This blood is then diffused to the seven parts of the body, and brings and conveys strength to the limbs. If the spleen become affected with any disorder, so that it cannot separate the black bile [37] from the blood, such diseases as leprosy, insanity, inflammation of the spleen and remittent fever are the consequence. If any derangement happen to the gall-bladder so that it cannot secrete the bile, bilious disorders follow. If the kidneys get disordered, so that they cannot abstract the water from the blood, dropsy and similar diseases are the result. It all depends, however, on the will of God. In the same manner, all the organs of the body have a specific function. If it were not so, the body would perish....
Our intention has been to show you that man is a great world, and that you might know what a multitude of servants his body has to minister to him : so that you might realize while in your enjoyments, in walking, in sleeping or at rest in your world, that by God's appointment, these numerous servants in your employ never suffer their functions to cease for a minute. Listen now for a moment candidly. If you had a servant who had been faithful to you during his whole life, with whose services you were not able to dispense, while he could at any time find a better master-yet if he should only for a single day disobey your orders, you would get angry, beat him, and wish to get rid of him. But God has been abundant in kindness to you, and has given you so many servants, and has in no wise any need of you. How then can it be just that you should become enslaved to yourself, and follow your own passions, and that forgetful of pleasing the infinite God, you should rebel against your Creator and Benefactor, and that you should render obedience to Satan, who is your enemy and the enemy of God ?
1.01 - Principles of Practical Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
something like an abstract idea. She is a guide, who takes the dreamer up a
high mountain. But she is also like a bird, perhaps a marabou or pelican.
--
what comes out on the paper is an abstract symbolic ideogram containing the trinity, another frequent motif.
[17]
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
This extract seems to contradict what was said above; but the contradiction is not a real one. God within and God without these are two abstract notions, which can be entertained by the understanding and expressed in words. But the facts to which these notions refer cannot be realized and experienced except in the deepest and most central part of the soul. And this is true no less of God without than of God within. But though the two abstract notions have to be realized (to use a spatial metaphor) in the same place, the intrinsic nature of the realization of God within is qualitatively different from that of the realization of God without, and each in turn is different from that of the realization of the Ground as simultaneously within and withoutas the Self of the perceiver and at the same time (in the words of the Bhagavad-Gita) as That by which all this world is pervaded.
When Svetaketu was twelve years old he was sent to a teacher, with whom he studied until he was twenty-four. After learning all the Vedas, he returned home full of conceit in the belief that he was consummately well educated, and very censorious.
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms,a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of savage communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressingto employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understanding the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic function.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
This typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active contri bution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour; the honour of the Brahmin which resides in purity, in piety, in a high reverence for the things of the mind and spirit and a disinterested possession and exclusive pursuit of learning and knowledge; the honour of the Kshatriya which lives in courage, chivalry, strength, a certain proud self-restraint and self-mastery, nobility of character and the obligations of that nobility; the honour of the Vaishya which maintains itself by rectitude of dealing, mercantile fidelity, sound production, order, liberality and philanthropy; the honour of the Shudra which gives itself in obedience, subordination, faithful service, a disinterested attachment. But these more and more cease to have a living root in the clear psychological idea or to spring naturally out of the inner life of the man; they become a convention, though the most noble of conventions. In the end they remain more as a tradition in the thought and on the lips than a reality of the life.
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
I11 the abstract, one might assume an internal growth of the
world's resources, an absolute increase in mechanical wealth
--
entiates itself from purely abstract magnitudes and places itself
among the realities which are born, which grow, and which die.
1.020 - The World and Our World, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
What is an individual, which we call the percipient? It is an abstracted group of characters, tentatively isolated from a larger set or group of characters to which these former really belong an act that has been perpetrated mysteriously for the purpose of playing a drama, we may say. We have falsely isolated ourselves. Even that isolation is not a real isolation, because a mere abstraction of a few characters from a group of larger characters cannot be regarded as real. It is only a closing of one's eyes to certain existent conditions. We can ignore the presence of things and conditions which are not conducive to our present purpose, but why this purpose itself has arisen is a very difficult thing to answer. This is maya, as they call it, a peculiar jugglery that has been projected by no one. Neither can we say that God created it, nor can we say that we created it. It is somewhere; and how it has come, neither can we say, nor can anyone else say. The inscrutability of the relationship between the individual and the cosmic, the difficulty in ascertaining the connection between appearance and reality this is called maya. To put it in more plain terms, the relationship between the subject and the object is itself difficult to understand.
We cannot understand what our connection is with anything at all, and so we are in a helpless condition. Therefore we cannot even control the mind, because controlling the mind is an adjustment of the modifications of the mind in respect of the object of its cognition, and the object of its cognition is not properly understood because of its unintelligible character. Everything then becomes difficult, and our efforts become a source of failure in the end. Success does not seem to be forthcoming, because it is not clear to us what is the right direction that we have to take.
What is the mind to do, what are we to do, what is anyone to do in this prescription of yoga called 'mind-control'? Are we to subjugate the object, destroy the object, absorb the object into ourselves, or abstract the mind from the object and not cognise it? In an act of mind-control, what is to be done? Are we satisfied if we merely become unaware of the existence of the object, which is what is usually known as abstraction of the senses and the mind from objects, or is there anything to be done in respect of the object itself? This question arises on account of the necessity to understand the extent of influence the object exerts upon the subject, and the extent of influence that the subject exerts upon the object.
For all practical purposes, we can agree with the author of the Panchadasi and conclude that we need not interfere with the scheme of things from the point of view of Ishvara's creation. People can be there, and things can be there they have to be there. We have to change our attitude, which means to say we have to reorganise the method of the working of our own mind inside, in respect of existent objects outside. This is only a tentative answer, and not the final answer, because we have not yet finally given the judgement as to the nature of things. We have temporarily accepted the existence of a world outside us, just as we temporarily accept the meaning of an 'x' in an equation in algebra. Though the 'x' itself may have no meaning ultimately, it is a necessary assumption which solves the question, and afterwards it cancels itself.
1.02.2.1 - Brahman Oneness of God and the World, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Integral Yoga
6 Not the abstract mental idea, but the supramental Real-Idea, the Consciousness,
Force and Delight of the Being precipitated into a comprehensive and discriminative
1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Integral Yoga
universe. But these are abstract terms; abstract ideas in themselves cannot produce concrete realities. They are impersonal
states; impersonal states cannot in themselves produce personal
--
This is because the original terms also are not really impersonal abstractions. In delight of Brahman there is an Enjoyer of
delight, in consciousness of Brahman a Conscient, in existence
--
When, therefore, we consider the abstract and impersonal
aspect of the infinite existence, we say, "That"; when we consider
10.23 - Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed philosophy and yoga go hand in hand. Yoga is applied philosophy. What is at first mentally perceived and recognised, what is accepted by the reason is made active and dynamic in life. The character embodies the abstract and general principles, the vital energy executes them, that is yoga. Philosophy brings in the light of consciousness, yoga the energy of consciousness. Here we have an expression of what may be caned "yogic philosophy".
II faut chaque moment secouer le pass comme une poussire qui tombe, afin qu' elle ne salisse pas le chemin vierge qui, chaque moment aussi, s' ouvre devant nous.6
1.02.4.1 - The Worlds - Surya, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Integral Yoga
except as an abstraction, a sum or a void. Therefore it has to
be gradually led from its own manner to that which exceeds it.
1.02 - Education, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
With very few exceptions, parents are not aware of the disastrous influence that their own defects, impulses, weaknesses and lack of self-control have on their children. If you wish to be respected by a child, have respect for yourself and be worthy of respect at every moment. Never be authoritarian, despotic, impatient or ill-tempered. When your child asks you a question, do not give him a stupid or silly answer under the pretext that he cannot understand you. You can always make yourself understood if you take enough trouble; and in spite of the popular saying that it is not always good to tell the truth, I affirm that it is always good to tell the truth, but that the art consists in telling it in such a way as to make it accessible to the mind of the hearer. In early life, until he is twelve or fourteen, the childs mind is hardly open to abstract notions and general ideas. And yet you can train it to understand these things by using concrete images, symbols or parables. Up to quite an advanced age and for some who mentally always remain children, a narrative, a story, a tale well told teach much more than any number of theoretical explanations.
Another pitfall to avoid: do not scold your child without good reason and only when it is quite indispensable. A child who is too often scolded gets hardened to rebuke and no longer attaches much importance to words or severity of tone. And above all, take good care never to scold him for a fault which you yourself commit. Children are very keen and clear-sighted observers; they soon find out your weaknesses and note them without pity.
1.02 - Karmayoga, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Vedanta and Yoga to life. To many who take their knowledge of Hinduism secondh and this may seem a doubtful definition. It is ordinarily supposed by "practical" minds that Vedanta as a guide to life and Yoga as a method of spiritual communion are dangerous things which lead men away from action to abstraction. We leave aside those who regard all such beliefs as mysticism, self-delusion or imposture; but even those who reverence and believe in the high things of Hinduism have the impression that one must remove oneself from a full human activity in order to live the spiritual life. Yet the spiritual life finds its most potent expression in the man who lives the ordinary life of men in the strength of the Yoga and under the law of the Vedanta. It is by such a union of the inner life and the outer that mankind will eventually be lifted up and become mighty and divine. It is a delusion to suppose that Vedanta contains no inspiration to life, no rule of conduct, and is purely metaphysical and quietistic. On the contrary, the highest morality of which humanity is capable finds its one perfect basis and justification in the teachings of the Upanishads and the Gita. The characteristic doctrines of the Gita are nothing if they are not a law of life, a dharma, and even the most transcendental aspirations of the
Vedanta presuppose a preparation in life, for it is only through life that one can reach to immortality. The opposite opinion is due to certain tendencies which have bulked large in the history and temperament of our race. The ultimate goal of our religion is emancipation from the bondage of material Nature and freedom from individual rebirth, and certain souls, among the highest we have known, have been drawn by the attraction of the final hush and purity to dissociate themselves from life and bodily action in order more swiftly and easily to reach the goal. Standing like
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
most definitely the case that the Russians have regarded motor output and its abstract equivalents as the
critically relevant aspect of human existence. This intellectual position distinguished them, historically,
--
that is, affect-laden; it is the capacity to construct hypothetical or abstract end points, such as b and to
contrast them against the present that makes human beings capable of using their cognitive systems to
--
as real as anything abstracted is real and is far more parsimonious and accessible, as such a
phenomenon, than the simple non-interpreted (and non-measurable, in any case) sum total of
--
Promises, which are also positive, might be regarded as more abstractly meaningful than satisfactions,
as they indicate potential, rather than actuality. Promises cues of consummatory rewards, or satisfactions
indicate the imminent attainment of something desired, or potentially desirable. Their more abstract
quality does not make them secondary or necessarily learned, however, as was once thought; our
--
and hurt.69 Threats are abstract, like promises; however, like promises, they are not necessarily secondary
or learned.70 Unexpected phenomena, for example which constitute innately recognizable threats
--
motivation for abstract cognition, whose cooperative endeavor is critical to the establishment of permanent
memory, and whose physical substrates constitute universal elements of the human nervous system. The
--
6: Emergence of Normal Novelty in the Course of Goal-Directed Behavior provides an abstracted
representation of this process of trivial adaptation.
--
experimental subjects are exposed to abstracted symbols with integral significance, such as written, spoken
or signed words and faces, in a meaningful context.102 In such a context, the N4 occurs after the N2 but
--
approach system (and its equivalent, in abstraction) generates (1) alternative sequences of behavior, whose
goal is the production of a solution to the present dilemma; (2) alternative conceptualizations of the desired
--
the prefrontal centers means in part heightened capability for abstract exploration, which means
investigation in the absence of actual movement, which means the capacity to learn from the observation of
--
increasing capability for thought considered as abstracted action and representation.134 Action and
thought produce phenomena. Novel acts and thoughts produce new phenomena. Creative exploration,
concrete and abstract, is therefore linked in a direct sense to being. Increased capacity for exploration
means existence in a qualitatively different even new world. This entire argument implies, of course,
--
Thinking might in many cases be regarded as the abstracted form of exploration as the capacity to
investigate, without the necessity of direct motoric action. abstract analysis (verbal and nonverbal) of the
unexpected or novel plays a much greater role for humans than for animals146 a role that generally takes
--
constitutes one major advantage of the development of intelligence. The abstract intelligence characteristic
of the human being developed in parallel with rapid evolution of the brain rapid shift in quantity and
--
however, is our capacity for abstract exploration, which is thought about action (and its consequences), in
the absence of action (and its consequences). The manner in which we conduct our abstracted exploration
appears as tightly linked to the physiological structures of our brains as the manner in which we move,
--
imagistic hypothesis generation that constitute the processes of abstract exploration fantasy we use to
give determinate (and oft-bizarre) form to the unknown.
--
they are), before what they mean (or what they are) can be more abstractly (or objectively) categorized.
What a thing is, therefore, might be determined (in the absence of more useful information) by examination
--
about it. Knowing what to do, after all, is classification, before it is abstracted: classification in terms of
motivational relevance, with the sensory aspects of the phenomena serving merely as a cue to recall of that
--
representation, and possibility for rapid abstract explicit communication. In this way, our explicit
knowledge of value is expanded, through the analysis of our own dreams. Interpretations that work
--
increasingly abstracted presumptions.
The process of creative exploration the function of the knower, so to speak, who generates explored
--
or thing, produces new sensory and affective input, during active or abstracted interaction of the exploring
subject and the object in question. This new sensory input constitutes grounds for the construction,
--
behavioral pattern. It is still knowing how, before it has been abstracted and made explicit as knowing
what. The left-hemisphere gets increasingly involved, as translation up the hierarchy of abstraction
occurs.
--
for example, that a child learns to act appropriately (assuming it does) long before it can provide abstracted
explanations for or descriptions of its behavior.169 A child can be good, without being a moral
--
more abstracted forms of adaptation that characterize adulthood. Piaget regarded imagistic representation
as an intermediary between sensorimotor intelligence and the (highest or most abstract) stage of formal
operations; furthermore, he believed that imitation the acting out of an object served as a necessary
--
of play appears as a higher-order, or more abstract form of imitation, from this perspective. Piaget presents
two main theses:
--
Furthermore, we cannot describe such patterns well, abstractly (explicitly, semantically) even though we
duplicate them accurately (and unconsciously) in our behavior (and can represent them, episodically, in our
--
abstract language; myth is the intermediary between action, and abstract linguistic representation of that
action. Myth is the distilled essence of the stories we tell ourselves about the patterns of our own behavior
--
and in image, and word: we act, then represent our behavior, ever more abstractly (ever more explicitly,
consciously).
--
duplicate their actions. In this manner, we obtain the skills of others. Our capacity for abstraction allows us
to take our facility for imitation one step farther, however: we can learn to imitate not only the precise
--
Our imitative proclivity, expressed in behavior, appears to find its more abstracted counterpart in the
ability to admire, which is a permanent, innate or easily acquired constituent element of our intraspsychic
--
inventing) oft ill-defined heroic qualities themselves. The capacity for imitation surfaces in more abstract
guise in the human tendency to act as-if174 to identify with another to become another, in fantasy
--
and, even more abstractly, in ideological possession. No independent instinct necessarily needs to be
postulated, to account for this mimetic ability (although one may well exist): all that may be necessary is
--
Play transcends imitation, in that it is less context-bound; it allows for the abstraction of essential
principles from specific (admirable) instances of behavior allows for the initial establishment of a more
--
drama likewise ritualizes play, abstracting its key elements one level more, and further distills the vitally
interesting aspects of behavior which are representative (by no mere chance) of that active heroic/social
--
embody the behavioral wisdom of history. In an analogous fashion, in a less abstract, less ritualized
manner, the continuing behavior of parents dramatizes cumulative mimetic history for children.
--
semantic representation of play, or drama of essentially abstracted episodic representations of social
interaction and individual endeavor and allows behavioral patterns contained entirely in linguistic
--
any less brilliant just that his level of abstraction was different.) Ideas, after all, come from somewhere
they do not arise, spontaneously, from the void. Every complex psychological theory has a lengthy period
--
knowledge is not representational, in its basic form) and to (potential) modification, in abstraction.
Knowing how information, generated in the course of exploratory activity, can nonetheless be transferred
--
the other persons action rapidly becomes something to be imitated, and then ritualized (and then abstracted
and codified further). A shared rite, where each persons behavior is modified by the other, can therefore
--
Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth
and codified religion and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational
--
progressively more abstract and episodic through ritual action, and observation of that action. The process
of increasing abstraction has allowed the knowing what system to generate a representation, in
imagination, of the implicit predicates of behavior governed by the knowing how system. Generation of
--
of the self), and to program predictable social behavior through exchange of abstracted moral (procedural)
information. Nietzsche states, further:
--
how activity procedure through a complex, lengthy process of abstraction. Action and imitation of
action developmentally predates explicit description or discovery of the rules governing action. Adaptation
--
philosophy, rationality offers an increasingly abstracted, generalized and detailed representation of the
behavioral wisdom embedded in and established during the previous stage. The introduction of semantic
--
explicit consciousness itself: procedure is established, then represented, then altered in abstraction, then
practiced; the procedure changes, as a consequence of the abstracted and practiced modification; this
change in turn produces an alteration in its representation, and so on, and so on, from individual to
--
interaction, or internally, as a consequence of word and image-mediated abstract exploratory activity
(thought). This interactive loop and its putative relationship to underlying cognitive/memory structures
is represented schematically in Figure 13: abstraction of Wisdom, and the Relationship of Such
abstraction to Memory. (Only a few of the interactions between the stages of knowledge are indicated,
--
exploration the adaptive behavioral patterns generated are imitated, and represented more abstractly.
Play allows for the generalization of imitated knowledge, and for the integration of behaviors garnered
--
Each succeeding stage of abstraction modifies all others, as our ability to speak, for example, has expanded
our capacity to play. As the process of abstraction continues and information vital for survival is
represented evermore simply and efficiently what is represented transforms from the particulars of any
--
Figure 13: abstraction of Wisdom, and the Relationship of Such abstraction to Memory
The fact that the many stories we live by can be coded and transmitted at different levels of
--
considered, with regard to the additional complicating fact of the multi-level embodiment and abstraction
of stories? So far we have considered the ends and the means of a given framework of reference (a
--
of phenomena. However, we can also shift levels of abstraction which means, can voluntarily focus our
attention, when necessary, on stories that map out larger or smaller areas of space-time (excuse the
--
behavior. This implies that such patterns may be abstracted from that behavior, at any time. The collective
unconscious is, from this perspective, embodied behavioral wisdom, in its most fundamental form is the
--
Our capacity for abstraction allows us to derive the constituent elements of successful adaptation
itself, from observation of behavioral patterns that are constantly played out in the world as it actually
--
categorization, and that those initial categories provide the basis for the development of more abstract
concepts (even for the comparison point for determining what we consider abstract). Most naturally
apprehensible means learned and named first (generally with short names); means conceptualized in terms
--
fundamental of all classifications; the classification from which all abstracted divisions are derived). The
category of all things that make you want to run away when you look at them might be considered, for
--
hierarchy of abstraction, might be the category of all objects to be feared, or all objects that are
dangerous when approached in one fashion, but beneficial when approached in another.
--
process of development, originating in action, culminating in production of capacity for abstract cognition.
The episodic system, which generates representations of the experiential world, contains an elaborate
--
and object in description the world-model contained abstracted inferences about the nature of existence,
derived primarily from observations of human behavior. This means, in essence, that pre-experimental man
--
motivational significance of events and processes. As this model became more abstract as the semantic
system analyzed the information presented in narrative format, but not understood man generated
--
and abstracted aspects we regard as purely objective.
Science might be considered description of the world with regards to those aspects that are
--
analysis. The process is just begininng, in abstraction, in Mesopotamia and Egypt; as will be demonstrated,
it is the ancient Israelites who bring it most clearly to fruition, with potent and lasting effect. It does not
--
imagination), and, finally and only much later an abstract construction of rules describing the explicit
rights and responsibilities of the citizenry (an entity of words, the body of law). This increasingly
abstract and detailed construction develops from imitation to abstract representation, and comprises rules
and schemas of interpretations useful for maintaining stability of interpersonal interaction. It is the
--
forms range in nature from the specific and concrete to the general and abstract, and are influenced in their
development by the environmental and cultural conditions obtaining at the time of their emergence. The
--
primordial representation of himself later, formulates a more abstracted model of his own actions. Thus
the subject is created from the information generated in the course of exploratory activity.
--
The state of the origin has been represented most abstractly as a circle, the most perfect of
geometric forms, or as a sphere, without beginning or end, symmetrical across all axes. Plato, in the
--
is explored territory, surrounded by mystery; that mystery is experienced as undifferentiated but oftmenacing chaos. Everything that occupies such chaos is directly perceived as (not abstractly
conceptualized as) identical to it is directly perceived as unknown and anxiety-provoking. The foreigner,
--
Representation of culture, the known, is simple, comparatively; is second-order abstraction, depiction of
that which has already been made subject to order. Representation of culture is encapsulation of that to
--
affective tone appear categorizable in single complexes, symbolic in nature (from the standpoint of abstract
cognition) products of culture, which evolved in the social environment characteristic of ancestral homo
--
Piaget pointed out and then, later, the consequence of more abstracted second-order representation (of
symbolic understanding). Understanding can be reached, at the most inclusive, yet primary level, through
--
undertaken manifested outside the realm of conditional abstract culturally-determined presumption.298
Everything novel encountered, avoided because of involuntary or willfully manifested fear or ignorance, is
--
recapitulated in adulthood, with the maternal object of fear and respect, hope, love and gratitude abstracted
into experience itself.
--
conditional adaptation, action, and abstract thought, but impossible to ignore, from the standpoint of affect.
The personality of such beings constitutes the embodiment of incomprehensible, and often intolerable,
--
grasp of conscious abstract apprehension, but not safe to ignore.
It is no simple manner for the limited subject to formulate an accurate representation of the unlimited
--
related abstract processes], that the mixture of symbols prevailing in the primordial archetype separates
into the groups of symbols characteristic of a single archetype or of a group of related archetypes; in
--
over threat. It is this mimetic identification and its abstracted equivalents and consequences that account for
the increased general confidence and capabilities that tends to accompany exposure training. The
--
incorporation of the heroic process. Such rituals were abstracted and altered, as they developed with the
nature of the sacrificial entity changing (with constancy of underlying ideation).
--
ritual meant furtherance of the abstract conceptualization of a permanent structural aspect of (every) human
psyche the heroic aspect, the Word as active, individually doomed, yet mythically eternal, destined to
--
(much more abstractly) that voluntary cautious, careful, exploratory encounter with the threatening and
unknown constitutes the precondition for transformation of that unknown into the promising (or at least the
--
could be represented in abstraction, in drama, in story. More abstract narrative representation of the target
of the heroic sacrifice then came to portray the emergence of the beneficient goddess, capable of
--
The spirit forever willing to risk personal (more abstractly, intrapsychic) destruction to gain redemptive
knowledge might be considered the archetypal representative of the adaptive process as such. The preexperimental mind considered traumatic union of this masculine representative with the destructive and
--
Shakespeare portrayed dramatically up one level of abstraction, towards the philosophical (or even the
empirical). Freud moved information about behavior from the implicit narrative to the explicit theory (or, at
--
more basic level he abstracted from what was still behavioral, from what had not even yet been
captured effectively in drama.
--
in the form of immediate imitation) or indirectly (in the form of abstract description, or narrative). There is
no real qualitative distinction between transformation of means, and transformation of ends (as we have
--
them). Active adaptation precedes abstracted comprehension of the basis for such adaptation. This is
necessarily the case, because we are more complex than we can understand and so is the world to which
--
of that behavior (which means establishment of a new feedback process) that enables man to abstractly
posit a desired future, to act in such a way as to bring that future about, and to judge the relevance of
--
matter). Jean Piaget solved the problem of the goal-like behavior in creatures not yet capable of abstract
conceptualization by presuming that goals are initially embedded in sensorimotor reflex operations,
--
that they can be considered, abstractly, before their enaction). So this means that it is possible to act in a
manner that looks as-if it were goal-directed, before goals as such have manifested themselves. Rychlak
--
abstraction allows us to represent and duplicate that pattern, as an end. The highest level abstractions
therefore allow us to represent the most universally applicable behavioral pattern: that characterizing the
--
followed a complex path of increasingly abstracted description and re-description of self and other.
151
--
concrete, abstract, intrapsychic and interpersonal variants. In the most basic case, an individual is rendered
subject to an intolerable conflict, as a consequence of the perceived (affective) incompatibility of two or
--
conflict (between temptation and moral purity, for example) requires the construction of an abstract
moral system, powerful enough to allow what an occurrence signifies for the future to govern reaction to
--
The properly socialized individual has been trained to grant this abstract other (future self and other
person) ontological status equivalent to the experienced self, however has been trained to use the
--
death partly because they are capable of abstractly constructing their territories (making beliefs out of
them) and of abstractly abandoning those territories, once they are no longer tenable. Animals, less capable
of abstraction, are also able to lose face, rather than life, although they act out this loss, in behavioral
routines, rather than in verbal or imagistic battles (rather than through argument). It is the capacity to
--
also engage in abstract war, at the procedural level, as well as in real war and argumentation).
Strong ideas produce profound displays of faith or, alternatively put: unshakeable displays of faith
--
position is held (whether it is a territorial position, dominance hierarchy niche, or abstract notion) insofar
as this can be inferred from observable behavior, such as absence of fear constitutes a valid indication
--
hierarchically-arranged behaviors and their second and third-order abstract representations, and more: it is
the integration of these, in the course of endless social and intrapsychic conflict, into a single pattern of
--
(where it forms the basis for sovereignty). abstractly represented imitated, played, ritualized, and
storied it becomes something ever-more psychological. This embodied and represented cultural
--
of human experience. The organization of these gods, as a consequence of combat, is an abstracted and
poetic description of the manner in which emergent behavioral patterns and interpretive schemas moral
--
been partially transformed into an abstract hypothesis about the relative value of things (including the self
and others). This is to say who owns what, for example, determines what things signify and who owns
--
remembered past is the mythical Father, echoed more abstractly in one person of the Christian Trinity.
The power of the past is given due recognition in the ritual of ancestor worship, for example, which is
--
awe-inspired imitation of the actions of that primary personage, modified by time and abstracted
representation, retains primary force (retains potent force, even in revolutionary cultures such as our own).
--
personality (procedure) and only secondarily abstracted first and second-order representation thereof
(and is most certainly not cumulative description of the objective world). That this is so can be seen, even
--
More abstractly, he is the pattern of behavior the father represents, that becomes internalized during
maturation. The Great Father takes the infinite possibility of spirit that the infant represents and forges it
--
Stated abstractly, the Prophetic Principle can be put as follows: The prerequisite of political stability is
social justice, for it is in the nature of things that injustice will not endure. Stated theologically, this
--
emergence of abstract and statable principles of social justice. Societies that lack such constraint or that
come, over time, to forget the necessity of such constraint risk the vengeance of God:
1.02 - Prana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
This opens to us the door to almost unlimited power. Suppose, for instance, a man understood the Prana perfectly, and could control it, what power on earth would not be his? He would be able to move the sun and stars out of their places, to control everything in the universe, from the atoms to the biggest suns, because he would control the Prana. This is the end and aim of Pranayama. When the Yogi becomes perfect, there will be nothing in nature not under his control. If he orders the gods or the souls of the departed to come, they will come at his bidding. All the forces of nature will obey him as slaves. When the ignorant see these powers of the Yogi, they call them the miracles. One peculiarity of the Hindu mind is that it always inquires for the last possible generalisation, leaving the details to be worked out afterwards. The question is raised in the Vedas, "What is that, knowing which, we shall know everything?" Thus, all books, and all philosophies that have been written, have been only to prove that by knowing which everything is known. If a man wants to know this universe bit by bit he must know every individual grain of sand, which means infinite time; he cannot know all of them. Then how can knowledge be? How is it possible for a man to be all-knowing through particulars? The Yogis say that behind this particular manifestation there is a generalisation. Behind all particular ideas stands a generalised, an abstract principle; grasp it, and you have grasped everything. Just as this whole universe has been generalised in the Vedas into that One Absolute Existence, and he who has grasped that Existence has grasped the whole universe, so all forces have been generalised into this Prana, and he who has grasped the Prana has grasped all the forces of the universe, mental or physical. He who has controlled the Prana has controlled his own mind, and all the minds that exist. He who has controlled the Prana has controlled his body, and all the bodies that exist, because the Prana is the generalised manifestation of force.
How to control the Prana is the one idea of Pranayama. All the trainings and exercises in this regard are for that one end. Each man must begin where he stands, must learn how to control the things that are nearest to him. This body is very near to us, nearer than anything in the external universe, and this mind is the nearest of all. The Prana which is working this mind and body is the nearest to us of all the Prana in this universe. This little wave of the Prana which represents our own energies, mental and physical, is the nearest to us of all the waves of the infinite ocean of Prana. If we can succeed in controlling that little wave, then alone we can hope to control the whole of Prana. The Yogi who has done this gains perfection; no longer is he under any power. He becomes almost almighty, almost all-knowing. We see sects in every country who have attempted this control of Prana. In this country there are Mind-healers, Faith-healers, Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, Hypnotists, etc., and if we examine these different bodies, we shall find at the back of each this control of the Prana, whether they know it or not. If you boil all their theories down, the residuum will be that. It is the one and the same force they are manipulating, only unknowingly. They have stumbled on the discovery of a force and are using it unconsciously without knowing its nature, but it is the same as the Yogi uses, and which comes from Prana.
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
20:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
21:Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will at first naturally enter. For what the enlightened will sees as the thing to be done and pursues as the crown to be conquered, what the heart embraces as the one thing delightful, that in us which feels itself limited and opposed and, because it is limited, craves and struggles, will seek with the troubled passion of an egoistic desire. This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed. Even from the very beginning it has to be taught to renounce all other desires and concentrate itself on the passion for the Divine. This capital point gained, it has to be taught to desire, not for its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and enthroned for ever. But last, most difficult for it, more difficult than to seek with the right object, it has to be taught to seek in the right manner; for it must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic way, but in the way of the Divine. It must insist no longer, as the strong separative will always insists, on its own manner of fulfilment, its own dream of possession, its own idea of the right and desirable; it must yearn to fulfil a larger and greater Will and consent to wait upon a less interested and ignorant guidance. Thus trained, Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul's seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes.
1.02 - The 7 Habits An Overview, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
If I were independent, physically, I could pretty well make it on my own. Mentally, I could think my own thoughts, I could move from one level of abstraction to another. I could think creatively and analytically and organize and express my thoughts in understandable ways. Emotionally, I would be validated from within. I would be inner directed. My sense of worth would not be a function of being liked or treated well.
It's easy to see that independence is much more mature than dependence. Independence is a major achievement in and of itself. But independence is not supreme.
1.02 - The Child as growing being and the childs experience of encountering the teacher., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Integral Yoga
During the ages before the fourteenth century, humans perceived the world of the senses, and also comprehended with the intellect. The intelligence of the medieval monastic schools is too often underestimated. The inner intelligence and conceptual faculty was much more highly developed than the modern and chaotic conceptual faculty, which is really driven by, and limited to, natural phenomena; anyone whos objective and impartial can observe this. In those days, anything that the intellect and senses perceived in the universe required validation from the divine, spiritual realm. The fact that sense revelation had to be sanctioned by divine revelation wasnt merely an abstract principle; it was a common, very human feeling and observation. A manifestation in the world of the senses could be considered valid only when knowledge of it could be proven and demonstrated in terms of the divine, spiritual world.
This situation changed, gradually at first, one mode of knowledge replacing the other. Today, however, it has come to the point where we acknowledge the validity of somethingeven in the spiritual worldonly when it can be proven through the senses. Something is validated when statements about spiritual life can be confirmed by experiment and observation. What is it that someones looking for when they ask for a demonstration of matters that are really related to spirit? People ask you to make an experiment or sense observation that provides proof. Why do they ask for this?
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If a child strokes a stick from top to bottom and then makes a stroke on the paper from top to bottom, the meaning is obvious. I show a fish to a child, who then follows the general direction of the form, followed by the front and back fins that cross in the opposite direction. I draw the general form of the fish, and this line across it, and say to the child, Here, on the paper, you have something like a fish. Then I go into the childs inner experi- ence of the fish. It contains an f, and so I draw a line crossed by another line, and thus, out of the childs feeling experience, I have a picture that corresponds to the sound that begins the word fish. All writing can be developed in this waynot a mere copying of the abstract now in use, but a perception of the things themselves as they arise from a childs drawing and painting. When I derive writing from the drawing and painting, Im working with the liv- ing forces of an image.
It would be enough to present the beginning of this artistic approach; we can feel how it calls on the childs whole being, not just an intellectual understanding, which is overtaxed to a cer- tain extent. If we abandon the intellectual element for imagery at this age, the intellect usually withdraws into the background. If, on the other hand, we overemphasize the intellect and are unable to move into a mode of imagery, the childs breathing process is delicately and subtly disrupted. The child can become congested, as it were, with weakened exhalation. You should think of this as very subtle, not necessarily obvious. If educa- tion is too intellectual between the ages of seven and fourteen, exhalation becomes congested, and the child is subjected to a kind of subconscious nightmare. A kind of intimate nightmare arises, which becomes chronic in the organism and leads in later life to asthmas and other diseases connected with swelling in the breathing system.
1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once we have the key, but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted.
To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Who is Ishvara? Janmdyasya yatah "From whom is the birth, continuation, and dissolution of the universe," He is Ishvara "the Eternal, the Pure, the Ever-Free, the Almighty, the AllKnowing, the All-Merciful, the Teacher of all teachers"; and above all, Sa Ishvarah anirvachaniyapremasvarupah "He the Lord is, of His own nature, inexpressible Love." These certainly are the definitions of a Personal God. Are there then two Gods the "Not this, not this," the Sat-chit-nanda, the Existence-Knowledge-Bliss of the philosopher, and this God of Love of the Bhakta? No, it is the same Sat-chit-ananda who is also the God of Love, the impersonal and personal in one. It has always to be understood that the Personal God worshipped by the Bhakta is not separate or different from the Brahman. All is Brahman, the One without a second; only the Brahman, as unity or absolute, is too much of an abstraction to be loved and worshipped; so the Bhakta chooses the relative aspect of Brahman, that is, Ishvara, the Supreme Ruler. To use a simile: Brahman is as the clay or substance out of which an infinite variety of articles are fashioned. As clay, they are all one; but form or manifestation differentiates them. Before every one of them was made, they all existed potentially in the clay, and, of course, they are identical substantially; but when formed, and so long as the form remains, they are separate and different; the clay-mouse can never become a clay-elephant, because, as manifestations, form alone makes them what they are, though as unformed clay they are all one.
Ishvara is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind. Creation is eternal, and so also is Ishvara.
1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Modern conceptions of mathematics, chemistry, and physics are sheer paradox to the" plain man" who thinks of matter, for example, as something that he can knock up against. There appears to be no doubt nowadays that the ultimate nature of Science in any of its branches will be purely abstract, almost of a
Qabalistic character one might say, even though it may never be officially denominated the Qabalah. It is natural and proper to represent the Cosmos or any part of it, or its
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
In sum, all of the various aspects are present at once. To state it in very general terms, we are spared both the need to walk around the human figure in time, in order to obtain a sequential view of the various aspects, and the need to synthesize or sum up these partial aspects which can only be realized through our conceptualization. Previously, such "sheafing" of the various sectors of vision into whole was possible only by the synthesizing recollection of successively viewed aspects, and consequently such "wholeness" had only an abstract quality.
In this drawing, however, space and body have become transparent. In this sense the drawing is neither unperspectival, i.e. a two-dimensional rendering of a surface in which the body is imprisoned, nor is it perspectival, i.e., a three-dimensional visual sector cut out of reality that surrounds the figure with breathing space. The drawing is "aperspectival" in our sense of the term; time is no longer spatialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension. By this means it renders the whole visible to insight, a whole which becomes visible only because the previously missing component, time, is expressed in an intensified and valid form as the present. It is no longer the moment, or the "twinkling of the eye" - time viewed through the organ of sight as spatialized time - but the pure present, the quintessence of time that radiates from this drawing.
1.035 - The Recitation of Mantra, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The mystic formulas, known as mantras, have some peculiar features. A mantra, in its spiritual connotation, is not an ordinary name like John, Jack, or Rama, Krishna, Govinda, Gopala, etc., as we have in respect of ordinary human beings. It is a specialised combination of vibrations which are packed into a very concentrated form, so that when they are repeated, what happens is not merely the generation of an idea in the mind in the sense of any abstract notion, but a positive vibration, though it may be invisible. When we take a powerful homeopathic dose, for instance, we cannot see the vibration, but it has its own effect. Words are really symbols of vibration. They are charged with the force of which they are supposed to be the external shape or the form. The mind, which itself is charged with consciousness, is associated with the meaning of the word with which it connects itself, and so sympathetically there is an effect produced in consciousness itself on merely hearing the word uttered. The word-symbol is a concentrated energy presented to us, which can be thrust into our system and made part of our nature.
In Indian tradition, we have the mantras which are also associated with certain factors other than merely a combination of words, one aspect of which is what is known as chandas. This a peculiar feature of the formation of a mantra. A chandas is a particular method of combining words according to a rule called ghana shastra, which is known in mystical circles in India. A particular word, when it is combined with another particular word, produces a particular effect. Rhetoricians are well acquainted with this subject. Great novelists and poets in India, especially those endowed with special genius and charged with divine power, such as Kalidasa, followed this technique of ghana shastra, and knowing the power of words, composed their poems or their works in such a way that they follow the rules of accepted rhetoric. Ordinary literature is not acquainted with this secret of Sanskrit literature. The greatness of a poet can be judged from the way he starts the work. How does he start the work? What is the word that he uses in the beginning? It is the belief among great writers in India that the initial phrases at the commencement of the work tell upon the nature of the entire work that is to follow.
10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This creation as an expression of the Divine Truth may not be altogether a falsehood. It is an inadequate expression, as it stands at present, as it has been till now; but it is a growing, a progressive expression. In other words, the instruments of expression, to start with, are not fully developed, they have to be developed; they are being developed, through the evolutionary movement of Nature, in the course of advancing time. Indeed evolution in Nature means that and a great deal of that. Take for example, speech, which is a special organ of expression for man. Now, originally speech, that is to say, the vocabulary on man's tongue consisted of vocables related only to the familiar objects around him, in the ordinary day to day movement of life. The field was narrow and limited, level to the ground. Observe the language also, the written language. The original written language started with images, pictorial diagrams: there was no alphabet but things and movements were presented, that is represented, almost actually. Thus for man a figure of man was drawn, that is to say, straight lines sticking out representing hands and legs and a dot for the head; the sun was a circle and so on. As consciousness grew and as the mind developed and reason became active, the images, the figures and the symbols gradually changed into more and more abstract signs. At first there was the pictogram, then the ideogram, and then, at the end, came the alphabet. Evidently, it appears, language could not develop so quickly as the consciousness or the mind did, for we see even in the earlier epochs of human civilisation and culture, man could and did come in contact with the Truth and Realities beyond his normal sense-bound consciousness. And the experiences the seers had on those levels were of such a kind that whenever they sought to express them, communicate them to others in the outward mind and speech, they had to take refuge in symbolism: they had to use the words of everyday life as signs and symbols pointing to other realities, other-worldly and unfamiliar. Thus, horse was to them life-force, cow the radiance of truth, the wind thought energies, the sun consciousness or Truth, night as ignorance, light as knowledge, wine (soma means both wine and moon) as delight and ecstasy, the sky as infinity or transcendence. And so on.
Indeed, that is the hiatus, the inadequacy that still cripples and stultifies the mind, the physical mind in its attempt to seize other realities beyond. It is the mind which gives the formal structure, the pattern of expression in the material frame. The mind being bound to the life of the ignorant and outgoing senses is constitutionally incapable of receiving or holding or expressing facts of the higher life, the life beyondwhat we name as the spiritual or the divine. Not only so, the mind in trying to express the higher or supraterrestrial truths inevitably diminishes, dilutes, devalues, even negates and annuls them. The attempt through parables and allegories is the story of the difficulty the impossibility of expressing through the mind truths beyond the mind. We land into the weird and confused worlds of myths and mythologies,myths and mythologies for example about popular Radha and Krishna, and Kali or Shiva. We are compelled to reduce to our human measures, to accentuate our human failings in order to present graphically to us the inexpressible intensities or extensions of the high experiences above. The Vaishnava lyrics or the songs of Solomon become to us high spiritual documents.
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The movement of freeing the consciousness from the hold of sense-perceptions has continued and has attained an unprecedented success. Rational mind, in order to find its autonomy has abstracted itself so much from the data of life experiences that it has become almost an esoteric domain. Mathematical logic of today has brought forth a language that has almost no kinship with either the popular or the aristocratic tongue. Modern science has so much sublimated the facts of life, the contents of experience, that it has become only a system of geometrical formulae.
The recoil from the brute facts of life, the concrete living realities has affected even the world of artistic creation. We are very much familiar with what has been called abstract art, that is to say, art denuded of all content. The supreme art today is this sketch of bare skeletoneven a skeleton, not in its organised form but merely dismembered bits strewn about. Even poetry, the art that is perhaps most bound to the sense pattern, as no other, so indissolubly married to sense-life, seems to be giving way to the new impact and inspiration. A poetry devoid of all thought-content, pure of all sentiment and understandable imagery is being worked out in the laboratory, as it were, a new poetry made of a bizarre combination of tones and syllables with a changed form too in regard to arrangement of lines and phrases. It is the pure form that is aimed at the very essence, it is said, what is quintessential!
In other words, mind, that is to say, the rational mind on which stands man's superiority has now been so developed, developed along a single line, has specialised itself so much that it has almost defeated its own purpose. Today it has entered a cul-de-sac, a blind alley where it has bogged itself and does not know where and how to move.
The recoil from the normal, the rich and lush physico-mental expression of human consciousness and experience has been so radical and complete that it has catapulted us into an opposite extreme of bareness and nudity, at the most into a world of pure signs and symbols of notches and blotches, the disjointed mimics and inarticulate groans of a deaf and dumb man. The process of abstraction has gone so far that it has now been reduced to an absurdity. It has its parallel in the movement that led man away from the world of Maya to the Transcendent featureless Brahman. In either case the reason is that the link that joins the two ends could not be founda living truth that is of the Transcendent, yet denying not, but affirming in a new manner the mayic existence. That is because man till now sought to create from a level of consciousness, by a force of consciousness that is not adequate to the task; for it belongs still to the mental region, to this inferior hemisphere although at present it seems to be the acme and topmost hemisphere in the scale. It is not an extension or intensification of the mind and its capacities that will solve the problem: a radical change in the very nature of the mind, a reversal of the mental consciousnessa turning of it inside out as it were, an opening out and up is needed to discover the true source of the Light. Therefore it has been said that man must transcend himself, find a new status in the other hemisphere. In fact there is a domain, a status of being and consciousness, a master-force which when revealed and made active will remould inevitably and spontaneously human creation and expression as a reality embodying the Highest. It is the world of Idea-Force which Sri Aurobindo has named Supermind: it is beyond the mind, even the highest mind: it is the typal concentration of the Supreme Consciousness. It is the fulcrum for the Supreme Consciousness to create and express a new formulation of the Truth in the world of matter. The mind, the highest mind, in its attempt to grasp the Supreme Reality is prone to reject, annul and efface the Cosmic Reality. The Supermind has no need to do that. It links the two ends in a supreme and miraculous synthesis negating neither, giving the full value to each, for the two are united, concentrated in its substance. Thus is found the golden bridge uniting earth and heaven.
The physical mind, with its satellite, the human speech, must indeed be rescued from the thraldom of the animal life, the life of the ordinary senses. They should be put under the regimen of the new consciousness, the status of the Idea-Force. The action of that consciousness will create its own norm and pattern adequate for expressing and embodying suprasensuous realities. It will not have to depend upon allegories and parables, symbols and signs seized from ordinary life. What exactly this will be is difficult to say at present. Evidently there is likely to be an intermediary creationa passage leading from the sensuous to the supra-sensuous, the higher not totally rejecting the lower or primitive formula, the lower not altogether englobing and swallowing the higher.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
cumulative behavioral wisdom, in increasingly abstracted form. Introduction of the previously-dependent
individual at adolescence to the world of ancestral behavior and myth constitutes transmission of culture
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to do or to think before. Integration of these behaviors into a stable hierarchy, and abstract representation of
them, in the course of a process beginning with imitation, and ending in semantic description, produces a
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The comparatively more abstracted rite of baptism is predicated upon similar principles. Baptism is the
dramatic or episodic representation of the act or ritual of initiation or, at least, stands mid-way between
the entirely unconscious or procedural forms of initiation and their semantically abstracted symbolic
equivalents. Baptism is spiritual birth (rebirth), as opposed to birth of the flesh. The font of the church,
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spirit.369 Such abstracted reductions to death and symbolic reconstructions constitute ritualization and
180
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philosophies, in more abstracted cultures which accompany it), simultaneously produces ability to act in a
given (social) environment, to predict the outcomes of such action, and to determine the meaning of general
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integrated pattern of action. Procedures may be mapped in episodic memory, and abstracted in essence by
the semantic system. This process results in construction of a story, or narrative. Any narrative contains,
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codification are the advantages granted by abstraction per se ease of communication, facilitation of
transformation and formal declaration of (historically-sanctified) principles useful in mediation of
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be paid, in the initial stages of abstract representation) to the more fundamental, but more abstract and
difficult, meta-problem of adaptation how is (or was) how to behave determined? or what is the
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communicated and abstractly elaborated in episodic and semantic memory. Such morality act and thought
is non-arbitrary in structure and specifically goal-directed. It is predicated upon conceptualization of the
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
to it up to a point. For we are dealing here not with an abstract
concept but with an empirical one, and the form in which it
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
As soon as the laws are confined to some abstract realm
of ideal mathematical forms, there is no problem, writes
1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
reflects on the abstract principles involved in his actions. With
him, as with the vast majority of men, logic is implicit, not
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which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract
principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern
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formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by
the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
That is to say, is it better to Be than not to Be?" Despite its abstract,
metaphysical form, this is essentially a practical question repre-
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developed. But what is true and clearly apparent in the abstract
field of geometry may also be found, and should be examined with
1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
therefore abstract, combine and foresee. He reflects. He
thinks. (V.P., p. 161.)
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born. abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions,
mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Moreover, and this is extremely important, by the acquisi- tion of an understanding of any one system of mystical philosophy or religion, one automatically acquires, when relating that comprehension to the Tree of Life, an under- standing of every system. So that ultimately, by a species of association of impersonal and abstract ideas, one gradually equilibrizes the whole of one's mental structure and obtains a simple view of the incalculably vast com- plexity of the universe. For it is written : " Equilibrium is the basis of the work ".
Serious students will need to make a careful study of the attri butions detailed in this work and commit them to memory. When, by persistent application to his own mental apparatus, the numerical system with its corres- pondences is partly understood - as opposed to being merely memorized - the student will be amazed to find fresh light breaking in on him at every turn as he continues to refer every item in experience and consciousness to this standard.
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Another way in which this same idea has been expressed is that within the concept of abstract negativity, the
Whirling Forces ( Rashis haGilgolim) presage the first mani- festation of the Primordial Point ( Nelcudah Bishonah), which becomes the primeval root from which all else will spring. Keser is the inscrutable Monad, the root of all things, defined by Leibnitz with reference both to the ulti- mate nature of physical things and to the ultimate unit of consciousness, as a metaphysical point, a centre of spiritual energy, unextended and indivisible, full of ceaseless life,
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Petrie, was one of the abstract Gods (as distinguished from human or cosmic gods) and the creator of the cosmic egg ;
THE SEPHIROS
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Malkus and the external universe. The Zohar restates this hypothesis. But there is a difficulty, since it is obviously impossible for so abstract a conception as Zero to do any- thing. Blavatsky in her monumental work, The Secret
Doctrine, recognizes the difficulty, and endeavours to solve the problem by stating that the Absolute (Ain) while incomprehensible in itself, has several aspects from which we can view it - Infinite Space, Eternal Duration, and
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Lady of Severity, the shadowy double and sister of Isis, is attri buted to this digit 5, and so we would naturally expect her to manifest in this Sephirah a quality similar to that of Binah, but much less pure as an abstract spiritual force. Thor is the Norwegian War God, and according to the Sagas, a scarlet cloud above his head reflected the fiery glint in his eyes ; he was girded with strength and armour and was drawn to battle in a chariot.
The magical weapons of Geburah are the Sword, Spear,
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:If the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing free from change, birth, death, and the relative as a creation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an abstraction in the contrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure and eternal Knowledge.
4:What justification, of logic or of experience, can be asserted in support of the one extreme which cannot be met by an equally cogent logic and an equally valid experience at the other end? The world of Matter is affirmed by the experience of the physical senses which, because they are themselves unable to perceive anything immaterial or not organised as gross Matter, would persuade us that the suprasensible is the unreal. This vulgar or rustic error of our corporeal organs does not gain in validity by being promoted into the domain of philosophical reasoning. Obviously, their pretension is unfounded. Even in the world of Matter there are existences of which the physical senses are incapable of taking cognisance. Yet the denial of the suprasensible as necessarily an illusion or a hallucination depends on this constant sensuous association of the real with the materially perceptible, which is itself a hallucination. Assuming throughout what it seeks to establish, it has the vice of the argument in a circle and can have no validity for an impartial reasoning.
1.03 - The Uncreated, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
We must not suffer ourselves to Le caught by the prestige of words or taken in the snare of abstractions.
If the original unity is beyond our comprehension, not less so is the dual origin.
1.03 - VISIT TO VIDYASAGAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
In the mean time the young members of the household and a few friends and relatives of Vidyasagar had gathered around. Sri Ramakrishna, still in an ecstatic mood, sat on the bench. A young man, seventeen or eighteen years old, who had come to Vidyasagar to seek financial help for his education, was seated there. The Master sat down at a little distance from the boy, saying in an abstracted mood: "Mother, this boy is very much attached to the world. He belongs to Thy realm of ignorance."
Vidyasagar told someone to bring water and asked M. whether the Master would like some sweetmeats also. Since M. did not object, Vidyasagar himself went eagerly to the inner apartments and brought the sweets. They were placed before the Master.
1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:But again we find that we are being misled by words, deceived by the trenchant oppositions of our limited mentality with its fond reliance on verbal distinctions as if they perfectly represented ultimate truths and its rendering of our supramental experiences in the sense of those intolerant distinctions. NonBeing is only a word. When we examine the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better chance than the infinite Self of being more than an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive conception. We erect a fiction of nothingness in order to overpass, by the method of total exclusion, all that we can know and consciously are. Actually when we examine closely the Nihil of certain philosophies, we begin to perceive that it is a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions, but is in fact the only true Existence.3
8:And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time. For what was that portentous date in the history of eternal Nothing on which Being was born out of it or when will come that other date equally formidable on which an unreal all will relapse into the perpetual void? Sat and Asat, if they have both to be affirmed, must be conceived as if they obtained simultaneously. They permit each other even though they refuse to mingle. Both, since we must speak in terms of Time, are eternal. And who shall persuade eternal Being that it does not really exist and only eternal Non-Being is? In such a negation of all experience how shall we find the solution that explains all experience?
9:Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence. We give the name of Non-Being to a contrary affirmation of Its freedom from all cosmic existence, - freedom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence which consciousness in the universe can formulate to itself, even from the most abstract, even from the most transcendent. It does not deny them as a real expression of Itself, but It denies Its limitation by all expression or any expression whatsoever. The Non-Being permits the Being, even as the Silence permits the Activity. By this simultaneous negation and affirmation, not mutually destructive, but complementary to each other like all contraries, the simultaneous awareness of conscious Self-being as a reality and the Unknowable beyond as the same Reality becomes realisable to the awakened human soul. Thus was it possible for the Buddha to attain the state of Nirvana and yet act puissantly in the world, impersonal in his inner consciousness, in his action the most powerful personality that we know of as having lived and produced results upon earth.
10:When we ponder on these things, we begin to perceive how feeble in their self-assertive violence and how confusing in their misleading distinctness are the words that we use. We begin also to perceive that the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual mind which concentrates itself on one aspect of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity. We affirm the One and Identical by passionately discriminating and asserting the egoism of our own opinions and partial experiences against the opinions and partial experiences of others. It is wiser to wait, to learn, to grow, and, since we are obliged for the sake of our self-perfection to speak of these things which no human speech can express, to search for the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible and found on it the largest and most comprehensive harmony.
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
The capacity to abstract that is, to code morality in image and word has facilitated the
communication, comprehension and development of behavior and behavioral interaction. However, the
capacity to abstract has also undermined the stability of moral tradition. Once a procedure has been
encapsulated in image and, particularly, in word it becomes easier to modify, experimentally; but
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implicit and fundamental. The capacity to abstract which has facilitated the communication of very
complex and only partially understood ideas is therefore also the capacity to undermine the very
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situations. Our capacity for abstraction is capable of disrupting our unconscious that is, imagistic and
procedural social identity, upsetting our emotional stability, and undermining our integrity (that is, the
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The ever-expanding human capacity for abstraction central to human consciousness has enabled
us to produce self-models sufficiently complex and extended to take into account the temporal boundaries
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of experience as interpreted). Euclid grounded his explicit abstract (semantic) system in observable
absolutes. It can be concretely demonstrated, for example, that any two points drawn in the sand can be
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aware of it, about the particular abstract characteristics that make those solutions permanent. They can,
that is, agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a
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years ago, we did not know how to act concretely, or think abstractly, in a manner that would produce some
situation whose nature could not be described by Euclid. That is no longer the case. Many alternative, and
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acts out, but does not believe. It might be said that the lack of isomorphism between explicit abstract
self-representation and actions undertaken in reality makes for substantial existential confusion and for
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anomalies perhaps because a substantial amount of negative emotion and abstract cognitive consideration
can be elicited merely through positing their possibility (what if we were threatened by the foreign
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centuries, in the form of abstract exploration and argumentation, revision of action, and war between
opposing alternative viewpoints (as in the case, for example, of the Catholic and Protestant Christians). The
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increasing ability to abstract, learn, and communicate; and as a consequence of revolutionary heroic
activity.
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The Word in its guise as painstakingly abstracted action and object can create new worlds and
destroy old; can pose an unbearable threat to seemingly stable cultures, and can redeem those that have
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the concept of rebirth can be rendered abstractly comprehensible. Frye states:
The hypothetical ritual studied in Frazers Golden Bough may be vulnerable enough in various
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present dominance structure, and who, more abstractly as his actions contain his moral tradition
199
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dangerous. More abstractly, what the stranger believes, specifically, threatens the integrated structure of
historically-determined belief, in general. This does not present a problem, when his foreign actions or
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Increasing ability to abstract makes previous learning, established through non- abstract means, increasingly
modifiable and increasingly vulnerable. In a way, this is the whole point of abstraction, and the very
capacity to learn. Words deceptively simple and harmless are sufficient to create disruption and
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rationale that a new idea is an abstract stranger (or, by the same logic, a natural disaster). It is for this
reason that the pen is truly mightier than the sword.
The process of increased abstraction allows for increasing self-understanding (self-consciousness) at
least in potential and for the prediction of the behaviors of others [which is a capacity integrally linked to
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The capacity to abstract has not come without price, however. The incautious, imaginative (and
resentful) can easily use their gift of socially-constructed intelligence to undermine moral principles that
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This means that the verbal systems utilized in abstract thinking, for example, only contain part of the
puzzle, at best only have partial information regarding the structure of the whole. So, while some of the
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The socially-mediated capacity to abstract to reason and represent, in behavior, imagination and word
means that an ill-chosen action, fantasy or thought may have devastating consequences. This is true in
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with imitation and ends with verbal abstraction, increases the permanent behavioral and abstract logical
repertoire of the individuals that form that group. The sum total of such behavioral patterns (and second
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of behavior and abstracted conceptualization thereof which inhibits fear of novelty, the Terrible Mother,
source of all nightmares. The group is the historical structure that humanity has erected between the
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of increasing abstraction and representation is equivalent to development of higher consciousness
(especially if the ever-more enlightened words are in fact utopian wish transformed back down the
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The major advantage of increased abstraction of representation apart from ease of communication is
increased adaptive flexibility: alterations in abstract thought can proceed as if as if a game, without
immediate practical consequences, positive or negative.404 The disadvantage of this adaptive flexibility is
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progress, in time. Until a new game appears, however, it is merely troublesome. The process of abstract
(semantic) inquiry is capable of undermining moral adaptation at each level semantic, episodic and
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side-effect of the ability to abstract.
The evolutionary construction of an adaptive social structure, simultaneously extant in behavior and in
semantic/episodic representation of that behavior, means abstraction and hierarchical organization of
knowledge hard-won in the physical battle for survival, and consequent capacity for immmediate
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for alteration and experimentation in the abstract (in play, episodic and semantic), prior to application in the
real world. Acquisition of such ability the capacity for abstract creative thought, and social exchange
thereof means tremendous heightening of adaptive ability, as concepts constructed purely semantically
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For the man whose beliefs have become abstracted (and, therefore, more doubtful, more debatable), the
mere idea of the stranger is sufficient to disrupt the stability of everyday presumption. Tolstoy, in his
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brought about, inexorably, by continued development of abstract consciousness. The first modern man,
Hamlet and those who follow him, in art and in life characteristically respond like Nietzsches pale
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unknown; is reaction of a spirit no longer able, as a consequence of abstract critical ability, to manifest
(unconscious or procedural) identity with the hero no longer able to muster belief in human possibility, in
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theologies or (rational) philosophies, can more easily incarnate and/or abstractly adopt or provisionally
formulate different positions, with regards to the value of initial assumptions; can also verbalize the beliefs
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developmental chain of abstraction can be applied to undermine the stability of its foundation. The modern
and verbally-sophisticated individual is therefore always in danger of sawing off the branch on which he or
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procedural information (and abstracted representation thereof), arranged hierarchically in terms of value,
embodied in non-verbal procedural and abstracted imagistic and semantic form. Representation of mythic
value in verbal format allowed for simple experimentation in ethics, in imagination (and then, often
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capacity for abstract thinking, for example, appears to be a consequence of biological and social forces,
working synergistically. The human brain has evolved exceptionally quickly, from the phylogenetic
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The ever-expanding human capacity for abstraction has enabled us as a species, and as individuals
to produce self-models that include the temporal boundaries of existence. We have become able to imagine
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concrete example of a unity that is at the same time a plurality can be used in abstraction, to represent the
hypothetical pretemporal state itself, where everything that would be more than one thing still existed in
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The myth like the dream may be regarded as the birthplace of conscious abstract knowledge, as the
matrix from which formed ideas spring. Every concept, no matter how new or modern it appears, emerges
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intrapsychic ideal, abstract symbolic construction and utopian state, creation of generations of autonomous
fantasy, following its own rules, governed by its own denizens, with its own non-individual transcendent
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the communication of disembodied or abstracted thought from person to person, through processes ranging
in complexity from concrete imitation to generalized philosophical discourse.
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being, by contrast, with a head full of alternative opinions (the abstracted residue of individual ancestral
choice), can use the internalized or freely offered opinion of the group to criticize spontaneous
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Serpent and the Lion are of particular importance in the study of alchemical literature. In modern psycho-analytic theory, the Serpent is lucidly recognized as a symbol both of the phallus and the abstract concept of Wisdom.
i-Y
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The Greek God is Themis, who, in the Homeric poems, is the personification of abstract law, custom, and equity, whence she is described as reigning in the assemblies of men, and convening the assembly of the Gods on Mount
Olympus. Its Egyptian God bears out the idea of Justice for she is Maat, the Goddess of Truth, who in the Book of the Dead appears in the judgment scene of the weighing of the heart of the deceased. Nemesis, too, is a correspon- dence, as she measured out to mortals happiness and misery ; and here, too, is the Hindu concept of Yama, the personification of death and Hell where men had to expiate their evil deeds.
1.04 - The Praise, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Integral Yoga
a syntax evasive to a level of abstraction but also because the style
would be heavy, littered with adverbs such as "completely,"
1.04 - The Qabalah The Best Training for Memory, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Every idea soever can be, and should be, attri buted to one or more of these primary symbols; thus green, in different shades, is a quality or function of Venus, the Earth, the Sea, Libra, and others. So also abstract ideas; dishonesty means "an afflicted Mercury," generosity a good, though not always strong, Jupiter; and so on.
The Tree of Life has got to be learnt by heart; you must know it backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside down; it must become the automatic background of all your thinking. You must keep on hanging everything that comes your way upon its proper bough.
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is an integral knowledge that is being sought, an integral force, a total amplitude of union with the All and Infinite behind existence. For the seeker of the integral Yoga no single experience, no one Divine Aspect,however overwhelming to the human mind, sufficient for its capacity, easily accepted as the sole or the ultimate reality,can figure as the exclusive truth of the Eternal. For him the experience of the Divine Oneness carried to its extreme is more deeply embraced and amply fathomed by following out to the full the experience of the Divine Multiplicity. All that is true behind polytheism as well as behind monotheism falls within the scope of his seeking; but he passes beyond their superficial sense to human mind to grasp their mystic truth in the Divine. He sees what is aimed at by the jarring sects and philosophies and accepts each facet of the Reality in its own place, but rejects their narrownesses and errors and proceeds farther till he discovers the One Truth that binds them together. The reproach of anthropomorphism and anthropolatry cannot deter him,for he sees them to be prejudices of the ignorant and arrogant reasoning intelligence, the abstracting mind turning on itself in its own cramped circle. If human relations as practised now by man are full of smallness and perversity and ignorance, yet are they disfigured shadows of something in the Divine and by turning them to the Divine he finds that of which they are a shadow and brings it down for manifestation in life. It is through the human exceeding itself and opening itself to a supreme plenitude that the Divine must manifest itself here, since that comes inevitably in the course and process of the spiritual evolution, and therefore he will not despise or blind himself to the Godhead because it is lodged in a human body, mnu tanum ritam. Beyond the limited human conception of God, he will pass to the one divine Eternal, but also he will meet him in the faces of the Gods, his cosmic personalities supporting the World-Play, detect him behind the mask of the Vibhutis, embodied World-Forces or human Leaders, reverence and obey him in the Guru, worship him in the Avatar. This will be to him his exceeding good fortune if he can meet one who has realised or is becoming That which he seeks for and can by opening to it in this vessel of its manifestation himself realise it. For that is the most palpable sign of the growing fulfilment, the promise of the great mystery of the progressive Descent into Matter which is the secret sense of the material creation and the justification of terrestrial existence.
Thus reveals himself to the seeker in the progress of the sacrifice the Lord of the sacrifice. At any point this revelation can begin; in any aspect the Master of the Work can take up the work in him and more and more press upon him and it for the unfolding of his presence. In time all the Aspects disclose themselves, separate, combine, fuse, are unified together. At the end there shines through it all the supreme integral Reality, unknowable to Mind which is part of the Ignorance, but knowable because self-aware in the light of a spiritual consciousness and a supramental knowledge.
1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless em-
pirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of
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What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for
something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates
1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Similarly, before Matter was, before its forms were manifested, there was in the possibility of these forms an eternal principle of Matter. And there where all form disappears and leaves only abstractions of pure Mind, does not this principle of Matter still subsist? Is it not the very substance and, so to speak, the matter of that Mind?
It is therefore beyond Matter and Mind, Force and Will, Consciousness and Unconsciousness and in all these that we must seek a cause for the existence of the worlds.
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Pure thought, which Idealism regards as the first essence, may well constitute the abstract and conceptual foundation of being; it is not sufficient to explain the living and concrete reality. And Will itself cannot be presented as ultimate cause of the world. For Will is a power of action, realisation, emotion, productive of movement, only in the domain of the subjective energies. But the universe is not only an internal dynamism; it is a substantial activity.
It is, therefore, only an integral experience that can enable us to attain, beyond the multiple forms and successive depths of the reality, its ultimate sources. The discovery cannot be effected by the sole aid of the logical reason. The data of sensation must enter into it no less than those of the understanding, no less than those of the still more transcendent faculties of intuitive consciousness and of knowledge that is lived.
1.053 - A Very Important Sadhana, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
There are various other methods of svadhyaya. It depends upon the state of ones mind how far it is concentrated, how far it is distracted, what these desires are that have remained frustrated inside, what the desires are that have been overcome, and so on. The quality of the mind will determine the type of svadhyaya that one has to practise. If nothing else is possible, do parayana of holy scriptures the Sundara Kanda, the Valmiki Ramayana or any other Ramayana, the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, the Srimad Bhagavadgita, the Moksha Dharma Parva of the Mahabharata, the Vishnu Purana, or any other suitable spiritual text. It has to be recited again and again, every day at a specific time, in a prescribed manner, so that this sadhana itself becomes a sort of meditation because what is meditation but hammering the mind, again and again, into a single idea? Inasmuch as abstract meditations are difficult for beginners, these more concrete forms of it are suggested. There are people who recite the Ramayana or the Srimad Bhagavata 108 times. They conduct Bhagvat Saptaha. The purpose is to bring the mind around to a circumscribed form of function and not allow it to roam about on the objects of sense.
The mind needs variety, no doubt, and it cannot exist without variety. It always wants change. Monotonous food will not be appreciated by the mind, and so the scriptures, especially the larger ones like the Epics, the Puranas, the Agamas, the Tantras, etc., provide a large area of movement for the mind wherein it leisurely roams about to its deep satisfaction, finds variety in plenty, reads stories of great saints and sages, and feels very much thrilled by the anecdotes of Incarnations, etc. But at the same time, with all its variety, we will find that it is a variety with a unity behind it. There is a unity of pattern, structure and aim in the presentation of variety in such scriptures as the Srimad Bhagavata, for instance. There are 18,000 verses giving all kinds of detail everything about the cosmic creation and the processes of the manifestation of different things in their gross form, subtle form, causal form, etc. Every type of story is found there. It is very interesting to read it. The mind rejoices with delight when going through such a large variety of detail with beautiful comparisons, etc. But all this variety is like a medical treatment by which we may give varieties of medicine with a single aim. We may give one tablet, one capsule, one injection, and all sorts of things at different times in a day to treat a single disease. The purpose is the continued assertion that God is All, and the whole of creation is a play of the glory of God.
1.05 - CHARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
This remark seems, at first sight, to be incompatible with what precedes it. But in reality St. Thomas is merely distinguishing between the various forms of love and knowledge. It is better to love-know God than just to know about God, without love, through the reading of a treatise on theology. Gold, on the other hand, should never be known with the misers love, or rather concupiscence, but either abstractly, as the scientific investigator knows it, or else with the disinterested love-knowledge of the artist in metal, or of the spectator, who love-knows the goldsmiths work, not for its cash value, not for the sake of possessing it, but just because it is beautiful. And the same applies to all created things, lives and minds. It is bad to love-know them with self-centred attachment and cupidity; it is somewhat better to know them with scientific dispassion; it is best to supplement abstract knowledge-without-cupidity with true disinterested love-knowledge, having the quality of aesthetic delight, or of charity, or of both combined.
We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.
1.05 - Computing Machines and the Nervous System, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
nor need we in the abstract associate it with the advantage of the
animal. The essential thing is this: that affective tone is arranged
1.05 - Knowledge by Aquaintance and Knowledge by Description, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
When we, who did not know Bismarck, make a judgement about him, the description in our minds will probably be some more or less vague mass of historical knowledge--far more, in most cases, than is required to identify him. But, for the sake of illustration, let us assume that we think of him as 'the first Chancellor of the German Empire'. Here all the words are abstract except 'German'. The word 'German' will, again, have different meanings for different people. To some it will recall travels in Germany, to some the look of Germany on the map, and so on.
But if we are to obtain a description which we know to be applicable, we shall be compelled, at some point, to bring in a reference to a particular with which we are acquainted. Such reference is involved in any mention of past, present, and future (as opposed to definite dates), or of here and there, or of what others have told us. Thus it would seem that, in some way or other, a description known to be applicable to a particular must involve some reference to a particular with which we are acquainted, if our knowledge about the thing described is not to be merely what follows _logically_ from the description. For example, 'the most long-lived of men' is a description involving only universals, which must apply to some man, but we can make no judgements concerning this man which involve knowledge about him beyond what the description gives. If, however, we say, 'The first Chancellor of the German Empire was an astute diplomatist', we can only be assured of the truth of our judgement in virtue of something with which we are acquainted--usually a testimony heard or read. Apart from the information we convey to others, apart from the fact about the actual Bismarck, which gives importance to our judgement, the thought we really have contains the one or more particulars involved, and otherwise consists wholly of concepts.
1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
catharsis is not just an abstraction which automatically produces nothing
but catharsis. He is also a human being, and although his thinking may be
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in and through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for continually the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation. Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this' defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On the other side. Science and Art and the knowledge of life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
A Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself In the human creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, -- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expressions-all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
1.05 - The Creative Principle, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
These two abstract terms, which appear to us so irreducible, are in fact exclusive only from one point of view, that of our own relative conceptions. There can be no exclusion in the Absolute. And here appears as something essentially distinctive and specific that character of exclusive affirmation which is assumed by the very principle of existence.
But if we must attri bute this form of relative affirmation to some power of primary activity and of creation, we may at least discover a preliminary and fundamental antecedent in the affirmation, also creative, of the Absolute itself in which all is included.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
thinkers and existential theorists have attempted to abstract these ideas upward into higher consciousness,
and to present them in logical and purely semantic form. Sufficient data have been gathered to present a
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fought in abstraction, image and in the course of genuine earthly combat portrayed in mythology as
spiritual war, played out in heaven (which is the place where transpersonal ideas exist). The Deity who
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the uncomfortable fact, embodied in the stranger or rendered abstract in the form of differing philosophy
is a call to religious action, and not an evil.
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unexpected experience, which is the abstract equivalent of running away, transforms it perforce into
determinate threat (is the categorical equivalent of labelling as threat). The domain of unprocessed novelty,
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dispute cascade, with each failure, down the chain of abstraction: from the word, to the image, to the deed
and those who will not let their outdated identities and beliefs die, when they must, kill themselves instead.
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products of imagination and abstract thought come to be regarded as acceptable, and are therefore
developed, and which are forbidden, and are therefore left repressed and stunted. If the individual or social
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The notion of the spirits intrinsic kinship with the creator was abstractly elaborated, in much more
detail, in the eventual course of development of Judeo-Christian thought. From this viewpoint, man is
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This capacity for infinite transcendence, which is the ability to abstract, and then represent the
abstraction, and then abstract from the representation, and so on, without end, does not come without a
cost, as we have previously observed. We can tumble down the deck of cards, as easily as erect it;
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abstract thinking in general, and abstract moral thinking in particular, is play: the game, what if?
Games are played by first establishing, then identifying, then altering, basic presuppositions. Before any
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answer to this meta-problem also provides the final answer to the (apparently) less abstract question how
to behave? or what is the good?
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allows for derivation of abstracted moral principles. First-order pure semantic codification of the morality
implicit in behavior, and then in episodic/semantic (narrative or mythic) representation, appears to take the
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resultant of intrapsychic Darwinian struggle of abstracted values) and, when the ability is there,
consequent generation of compensatory adaptive activity. In the (mythic) case of Moses, such activity took
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thereof, into an abstract semantic code. This act of translation comprised a tremendous leap forward, a
qualitative shift in human cognition regardless of whether it was actually undertaken by Moses, or by any
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true art included) to abstract verbal knowledge as from representation to behavior.543 544 545
Translation of tradition into law makes verbally abstract what had previously been, at best, encoded in
image makes the morality of the culture and the moral individual conscious for the first time. This act
of transformation constitutes the culminating act of centuries of abstract adaptive endeavor and increasing
consciousnesses, emerging in a qualitative shift of cognitive sophistication, in the intrapsychic activity of a
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Semantic cognition, feeding on narrative the bridge between the episode and the pure verbal abstraction
derives rules from behavior. Application of the rules alters the environment, including procedural and
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order, education and wisdom embodied, and represented; is the abstracted and integrated personification of
all those heroes who have come before and left their mark on the (cultural) behavior of the species. He is
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ending with verbal abstraction. To what end are all behaviors (and representations of those behaviors)
archetypally subjugated? Towards establishment of a state a spiritual kingdom that allows the
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presuppositions underlying adaptive social behavior become more and more accurately abstractly
formulated (more declarative) society moves from conceptualization of the consequences or productions
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simultaneously, the power that divides order from chaos, and tradition rendered spiritual, abstract,
declarative, semantic. His manner of being is that which moves morality itself from rule of law to rule of
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makes it easily memorable, and accessible as a shared point of reference. The benefits of its abstraction
communicability and potential for rapid generalization makes it a potent force for the establishment and
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fulfilled, to establishment of a more abstract form of moral order, predicated upon more flexible principle
which suggests what should be.
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principle. It is idiotic to presuppose, however, that simpler animals can abstractly represent either their
behaviors which is to say, form an imagistic model of them in imagination or understand the
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morality of their culture in their behavior long before they are able to abstractly represent or semantically
describe rationale for that morality, and before they can consciously (episodically or semantically)
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Two questions arise naturally from such a discussion: is it possible to abstract out from observation of
social interaction the rules or patterns that characterize such interactions? and, if so what might those
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decreased biological reproductive and abstract creative potential, for the (kin) group as a whole. Physical
competition among social animals, necessary for dominance establishment, generally has a ritualistic
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emergence of complex abstract morality, which originates in innate and socialized procedural knowledge,
which is unconscious in essence that is, nonrepresentational, or undeclarable. It is not too difficult to
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essence of the past. The process of imitation and abstracted variants thereof, however, allow for the nature
of this essence to be continually clarified until, finally, representation of abstracted but specific heroic
actions give way to representation of the process of heroism, per se. At this point, it becomes possible for
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psychological, rather than ritual, perspective. The holy pilgrimage in its abstract or spiritual version is
the journey through elements of experience and personal character that constitute the subjective world
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if it was still a matter of philosophy or abstract conceptualization: the well-integrated spirit also had to be
realized in behavior. And this was not necessarily yet even the final stage. The alchemist Dorn states:
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stone, which bears an unmistakable resemblance to Christ, embodied in abstractly material form. This
form, the philosophers stone, the lapis, was composed of the most paradoxical elements: it was base,
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power when they were incorporated, and acted out, rather than believed, in some abstract sense. This
meant: to say that Christ was the greatest man in history a combination of the divine and mortal was
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structure, given a sufficiently abstract analysis). The lines among which culture develops are determined
biologically, and the rules which govern that development are the consequence of the pyschological
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this constitutes the centrally defining pattern of human abstraction and behavior. The simplest and most
basic day-to-day human activities, invariably goal-directed, are necessarily predicated upon conscious or
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These maps are so important to us, so vital, that their mere abstract description (acted, orally transmitted, or
written) is intrinsically interesting, capable of engaging us in a simulated world [see Oatley, K. (1994)].
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An idea is (in part) an abstracted action, whose consequences can be analyzed in abstracted fantasy. The distance
between the idea and the action has widened within the course of recent evolutionary history. Medieval people, unused
1.05 - THE MASTER AND KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M. was among the passengers. As the boat came alongside the steamer, all rushed to the railing to have a view of Sri Ramakrishna. Keshab became anxious to get him safely on board. With great difficulty the Master was brought back to consciousness of the world and taken to a cabin in the steamer. Still in an abstracted mood, he walked mechanically, leaning on a devotee for support. Keshab and the others bowed before him, but he was not aware of them. Inside the cabin there were a few chairs and a table. He was made to sit on one of the chairs, Keshab and Vijay occupying two others.
Some devotees were also seated, most of them on the floor, while many others had to stand outside. They peered eagerly through the door and windows. Sri Ramakrishna again went into deep samdhi and became totally unconscious of the outer world.
1.05 - Vishnu as Brahma creates the world, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Whilst he (Brahmā) formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was. meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning with ignorance, and consisting of darkness. From that great being appeared fivefold Ignorance, consisting of obscurity, illusion, extreme illusion, gloom, utter darkness[2]. The creation of the creator thus plunged in abstraction, was the fivefold (immovable) world, without intellect or reflection, void of perception or sensation, incapable of feeling, and destitute of motion[3]. Since immovable things were first created, this is called the first creation. Brahmā, beholding that it was defective, designed another; and whilst he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested, to the products of which the term Tiryaksrotas is applied, from their nutriment following a winding course[4]. These were called beasts, &c., and their characteristic was the quality of darkness, they being destitute of knowledge, uncontrolled in their conduct, and mistaking error for wisdom; being formed of egotism and self-esteem, labouring under the twenty-eight kinds of imperfection[5], manifesting inward sensations, and associating with each other (according to their kinds).
Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahmā again meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the quality of goodness, termed Ūrddhasrotas[6]. The beings thus produced in the Ūrddhasrotas creation were endowed with pleasure and enjoyment, uneñcumbered internally or externally, and luminous within and without. This, termed the creation of immortals, was the third performance of Brahmā, who, although well pleased with it, still found it incompetent to fulfil his end. Continuing therefore his meditations, there sprang, in consequence of his infallible purpose, the creation termed Arvāksrotas, from indiscrete nature. The products of this are termed Arvāksrotasas[7], from the downward current (of their nutriment). They abound with the light of knowledge, but the qualities of darkness and of foulness predominate. Hence they are afflicted by evil, and are repeatedly impelled to action. They have knowledge both externally and internally, and are the instruments (of accomplishing the object of creation, the liberation of soul). These creatures were mankind.
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
ence is about abstract knowing, technology about practical
making.
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reduces the world to a kind of abstract rendition of its
real appearance, a black-and-white version of the fantastic
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involution. What is here summarized in an abstract way
means that, in order to realize the urge in Nature to exceed
1.06 - Gestalt and Universals, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
scanning to abstract from the transformations of a group. The
groups which we here consider have a "group measure," a prob-
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at nothing in particular, as in the condition of abstraction of a
yogi, 1 when it shows an almost perfect periodicity.
1.06 - On Thought, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For, to be your own thought, it would have to form part of a logical synthesis you had elaborated in the course of your existence, either by observation, experience and deduction, or by deep, abstract meditation and contemplation.
This, then, is our second discovery.
1.06 - The Desire to be, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
The word, Thought, says too much and too little,too much if that conscient thought is meant which appears at the term of progressive evolution, and too little if it means a pure abstraction of the being previous to its coming into existence. This abstraction may very well define the essence of all its possibilities, but not its power to act and to become. To become implies not only pure thought, but tendency, effort, or, to express all in a single word, if that be possibledesire.
For desire represents in the being that first active form of Thought in which we must seek for the initial spring conscient or inconscient of its energies, the obscure genesis of its will and that first spontaneity of fundamental egoism by which the I of the relativity manifests.
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For desire is tendency, abstract, subjective movement, outside Space, in pure duration of Time.
And the progressive passage of this conditional and virtual form of movement to its concrete, objective, material forms defines the succession of the states of being from the first transcendences to the last realisations of the physical order of things.
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But this Finite itself must necessarily be relative. And it is only by an abstraction of the mind that we can conceive thus of the world at each moment of its progressive evolution. None of these moments exists in itself, no number is the last of numbers. Between the absolute Infinite and the perfect Finite, universal relativity defines itself progressively in the course of an indefinite manifestation.
If follows that at no moment does the world contain the total manifestation of the numberless virtualities of the Absolute, but at each moment it is the field of realisation for a new series of possibilities.
1.06 - The Objective and Subjective Views of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The principle of subjectivism entering into human thought and action, while necessarily it must make a great difference in the view-point, the motive-power and the character of our living, does not at first appear to make any difference in its factors. Subjectivism and objectivism start from the same data, the individual and the collectivity, the complex nature of each with its various powers of the mind, life and body and the search for the law of their self-fulfilment and harmony. But objectivism proceeding by the analytical reason takes an external and mechanical view of the whole problem. It looks at the world as a thing, an object, a process to be studied by an observing reason which places itself abstractly outside the elements and the sum of what it has to consider and observes it thus from outside as one would an intricate mechanism. The laws of this process are considered as so many mechanical rules or settled forces acting upon the individual or the group which, when they have been observed and distinguished by the reason, have by ones will or by some will to be organised and applied fully much as Science applies the laws it discovers. These laws or rules have to be imposed on the individual by his own abstract reason and will isolated as a ruling authority from his other parts or by the reason and will of other individuals or of the group, and they have to be imposed on the group itself either by its own collective reason and will embodied in some machinery of control which the mind considers as something apart from the life of the group or by the reason and will of some other group external to it or of which it is in some way a part. So the State is viewed in modern political thought as an entity in itself, as if it were something apart from the community and its individuals, something which has the right to impose itself on them and control them in the fulfilment of some idea of right, good or interest which is inflicted on them by a restraining and fashioning power rather than developed in them and by them as a thing towards which their self and nature are impelled to grow. Life is to be managed, harmonised, perfected by an adjustment, a manipulation, a machinery through which it is passed and by which it is shaped. A law outside oneself,outside even when it is discovered or determined by the individual reason and accepted or enforced by the individual will,this is the governing idea of objectivism; a mechanical process of management, ordering, perfection, this is its conception of practice.
Subjectivism proceeds from within and regards everything from the point of view of a containing and developing self-consciousness. The law here is within ourselves; life is a self-creating process, a growth and development at first subconscious, then half-conscious and at last more and more fully conscious of that which we are potentially and hold within ourselves; the principle of its progress is an increasing self-recognition, self-realisation and a resultant self-shaping. Reason and will are only effective movements of the self, reason a process in self-recognition, will a force for self-affirmation and self-shaping. Moreover, reason and intellectual will are only a part of the means by which we recognise and realise ourselves. Subjectivism tends to take a large and complex view of our nature and being and to recognise many powers of knowledge, many forces of effectuation. Even, we see it in its first movement away from the external and objective method discount and belittle the importance of the work of the reason and assert the supremacy of the life-impulse or the essential Will-to-be in opposition to the claims of the intellect or else affirm some deeper power of knowledge, called nowadays the intuition, which sees things in the whole, in their truth, in their profundities and harmonies while intellectual reason breaks up, falsifies, affirms superficial appearances and harmonises only by a mechanical adjustment. But substantially we can see that what is meant by this intuition is the self-consciousness feeling, perceiving, grasping in its substance and aspects rather than analysing in its mechanism its own truth and nature and powers. The whole impulse of subjectivism is to get at the self, to live in the self, to see by the self, to live out the truth of the self internally and externally, but always from an internal initiation and centre.
1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
conception of deity those very abstract and complex ideas which we
attach to the term. Our ideas on this profound subject are the fruit
1.07 - On Our Knowledge of General Principles, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
All pure mathematics is _a priori_, like logic. This was strenuously denied by the empirical philosophers, who maintained that experience was as much the source of our knowledge of arithmetic as of our knowledge of geography. They maintained that by the repeated experience of seeing two things and two other things, and finding that altogether they made four things, we were led by induction to the conclusion that two things and two other things would _always_ make four things altogether. If, however, this were the source of our knowledge that two and two are four, we should proceed differently, in persuading ourselves of its truth, from the way in which we do actually proceed. In fact, a certain number of instances are needed to make us think of two abstractly, rather than of two coins or two books or two people, or two of any other specified kind. But as soon as we are able to divest our thoughts of irrelevant particularity, we become able to see the general principle that two and two are four; any one instance is seen to be _typical_, and the examination of other instances becomes unnecessary.(1)
(1) Cf. A. N. Whitehead, _Introduction to Mathematics_ (Home University
1.07 - The Ego and the Dualities, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:At first, however, we must strive to relate the individual again to the harmony of the totality. There it is necessary for us - otherwise there is no issue from the problem - to realise that the terms in which our present consciousness renders the values of the universe, though practically justified for the purposes of human experience and progress, are not the sole terms in which it is possible to render them and may not be the complete, the right, the ultimate formulas. Just as there may be sense-organs or formations of sense-capacity which see the physical world differently and it may well be better, because more completely, than our sense-organs and sense-capacity, so there may be other mental and supramental envisagings of the universe which surpass our own. States of consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such states of consciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most important and indispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection.
4:Certainly, the practical values given us by our senses and by the dualistic sense-mind must hold good in their field and be accepted as the standard for ordinary life-experience until a larger harmony is ready into which they can enter and transform themselves without losing hold of the realities which they represent. To enlarge the sense-faculties without the knowledge that would give the old sense-values their right interpretation from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders and incapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and disciplined use of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of the experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some form of total consciousness might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity for the active life of humanity in the established order of the world's relativities. This, no doubt, is the root of the injunction imposed in the Gita on the man who has the knowledge not to disturb the life-basis and thought-basis of the ignorant; for, impelled by his example but unable to comprehend the principle of his action, they would lose their own system of values without arriving at a higher foundation.
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
In other words, the deep structures of worldspaces (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and transpersonal) show cross-cultural and largely invariant features at a deep level of abstraction, whereas the surface structures (the actual subjects and objects in the various worldspaces) are naturally and appropriately quite different from culture to culture. Just as the human mind universally grows images and symbols and concepts (even though the actual contents of those structures vary considerably), so the human spirit universally grows intuitions of the Divine, and those developmental signifieds unfold in an evolutionary and reconstructible fashion, just like any other holon in the Kosmos (and their referents are just as real as any other similarly disclosed data).
In the past few decades there has been a concerted effort on the part of many researchers (such as Stanislav Grof, Roger Walsh, Frances Vaughan, Daniel Brown, Jack Engler, Daniel Goleman, Charles Tart, Donald Rothberg, Michael Zimmerman, Seymour Boorstein, Mark Epstein, David Lukoff, Michael Washburn, Joel Funk, John Nelson, John Chirban, Robert Forman, Francis Lu, Michael Murphy, Mark Waldman, James Fadiman, myself, and others)21 to rationally reconstruct the higher stages of transpersonal or contemplative development-stages that continue naturally or normally beyond the ego and centaur if arrest or fixation does not occur.
1.07 - The Literal Qabalah (continued), #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
World of Briah, a plane less spiritual and less abstract.
Here the creative forces of the Gods seize upon the arche- typal ideas of things, expanding and vivifying and develop- ing the Tree on that particular plane. This is the mental plane proper, comparable in cosmical constitution to the conception of the Buach or the lower Manas of Theosophy in man. The lowest Sephirah in Atsilus thus becomes the
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The student will undoubtedly begin to wonder how it is possible to correlate the abstract mythological conceptions inherent in our Sephiros to the ideology of the various academic systems of philosophy. This is not a particularly difficult task, once one has a perfect string of correspon- dences established in one's mind.
Let us take, for instance, the critical idealism of Kant.
1.07 - The Primary Data of Being, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
It is in the movement that we have the mingling and the becoming concrete of these two abstractions, one of pure extent and the other of duration, one of simultaneity and the other of becoming, one of concomitance and the other of succession. Mingling and becoming concrete they form the very substance of all reality.
What abstract movement in Time is for indivisible unity,the condition of its subjective manifestation,concrete movement in Space is for the multiple and divisible,the condition of objective manifestation.
Thus the analysis of the essential categories of being enables us to understand how the identity of principles in the Absolute is represented in the relative by the synthesis of movement.
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If we wish to carry farther that play of mind which consists in representing symbolically by means of abstract notions the very life of the essential and untranslateable Reality, it can be shown how all relative notions are attached to absolute categories and how from the fundamental principles of unity and immutability the mind can deduce its most general concepts.
Inseparable, indiscernable in their origin these principles of the Absolute can only be disjoined and dissociated if they exclude each other by a mutual opposition of their contraries.
--
One might define these two groups of opposite categories as belonging the one to masculine activities abstract, synthetic, involutive, productive of transformation, the other to feminine passivities concrete, analytic, evolutionary, powerful for conservation.
From their union all relative objectivities are born.
--
In the relative all is relative. When we speak of Space and Time, we are under these abstractions defining the most general categories to which all the possible modes and forms of simultaneity and succession can be reduced.
To these abstract modes there correspond, in the objective world, concrete states of substance and of being, states which extend in an indefinite series from the first transcendences to our own physical domain.
In each of these states Space and Time find a real content which forms the stuff of their weaving.
--
What we call Matter is the pure possibility of these combinations; it is the abstract multiplicity of the elements whose active organisation constitutes life.
To each degree of divisibility in substance there corresponds a certain state of Matter and a certain domain of Life which is a field of operation for less and less simple syntheses of form and of activity.
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
A person who gives assent to untrue dogma, or who pays all his attention and allegiance to one true dogma in a comprehensive system, while neglecting the others (as many Christians concentrate exclusively on the humanity of the Second Person of the Trinity and ignore the Father and the Holy Ghost), runs the risk of limiting in advance his direct apprehension of Reality. In religion as in natural science, experience is determined only by experience. It is fatal to prejudge it, to compel it to fit the mould imposed by a theory which either does not correspond to the facts at all, or corresponds to only some of the facts. Do not strive to seek after the true, writes a Zen master, only cease to cherish opinions. There is only one way to cure the results of belief in a false or incomplete theology and it is the same as the only known way of passing from belief in even the truest theology to knowledge or primordial Factselflessness, docility, openness to the datum of Eternity. Opinions are things which we make and can therefore understand, formulate and argue about. But to rest in the consideration of objects perceptible to the sense or comprehended by the understanding is to be content, in the words of St. John of the Cross, with what is less than God. Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who have ceased to cherish opinionseven opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.
Up then, noble soul! Put on thy jumping shoes which are intellect and love, and overleap the worship of thy mental powers, overleap thine understanding and spring into the heart of God, into his hiddenness where thou art hidden from all creatures.
1.080 - Pratyahara - The Return of Energy, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
What happens in pratyahara is mentioned in the sutra: svaviaya asaprayoge cittasya svarpnukra iva indriy pratyhra (II.54). There are two changes that take place in this action of the senses in their abstraction from the objects. Firstly, they are disconnected from contact with the object due to the withdrawal of the consciousness which is animating the senses. Secondly, which is more important, the senses turn back to the mind and assume the character of the mind. Cittasya svarupanukarah means the senses accompanying the mind in its essential nature. They become almost one with the mind. In the usual activity of the senses, they are not one with the mind. They drag the mind out from its own chambers and then compel it to contemplate an external object, in which case the mind is something like a slave of the senses; the master has himself come under the subjection of the servants. But in pratyahara, this is not what is happening. The master is recognised and his worth is known. The senses return. They do not return of their own accord. If the gas in the engine is completely removed, the vehicle will not move. The gas is the motive force, and that motive force is the consciousness that is attending upon the activity of the senses. If the supply of energy behind the movement of a vehicle is withdrawn, the vehicle cannot move. And, as long as the supply is there, the vehicle cannot be stopped. The vehicle may be said to be the senses which are running towards some objective. They cannot be stopped in their activities unless the energy is withdrawn. That energy is the consciousness.
Therefore, first and foremost, what is required is a severance of the attention of consciousness in respect of the movement of the senses towards objects. The attention is diverted. That is why sometimes, when we are deeply thinking over some important matter, even if we may be looking at some object, we may not see it. Our eyes may be open; it may appear that we are gazing at something, but we are seeing nothing at all on account of the fact that the energy that is necessary for the cognition of an object is withdrawn. There cannot be perception when the attention is diverted in some other way. Thus, in pratyahara there is first a diversion of attention from one place to another place. We have to find out what that place is, which is the object of meditation.
1.081 - The Application of Pratyahara, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
There is a great amount of doubt in the minds of seekers, even well-informed ones, as to what exactly is intended to be done in this stage known as pratyahara. Is it withdrawal? Many questions arise due to a mix-up of philosophical doctrines, as well as practical difficulties. Some of them are: What is it from which the mind is being abstracted? Is it from the form of the object or from the reality of the object, the very existence of it?
The omnipresence of the spirit should preclude any kind of withdrawal. Also, there is the doctrine of devotion which recognises the presence of God in everything, and the all-pervading characteristic of God would not demand a withdrawal of the mind from anything, inasmuch as God is present everywhere. Next, there is a doubt that the abstraction of the mind may mean a kind of psychological introversion, which is what is objected to by psychoanalysts, because the introverted attitude is the opposite of the extroverted one, and it is equally bad as bad as the extroverted attitude. Whether we are tied up inwardly or bound outwardly, it makes no difference anyhow we are bound. And, topping the list there is the painful aspect of it, because it is impossible for the mind not to think of that which it desires. If it is not to think of what it desires, then of what is it to think? What else are we to think what we dont like? We are expecting the mind to wipe out the thought of things from its memory, including even those thoughts which it wants and regards as valuable and worthwhile. What else is it to think, if everything is removed from its memory? All these are the difficulties.
Questions of this type all arise because of an improper grounding in a philosophical background, which is the preparatory stage of the practice of yoga. Yoga is a practical implementation of a doctrine of the universe. An outlook of things is at the background of this very technique. This is what is perhaps meant by the oft-repeated teaching of the Bhagavadgita that yoga should be preceded by samkhya. Here the words yoga and samkhya do not mean the technical classical jargons. They simply mean the theory and the practice. E tebhihit s
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In every branch of learning there is the theory aspect and the practical aspect, whether it is in mathematics, or physics, or any other aspect of study. Here it is of a similar nature. Why is it that the mind is to be withdrawn from the object? The answer to this question is in the theoretical aspect which is the philosophy. What is wrong with the mind in its contemplation on things? Why should we not think of an object? Why we should not think of an object cannot be answered now, at this stage, when we have actually taken up this practice. We ought to have understood it much earlier. When we have started walking, it means that we already know why we are walking and where is our destination. We cannot start walking and say, Where am I walking to? Why did we start walking without knowing the destination? Likewise, if our question as to why this is necessary at all is not properly answered within our own self, then immediately there will be repulsion from the mind and it will say, You do not know what you are doing. You are merely troubling me. Then the mind will not agree to this proposal of abstraction.
Hence, there should be a very clear notion before we set about doing things; and this is a principle to be followed in every walk of life. Without knowing what is to be done, why do we start doing anything? Even if it is cooking, we must know the theory first. What is it about? We cannot run about higgledy-piggledy without understanding it. The purpose of the withdrawal of the mind or the senses from the objects is simple; and that simple answer to this question is that the nature of things does not permit the notion that the mind entertains when it contacts an object. The idea that we have in our mind at the time of cognising an object is not in consonance with the nature of Truth. This is why the mind is to be withdrawn from the object. There is a peculiar definition which the mind imposes upon the object of sense at the time of cognising it, for the purpose of contacting it, etc. This definition is contrary to the true nature of that object. If we call an ass a dog, that would not be a proper definition; it would be a misunderstanding of its real essence. The object of sense is not related to the subject of perception in the manner in which the subject is defining it or conceiving it.
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Thus, in the effecting of the pratyahara or the abstraction of the mind from the objects, we have to consider the thinking aspect, the willing aspect and also the feeling aspect. What are we thinking about that object towards which we are moving? What is the amount of will that we have exercised in fulfilling our wish? What is the deep-seated feeling that we have got in respect of it? All these three have to be isolated threadbare, if possible. The thinking, the willing and the feeling, though they all work together almost simultaneously, are three different aspects, and they can be pulled out independently like threads from a cloth. The most difficult thing to tackle is feeling, and less difficult to encounter is the will, and still less is the aspect of thinking. Therefore, in the beginning, it would be to the advantage of the seeker to analyse the easier aspect namely, the thinking aspect. What are we thinking about that object? Why did we go towards it? What is our intention behind it? Then we can go to the other aspect, which is the will. We have a determination for the purpose of confirming the attitude that we have adopted on account of a thought in respect of that object. But the deepest aspect of it is the emotion the feeling.
No pratyahara can be effective unless all these three aspects are properly analysed and isolated from the nature of the object. Though the mind may not be thinking about the object, there may be feeling towards it; then there is no pratyahara. Not only that the thinking, willing, feeling aspect has also a subconscious element in it, which also is to be probed into before complete mastery is gained. There may be a subtle restlessness at the time of the effecting of this practice. That restlessness may be due to the presence of a subconscious like for that very object from which the mind has been consciously withdrawn, which aspect is pointed out in a verse of the Bhagavadgita: rasavarjam rasopy asya para dv nivartate (B.G. II.59). The mind and the senses appear to be withdrawn from the objects of sense in pratyahara, it is true. But how do we know that the mind and the senses have no taste for the object? Hence, pratyahara is not merely a physical isolation or even a conscious disconnection of oneself from the object, but is an emotional detachment that is necessary wherein alone is it possible to have no taste for a thing. The taste may go to the feeling; and as long as the taste is present, there is every possibility of the other aspects rising once again into action. As long as the root is there, there is every chance of the sprout coming up one day or the other.
1.08 - Civilisation and Barbarism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even in its negative work the materialism of Science had a task to perform which will be useful in the end to the human mind in its exceeding of materialism. But Science in its heyday of triumphant Materialism despised and cast aside Philosophy; its predominance discouraged by its positive and pragmatic turn the spirit of poetry and art and pushed them from their position of leadership in the front of culture; poetry entered into an era of decline and decadence, adopted the form and rhythm of a versified prose and lost its appeal and the support of all but a very limited audience, painting followed the curve of Cubist extravagance and espoused monstrosities of shape and suggestion; the ideal receded and visible matter of fact was enthroned in its place and encouraged an ugly realism and utilitarianism; in its war against religious obscurantism Science almost succeeded in slaying religion and the religious spirit. But philosophy had become too much a thing of abstractions, a seeking for abstract truths in a world of ideas and words rather than what it should be, a discovery of the real reality of things by which human existence can learn its law and aim and the principle of its perfection. Poetry and art had become too much cultured pursuits to be ranked among the elegances and ornaments of life, concerned with beauty of words and forms and imaginations, rather than a concrete seeing and significant presentation of truth and beauty and of the living idea and the secret divinity in things concealed by the sensible appearances of the universe. Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for the most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources. Now that the stress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery. They have learned or are learning from the example of Science that Truth is the secret of life and power and that by finding the truth proper to themselves they must become the ministers of human existence.
But if Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism,for it can be called by no other name,that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence of the body and the development of physical force, health and prowess his standard and aim, so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his standard and aim. His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess is his existence. The accumulation of wealth and more wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a cumbrous inartistic luxury, a plethora of conveniences, life devoid of beauty and nobility, religion vulgarised or coldly formalised, politics and government turned into a trade and profession, enjoyment itself made a business, this is commercialism. To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity or an ostentation and a means of advertisement. His idea of civilisation is comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade following the flag, his idea of religion at best a pietistic formalism or the satisfaction of certain vitalistic emotions. He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialised industrial existence, science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comforts, conveniences, machinery of production with which it arms him, its power for organisation, regulation, stimulus to production. The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult rulers of its society.
1.08 - Information, Language, and Society, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
pletely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction
and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number
1.08 - Summary, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Can you give me a brief abstract of this method?
A.
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
When one is no longer concerned with the Where, the When, the Why and the What-for of things, but only and alone with the What, and lets go even of all abstract thoughts about them, intellectual concepts and consciousness, but instead of all that, gives over the whole force of one's spirit to the act of perceiving, becomes absorbed in it and lets every bit of one's consciousness be filled in the quiet contemplation of the natural object immediately present-be it a landscape, a tree, a rock, a building, or anything else at all; actually and fully losing oneself in the object\: forgetting one's individuality, one's will, and remaining there only as a pure subject, a clear mirror to the object-so that it is as though the object alone were there, without anyone regarding it, and to such a degree that one might no longer distinguish the beholder from the act of beholding, [then] the two have become one. . . .20
Schopenhauer's "clear mirror to the object" is, of course, Emerson's "transparent eyeball," which is perfectly transpersonal, or no longer merely individual. Schopenhauer: "The person absorbed in this mode of seeing is no longer an individual-the individual has lost himself in the perception-but is a pure, will-less, painless, timeless,
1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Consciousness is indeed the creatrix of the universe, but love is its saviour. Conscious experience alone can give a glimpse of what love is, of its purpose and process. Any verbal transcription is necessarily a mental travesty of something which eludes all expression in every way. Philosophers, mystics, occultists, have all tried to define love, but in vain. I have no pretension of succeeding where they have failed. But I wish to state in the simplest possible terms what in their writings takes such an abstract and complicated form. My words will have no other aim than to lead towards the living experience, and I wish to be able to lead even a child to it.
Love is, in its essence, the joy of identity; it finds its ultimate expression in the bliss of union. Between the two lie all the phases of its universal manifestation.
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This explanation of vjebhir vjinvat leads at once to the figurative sense of maho arnas. Arnas or samudra is the image of the sea, flood or stream in which the Vedic seers saw the substance of being and its different states. Sometimes one great sea, sometimes seven streams of being are spoken of by the Rishis; they are the origin of the seven seas of the Purana. It cannot be doubted that the minds of the old thinkers were possessed with this image of ocean or water as the very type & nature of the flux of existence, for it occurs with a constant insistence in the Upanishads. The sole doubt is whether the image was already present to the minds of the primitive Vedic Rishis. The Europeans hold that these were the workings of a later imagination transfiguring the straightforward material expressions & physical ideas of the Veda; they admit no real parentage of Vedantic ideas in the preexistent Vedic notions, but only a fictitious derivation. I hold, on the contrary, that Vedantic ideas have a direct & true origin & even a previous existence in the religion & psychology of the Vedas. If, indeed, there were no stuff of high thinking or moral sensibility in the hymns of the Vedic sages, then I should have no foundation to stand upon and no right to see this figure in the Vedic arnas or samudra. But when these early minds,early to us, but not perhaps really so primitive in human history as we imagine,were capable of such high thoughts & perceptions as these three Riks bear on their surface, it would be ridiculous to deny them the capacity of conceiving these great philosophical images & symbols. A rich poetic imagery expressing a clear, direct & virgin perception of the facts of mind and being, is not by any means impossible, but rather natural in these bright-eyed sons of the morning not yet dominated in their vision by the dry light of the intellect or in their speech & thought by the abstractions & formalities of metaphysical thinking. Water was to them, let us hold in our hypothesis, the symbol of unformed substance of being, earth of the formed substance. They even saw a mystic identity between the thing symbolised & the symbol.
What then is maho arnas? Is it the great sea of general being, substance of general existence out of which the substance of thought & speech are formed? It is possible; but such an interpretation is not entirely in consonance with the context of this passage. The suggestion I shall advance will therefore be different. Mahas, as a neuter adjective, means great,maho arnas, the great water; but mahas may be equally a noun and then maho arnas will mean Mahas the sea. In some passages again, mahas is genitive singular or accusative plural of a noun mah; maho arnas may well be the flowing stream or flood of Mah, as in the expression vasvo arnavam, the sea of substance, in a later Sukta.We are therefore likely to remain in doubt unless we can find an actual symbolic use of either word Mah or Mahas in a psychological sense which would justify us in supposing this Maho Arnas to be a sea of substance of knowledge rather than vaguely the sea of general substance of being. For this is the significance which alone entirely suits the actual phraseology of the last Rik of the Sukta. We find our clue in the Taittiriya Upanishad. It is said there that there are three recognised vyahritis of the Veda, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swah, but the Rishi Mahachamasya affirmed a fourth. The name of this doubtful fourth vyahriti is Mahas. Now the mystic vyahritis of the Veda are the shabdas or sacred words expressing objectively the three worlds, subjectively mentalised material being, mentalised vital being & pure mental being, the three manifest states of our phenomenal consciousness. Mahas, therefore, must express a fourth state of being, which is so much superior to the other three or so much beyond the ordinary attainment of our actual human consciousness that it is hardly considered in Vedic thought a vyahriti, whatever one or two thinkers may have held to the contrary. What do we know of this Mahas from Vedantic or later sources? Bhuh, Bhuvah, Swar of the Veda rest substantially upon the Annam, Prana, Manas, matter, life & mind of the Upanishads. But the Upanishads speak of a fourth state of being immediately aboveManas, preceding it therefore & containing it, Vijnanam, ideal knowledge, and a fifth immediately above Vijnanam, Ananda or Bliss. Physically, these five are the pancha kshitayah, five earths or dwelling-places, of the Rig Veda and they are the pancha koshas, five sheaths or bodies of the Upanishads. But in our later Yogic systems we recognise seven earths, seven standing grounds of the soul on which it experiences phenomenal existence. The Purana gives us their names [the names of the two beyond the five already mentioned], Tapas and Satya, Energy&Truth. They are the outward expressions of the two psychological principles, Self-Awareness &Self-Being (Chit&Sat) which with Ananda, Self-Bliss, are the triune appearance in the soul of the supreme Existence which the Vedanta calls Brahman. Sat, Chit & Ananda constitute to Vedantic thought the parardha or spiritual higher half [of] our existence; in less imaginative language, we are in our supreme existence self-existence, self-awareness & self-delight. Annam, Prana & Manas constitute to Vedantic thought the aparardha or lower half; again, in more abstract speech, we are in our lower phenomenal existence mind, life & matter. Vijnana is the link; standing in ideal knowledge we are aware, looking upward, of our spiritual existence, looking downward, we pour it out into the three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvah & Swar, mental, vital & material existence, the phenomenal symbols of our self-expression. Objectively vijnana becomes mahat, the great, wide or extended state of phenomenal being,called also brihat, likewise signifying vast or great,into which says the Gita, the Self or Lord casts his seed as into a womb in order to engender all these objects & creatures. The Self, standing in vijnanam or mahat, is called the Mahan Atma, the great Self; so that, if we apply the significance [of] these terms to the Vedic words mah, mahas, mahi, mahn, then, even accepting mahas as an adjective and maho arnas in the sense of the great Ocean, it may very well be the ocean of the ideal or pure ideative state of existence in true knowledge which is intended, the great ocean slumbering in our humanity and awakened by the divine inspiration of Saraswati. But have we at all the right to read these high, strange & subtle ideas of a later mysticism into the primitive accents of the Veda? Let us at least support for a while that hypothesis. We may very well ask, if not from the Vedic forefa thers, whence did the Aryan thinkers get these striking images, this rich & concrete expression of the most abstract ideas and persist in them even after the Indian mind had rarefied & lifted its capacity to the height of the most difficult severities & abstractions known to any metaphysical thinking? Our hypothesis of a Vedic origin remains not only a possible suggestion but the one hypothesis in lawful possession of the field, unless a foreign source or a later mixed ideation can be proved. At present this later ideation may be assumed, it has not been & cannot be proved. The agelong tradition of India assigns the Veda as the source & substance of our theosophies; Brahmana, Aranyaka, Upanishad & Purana as only the interpretation & later expression; the burden of disproof rests on those who negative the tradition.
Vjebhir vjinvat and maho arnas are therefore fixed in their significance. The word vashtu in the tenth Rik offers a difficulty. It is equivalent to vahatu, says the Brahmana; to kmayatu, says Sayana; but, deferring to the opinion of the Brahmana, he adds that it means really kmayitw vahatu. Undoubtedly the root va means in classical Sanscrit to desire; but from the evidence of the classical Sanscrit we have it established that in more ancient times its ordinary meaning must have been to subdue or control; for although the verb has lost this sense in the later language, almost all its derivatives bear that meaning & the sense of wish, will or desire only persists in a few of them, va, wish and possibly va, a woman. It is this sense which agrees best with the context of the tenth rik and is concealed in the vahatu of the Brahmanas. There is no other difficulty of interpretation in the passage.
1.08 - THE MASTERS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Hearing the song, Sri Ramakrishna went into samdhi; his whole body became still, and his hand remained touching the plate of food. He could eat no more. After a long time his mind came down partially to the plane of the sense world, and he said, "I want to go downstairs." A devotee led him down very carefully. Still in an abstracted mood, he sat near the singer. The song had ended. The Master said to him very humbly, "Sir, I want to hear the chanting of the Mother's name again."
The musician sang:
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Is it not, indeed, to this conception that the abstractions of the mechanical view of things tend when, disengaging itself from the sensible forms of substance, it reduces all its notions to that of a pure energy which in the language of philosophy is indistinguishable from absolute substance?
To this state of pure energy or of pure will which is that of the absolute manifestation, are opposed the different states of the relative manifestation in which is worked out progressively the disjunction of the categories of Time and Space.
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Hence the incapacity of our senses to perceive it as movement at all outside its most concrete and slowest forms. The moment it is accelerated, our sense-perception translates it into more and more abstract phenomena of sound, heat, light and beyond them there begins the gamut of the purely mystical movement of feeling and thought.
In proportion as it raises itself in the order of these transcendent movements, our consciousness passes from its more individualised states to states of increasing impersonality. This is the opposite road to that which the impulsion of desire has followed in order to individualise itself increasingly in more and more concrete forms of substance. And the material world, the last term of the manifestations of creative Desire, is at the same time the nodus of the slowest movements and of the most relative states of consciousness.
But it is precisely in the apparent inertia of Matter that is hidden the secret of the relative movements return towards the absolute movement and of a correlative ascent of the being towards the Impersonal. It is there that by a veritable magic the objective and analytical movements of the elements are transmuted into the synthetic, abstract and subjective movements which are those of the internal life and the conscient ego.
While in the successive states of pre-physical manifestation the universal movement slackened more and more in order to give birth to diverse vibrations without any limitation of the space offered for its development, in the physical state on the contrary that movement inclosed in the infinitesimal circle of the atom is transformed into vibrations of a rapidity increasing with the limitation of its field into a whirl the more vertiginous, the more it is internal.
1.09 - ADVICE TO THE BRAHMOS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
He muttered to himself, still in an abstracted mood.
Worldly people's lack perseverance
1.09 - The Worship of Trees, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
all abstract spiritual beings in concrete human form. Hence in
classical art the sylvan deities are depicted in human shape, their
1.1.02 - Sachchidananda, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Pure Existence is not something abstract, but substantial and concrete. Moreover it is descending into the body, so it is quite natural to feel it materially.
Chit or Consciousness
1.10 - GRACE AND FREE WILL, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Human grace comes to us either from persons, or from social groups, or from our own wishes, hopes and imaginings projected outside ourselves and persisting somehow in the psychic medium in a state of what may be called second-hand objectivity. We have all had experience of the different types of human grace. There is, for example, the grace which, during childhood, comes from mother, father, nurse or beloved teacher. At a later stage we experience the grace of friends; the grace of men and women morally better and wiser than ourselves; the grace of the guru, or spiritual director. Then there is the grace which comes to us because of our attachment to country, party, church or other social organizationa grace which has helped even the feeblest and most timid individuals to achieve what, without it, would have been the impossible. And finally there is the grace which we derive from our ideals, whether low or high, whether conceived of in abstract terms or bodied forth in imaginary personifications. To this last type, it would seem, belong many of the graces experienced by the pious adherents of the various religions. The help received by those who devotedly adore or pray to some personal saint, deity or Avatar is often, we may guess, not a genuinely spiritual grace, but a human grace, coming back to the worshipper from the vortex of psychic power set up by repeated acts (his own and other peoples) of faith, yearning and imagination.
Spiritual grace cannot be received continuously or in its fulness, except by those who have willed away their self-will to the point of being able truthfully to say, Not I, but God in me. There are, however, few people so irremediably self-condemned to imprisonment within their own personality as to be wholly incapable of receiving the graces which are from instant to instant being offered to every soul. By fits and starts most of us contrive to forget, if only partially, our preoccupation with I, me, mine, and so become capable of receiving, if only partially, the graces which, in that moment, are being offered us.
1.10 - On our Knowledge of Universals, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
Let us consider first the knowledge of universals by acquaintance. It is obvious, to begin with, that we are acquainted with such universals as white, red, black, sweet, sour, loud, hard, etc., i.e. with qualities which are exemplified in sense-data. When we see a white patch, we are acquainted, in the first instance, with the particular patch; but by seeing many white patches, we easily learn to abstract the whiteness which they all have in common, and in learning to do this we are learning to be acquainted with whiteness. A similar process will make us acquainted with any other universal of the same sort. Universals of this sort may be called 'sensible qualities'. They can be apprehended with less effort of abstraction than any others, and they seem less removed from particulars than other universals are.
We come next to relations. The easiest relations to apprehend are those which hold between the different parts of a single complex sense-datum.
For example, I can see at a glance the whole of the page on which I am writing; thus the whole page is included in one sense-datum. But I perceive that some parts of the page are to the left of other parts, and some parts are above other parts. The process of abstraction in this case seems to proceed somewhat as follows: I see successively a number of sense-data in which one part is to the left of another; I perceive, as in the case of different white patches, that all these sense-data have something in common, and by abstraction I find that what they have in common is a certain relation between their parts, namely the relation which I call 'being to the left of'. In this way I become acquainted with the universal relation.
In like manner I become aware of the relation of before and after in time. Suppose I hear a chime of bells: when the last bell of the chime sounds, I can retain the whole chime before my mind, and I can perceive that the earlier bells came before the later ones. Also in memory I perceive that what I am remembering came before the present time. From either of these sources I can abstract the universal relation of before and after, just as I abstracted the universal relation 'being to the left of'. Thus time-relations, like space-relations, are among those with which we are acquainted.
Another relation with which we become acquainted in much the same way is resemblance. If I see simultaneously two shades of green, I can see that they resemble each other; if I also see a shade of red: at the same time, I can see that the two greens have more resemblance to each other than either has to the red. In this way I become acquainted with the universal _resemblance_ or _similarity_.
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Our knowledge of such relations, though it requires more power of abstraction than is required for perceiving the qualities of sense-data, appears to be equally immediate, and (at least in some cases) equally indubitable. Thus there is immediate knowledge concerning universals as well as concerning sense-data.
Returning now to the problem of _a priori_ knowledge, which we left unsolved when we began the consideration of universals, we find ourselves in a position to deal with it in a much more satisfactory manner than was possible before. Let us revert to the proposition 'two and two are four'. It is fairly obvious, in view of what has been said, that this proposition states a relation between the universal 'two' and the universal 'four'. This suggests a proposition which we shall now endeavour to establish: namely, _All _a priori_ knowledge deals exclusively with the relations of universals_. This proposition is of great importance, and goes a long way towards solving our previous difficulties concerning _a priori_ knowledge.
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We may now take a survey of the sources of our knowledge, as they have appeared in the course of our analysis. We have first to distinguish knowledge of things and knowledge of truths. In each there are two kinds, one immediate and one derivative. Our immediate knowledge of things, which we called _acquaintance_, consists of two sorts, according as the things known are particulars or universals. Among particulars, we have acquaintance with sense-data and (probably) with ourselves. Among universals, there seems to be no principle by which we can decide which can be known by acquaintance, but it is clear that among those that can be so known are sensible qualities, relations of space and time, similarity, and certain abstract logical universals. Our derivative knowledge of things, which we call knowledge by _description_, always involves both acquaintance with something and knowledge of truths. Our immediate knowledge of _truths_ may be called _intuitive_ knowledge, and the truths so known may be called _self-evident_ truths. Among such truths are included those which merely state what is given in sense, and also certain abstract logical and arithmetical principles, and (though with less certainty) some ethical propositions. Our _derivative_ knowledge of truths consists of everything that we can deduce from self-evident truths by the use of self-evident principles of deduction.
If the above account is correct, all our knowledge of truths depends upon our intuitive knowledge. It therefore becomes important to consider the nature and scope of intuitive knowledge, in much the same way as, at an earlier stage, we considered the nature and scope of knowledge by acquaintance. But knowledge of truths raises a further problem, which does not arise in regard to knowledge of things, namely the problem of
1.10 - The Absolute of the Being, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
If we take care to remember that the idea of the Absolute cannot be anything more for us than an intellectual image, a more or less abstract symbol of the Unknowable, there may be some profit for the mind in the attempt to discover in itself those multiple aspects and different points of view by whose aid it can conceive what it calls the Absolute.
We have defined this Unknowable as the point of identity of all contraries and resolution of all antinomies; it has appeared to us under two different aspects, being and non-being, absolute repose and absolute movement and we have been obliged to consider as if they were alternative, although they cannot in truth be so, its phases of infinite expansion and infinite concentration. In truth, the term infinite seems to apply better to the former than to the latter of these two representations; for the word wakes in us the idea of expansion rather than of concentration; we find it difficult not to introduce into it the notion of Space. The mind would indeed be quite ready to oppose the concept of unity to that of infinity, although from the point of view of the Absolute they are identical. For while we are unable to draw any intellectual image from this idea of unity, akin to that of the absolute concentration, any more than from the idea of the absolute repose and total absorption of being into non-being, the notion of infinity, on the contrary, being associated with that of the absolute manifestation and the absolute movement, offers itself to the mind as rich in such images. It would seem, indeed, as if the mind found in it something of which it can become conscious in itself. It applies more easily to this positive Absolute the characteristics of its own manifested existence.
It is this facility which permits, for example, some Indian schemes to distinguish three modes of being in the supreme manifestation, three divine worlds, those of pure existence, of the beings infinite conscious energy and of the beatitudes of its infinite consciousness. These three worlds or degrees of the absolute activity are for the intellectual thought only abstract symbols by which the mind attempts to translate the absolute Reality at the very limit indeed of its relative categories, but still by their aid. Yet the attempt has its utility, for if it cannot procure for the mind any direct vision of the Unknowable, it has at least this result that it gives it certain indirect perceptions of That by permitting it to descend in its own depths to its principles.
***
1.10 - Theodicy - Nature Makes No Mistakes, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
of the Abrahamic religions may say that he is an abstract
God, rare mystics in these religions may say that he can be
--- Overview of noun abstract
The noun abstract has 2 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (2) abstraction, abstract ::: (a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance; "he loved her only in the abstract--not in person")
2. outline, synopsis, abstract, precis ::: (a sketchy summary of the main points of an argument or theory)
--- Overview of verb abstract
The verb abstract has 4 senses (first 3 from tagged texts)
1. (5) abstract ::: (consider a concept without thinking of a specific example; consider abstractly or theoretically)
2. (1) pilfer, cabbage, purloin, pinch, abstract, snarf, swipe, hook, sneak, filch, nobble, lift ::: (make off with belongings of others)
3. (1) abstract ::: (consider apart from a particular case or instance; "Let's abstract away from this particular example")
4. abstract ::: (give an abstract (of))
--- Overview of adj abstract
The adj abstract has 3 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (5) abstract ::: (existing only in the mind; separated from embodiment; "abstract words like `truth' and `justice'")
2. (1) abstract, abstractionist, nonfigurative, nonobjective ::: (not representing or imitating external reality or the objects of nature; "a large abstract painting")
3. abstract ::: (dealing with a subject in the abstract without practical purpose or intention; "abstract reasoning"; "abstract science")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun abstract
2 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
=> concept, conception, construct
=> idea, thought
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
outline, synopsis, abstract, precis
=> summary, sum-up
=> statement
=> message, content, subject matter, substance
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun abstract
2 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
=> right
=> absolute
=> teacher
=> thing
Sense 2
outline, synopsis, abstract, precis
=> brief
=> apercu
=> epitome
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun abstract
2 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
=> concept, conception, construct
Sense 2
outline, synopsis, abstract, precis
=> summary, sum-up
--- Similarity of adj abstract
3 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstract (vs. concrete)
=> conceptional, ideational, notional
=> conceptual
=> ideal
=> ideological, ideologic
Also See-> intangible#2, impalpable#1; nonrepresentational#1
Sense 2
abstract, abstractionist, nonfigurative, nonobjective
=> nonrepresentational (vs. representational)
Sense 3
abstract
=> theoretical (vs. applied)
--- Antonyms of adj abstract
3 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstract (vs. concrete)
concrete (vs. abstract)
=> objective
=> real, tangible
Sense 2
abstract, abstractionist, nonfigurative, nonobjective
INDIRECT (VIA nonrepresentational) -> representational
Sense 3
abstract
INDIRECT (VIA theoretical) -> applied
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun abstract
2 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
-> concept, conception, construct
=> conceptualization, conceptualisation, conceptuality
=> notion
=> category
=> rule, regulation
=> property, attribute, dimension
=> abstraction, abstract
=> quantity
=> part, section, division
=> whole
=> law, natural law
=> law, law of nature
=> lexicalized concept
=> hypothesis, possibility, theory
=> fact
=> rule, linguistic rule
Sense 2
outline, synopsis, abstract, precis
-> summary, sum-up
=> argument, literary argument
=> capitulation
=> compendium
=> condensation, abridgement, abridgment, capsule
=> conspectus
=> curriculum vitae, CV, resume
=> line score
=> outline, synopsis, abstract, precis
=> overview
=> roundup
=> sketch, survey, resume
=> summation, summing up, rundown
--- Pertainyms of adj abstract
3 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstract (vs. concrete)
Sense 2
abstract, abstractionist, nonfigurative, nonobjective
Sense 3
abstract
--- Derived Forms of adj abstract
3 senses of abstract
Sense 1
abstract (vs. concrete)
RELATED TO->(noun) abstract#1
=> abstraction, abstract
RELATED TO->(noun) abstractness#1
=> abstractness
Sense 2
abstract, abstractionist, nonfigurative, nonobjective
RELATED TO->(noun) abstractness#1
=> abstractness
Sense 3
abstract
RELATED TO->(noun) abstractness#1
=> abstractness
--- Grep of noun abstract
abstract
abstract art
abstract artist
abstract entity
abstract expressionism
abstract thought
abstractedness
abstracter
abstraction
abstractionism
abstractionist
abstractness
abstractor
Wikipedia - 6805 Abstracta -- carbonaceous Themistian asteroid and slow rotator from the outer region of the asteroid belt
Wikipedia - Abstract algebra -- Mathematical study of algebraic structures
Wikipedia - Abstract and concrete -- Classifications that denote whether a term describes an object with a physical referent or one with no physical referents
Wikipedia - Abstract animation
Wikipedia - Abstract Art
Wikipedia - Abstract art -- Art with a degree of independence from visual references in the world
Wikipedia - Abstract base class
Wikipedia - Abstract Chintan Pyaj -- Book by Shankar Lamichhane
Wikipedia - Abstract class
Wikipedia - Abstract data types
Wikipedia - Abstract data type -- Mathematical model for data types
Wikipedia - Abstract empiricism
Wikipedia - Abstract Expressionism
Wikipedia - Abstract expressionism -- American post-World War II art movement
Wikipedia - Abstract expressionists
Wikipedia - Abstract Expressionist
Wikipedia - Abstract expressionist
Wikipedia - Abstract factory pattern
Wikipedia - Abstract Families of Languages
Wikipedia - Abstract family of acceptors
Wikipedia - Abstract family of languages
Wikipedia - Abstract film
Wikipedia - Abstract illusionism
Wikipedia - Abstract index notation
Wikipedia - Abstract interpretation
Wikipedia - Abstraction (computer science) -- Technique for arranging complexity of computer systems
Wikipedia - Abstractionist Platonism
Wikipedia - Abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Abstraction (linguistics) -- Use of terms for concepts removed from the objects to which they were originally attached
Wikipedia - Abstraction (mathematics)
Wikipedia - Abstraction principle (programming)
Wikipedia - Abstraction (software engineering)
Wikipedia - Abstraction -- Conceptual process where general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples
Wikipedia - Abstract labour and concrete labour
Wikipedia - Abstract (law) -- Summary of a legal document
Wikipedia - Abstract machine notation
Wikipedia - Abstract machine
Wikipedia - Abstract mathematics
Wikipedia - Abstract Meaning Representation
Wikipedia - Abstract method
Wikipedia - Abstract objects
Wikipedia - Abstract object theory -- Branch of metaphysics regarding abstract objects
Wikipedia - Abstract object
Wikipedia - Abstract particularity
Wikipedia - Abstract polyhedron
Wikipedia - Abstract polytope
Wikipedia - Abstract rewriting system
Wikipedia - Abstract semantic graph
Wikipedia - Abstract simplicial complex
Wikipedia - Abstract Speed + Sound -- painting by Giacomo Balla
Wikipedia - Abstract State Machines
Wikipedia - Abstract strategy game -- strategy game in which the theme is not important to the experience of playing
Wikipedia - Abstract strategy
Wikipedia - Abstract structuralism
Wikipedia - Abstracts
Wikipedia - Abstract Syntax Notation One
Wikipedia - Abstract Syntax Notation
Wikipedia - Abstract Syntax Tree
Wikipedia - Abstract syntax tree
Wikipedia - Abstract thought
Wikipedia - Abstract type
Wikipedia - Abstract Wiener space
Wikipedia - Abstract Window Toolkit
Wikipedia - Alex Cameron (artist) -- Canadian abstract landscape painter
Wikipedia - Amy Ellingson -- American contemporary abstract painter
Wikipedia - Automata theory -- Study of abstract machines and automata
Wikipedia - Biological Abstracts -- Online database of scientific articles
Wikipedia - Bird stone -- Prehistoric, abstract stone carvings made by Native Americans
Wikipedia - Bruce Beasley -- American abstract expressionist sculptor
Wikipedia - Categorical abstract machine
Wikipedia - Category:Abstract algebra
Wikipedia - Category:Abstract data types
Wikipedia - Category:Abstract interpretation
Wikipedia - Category:Abstraction
Wikipedia - Category:Abstract machines
Wikipedia - Category:Abstract strategy games
Wikipedia - Category:Educational abstract machines
Wikipedia - Catherine Everett (painter) -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Chemical Abstracts Service -- Division of the American Chemical Society
Wikipedia - Chinese checkers -- Abstract strategy game
Wikipedia - Collection (abstract data type)
Wikipedia - Computer Othello -- Abstract strategy game
Wikipedia - Concept -- Mental representation or an abstract object
Wikipedia - Confluence (abstract rewriting)
Wikipedia - Container (abstract data type) -- Software class, data structure, or abstract data type (ADT) whose instances are collections of other objects
Wikipedia - Cross-platform support middleware -- Software abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Crosstrack -- Abstract strategy game
Wikipedia - Cullen Washington Jr. -- American contemporary abstract painter
Wikipedia - Daniel Solomon -- Canadian abstract painter and sculptor
Wikipedia - Data abstraction
Wikipedia - Database abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Data model -- An abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to on another and to real world entities.
Wikipedia - David Bolduc -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - David Budd -- American abstract painter
Wikipedia - Decomposition of a module -- Abstract algebra concept
Wikipedia - Descendant subgroup -- abstract algebra subgroup
Wikipedia - Draft:Abstract Division (copy) -- Dutch-born electronic music producer duo
Wikipedia - Draft:Abstract Division -- Dutch-born electronic music producer duo
Wikipedia - Elizabeth Gower -- Australian abstract artist
Wikipedia - Encapsulation (networking) -- Method of designing modular communication protocols in which separate functions are abstracted from their underlying structures
Wikipedia - Formal system -- Any well-defined system of abstract thought based on the model of mathematics
Wikipedia - Frame of reference -- Abstract coordinate system and the set of physical reference points that uniquely fix (locate and orient) the coordinate system and standardize measurement (s)
Wikipedia - Freddy Rodriguez (artist) -- American abstract artist
Wikipedia - Frobenius theorem (real division algebras) -- Theorem in abstract algebra
Wikipedia - Full abstraction
Wikipedia - Fully abstract
Wikipedia - Fundamental theorem of software engineering -- A general principle for managing complexity through abstraction
Wikipedia - Geometric abstraction -- form of abstract art involving geometry
Wikipedia - Go (game) -- Abstract strategy board game for two players
Wikipedia - Gordon Rayner -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Graham Coughtry -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Graph (abstract data type)
Wikipedia - Gust Graas -- Luxembourgian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Hardware abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Hardware abstraction
Wikipedia - High-level programming language -- Programming language with strong abstraction from details of hardware
Wikipedia - Honour -- Abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability
Wikipedia - Hughie O'Donoghue -- British abstract figurist artist
Wikipedia - Hypostatic abstraction
Wikipedia - In Abstraction -- album by A Hope for Home
Wikipedia - Instruction set architecture -- Set of abstract symbols which describe a computer program's operations to a processor
Wikipedia - Ishvaratva -- Abstract noun meaning "goodhood" in Sanskrit
Wikipedia - Jagannath -- Hindu God, believed to be abstract form of Krishna.
Wikipedia - John Blackburn (artist) -- British abstract painter
Wikipedia - Kajetan Sosnowski -- Polish abstract painter
Wikipedia - Keltie Ferris -- American abstract painter
Wikipedia - Kevin Abstract -- American rapper, Band member
Wikipedia - Kharbaga -- Two-player abstract strategy game from North Africa
Wikipedia - Kim Anno -- Japanese-American abstract painter
Wikipedia - Kruskal-Katona theorem -- About the numbers of faces of different dimensions in an abstract simplicial complex
Wikipedia - Lambda abstraction
Wikipedia - Lambda calculus -- Formal mathematical logic system centered on function abstractions and applications
Wikipedia - Larry Poons -- American abstract painter
Wikipedia - Latimer-MacDuffee theorem -- Theorem in abstract algebra
Wikipedia - Lattice (order) -- Abstract structure studied in the mathematical subdisciplines of order theory and abstract algebra
Wikipedia - Lee Krasner -- American abstract expressionist painter (1908-1984)
Wikipedia - Leray's theorem -- Relates abstract sheaf cohomology with Cech cohomology
Wikipedia - Link layer -- lowest abstraction layer in the Internet Protocol Suite
Wikipedia - List (abstract data type) -- Abstract data type used in computer science
Wikipedia - List of abstract algebra topics -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of abstract strategy games
Wikipedia - Logical form -- Form for logical arguments, obtained by abstracting from the subject matter of its content terms
Wikipedia - Lowrie Warrener -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Lynne Taetzsch -- American abstract painter and writer
Wikipedia - Lyrical Abstraction
Wikipedia - Lyrical abstraction
Wikipedia - Mathematical and theoretical biology -- Branch of biology which employs theoretical analysis, mathematical models and abstractions of the living organisms
Wikipedia - Matroid -- Abstract structure that models and generalizes linear independency
Wikipedia - M-CM-^Arpad Szenes -- Hungarian-Jewish abstract painter
Wikipedia - Michael Forster (artist) -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Mill (currency) -- Now-abstract unit of currency used sometimes in accounting, worth one one-thousandth of the whole unit of currency
Wikipedia - Mind-body problem -- Open question in philosophy of how abstract minds interact with physical bodies
Wikipedia - Mitchell's embedding theorem -- Abelian categories, while abstractly defined, are in fact concrete categories of modules
Wikipedia - Model (abstract)
Wikipedia - Multiple abstract variance analysis -- Statistical technique
Wikipedia - Nadir Afonso -- Portuguese geometric abstractionist painter (1920-2013)
Wikipedia - Nena Saguil -- Filipino abstract artist
Wikipedia - Nina Tryggvadottir -- Abstract expressionist artist (1913-1968)
Wikipedia - No. 1 Northern -- Abstract steel sculpture by John Cullen Nugent
Wikipedia - Normalization property (abstract rewriting)
Wikipedia - One-instruction set computer -- Abstract machine that uses only one instruction
Wikipedia - Operating system abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Oracle machine -- Abstract machine used to study decision problems
Wikipedia - OSI model -- Model of communication of seven abstraction layers
Wikipedia - Oskar Fischinger -- German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter
Wikipedia - Parallel programming model -- Abstraction of parallel computer architecture, with which it is convenient to express algorithms and their composition in programs
Wikipedia - Parallel RAM -- Abstract computer for designing parallel algorithms
Wikipedia - Parcheesi -- Abstract strategy board game
Wikipedia - Paul Sloggett -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Personification in the Bible -- The attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts in the Bible
Wikipedia - Personification -- An anthropomorphic metaphor in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person
Wikipedia - Picaria -- Two-player abstract strategy game from the Zuni Native American Indians or Pueblo Indians
Wikipedia - Platonic realism -- Philosophical doctrine about abstract objects
Wikipedia - Portrait of a German Officer -- Early 20th century abstract painting by Marsden Hartley
Wikipedia - Post-painterly abstraction
Wikipedia - Presentation-abstraction-control
Wikipedia - Principle of abstraction
Wikipedia - Priority queue -- Abstract data type in computer science
Wikipedia - Psychological Abstracts -- Abstract and index periodical for psychology
Wikipedia - Quantum cellular automaton -- An abstract model of quantum computation
Wikipedia - Queue (abstract data type) -- Abstract data type
Wikipedia - Radhia Cousot -- Inventor of abstract interpretation
Wikipedia - Radical polynomial -- abstract algebra polynominal in mathematics
Wikipedia - Regina Bogat -- American abstract artist
Wikipedia - Representation theory -- Branch of mathematics that studies abstract algebraic structures
Wikipedia - Ronnie Landfield -- American abstract painter
Wikipedia - Rules of Go -- Details of the rules for the abstract strategy board game for two players
Wikipedia - Salta (game) -- Two-player abstract strategy board game
Wikipedia - Sandra Blow -- English abstract painter
Wikipedia - Schizoanalysis -- Practice formulated by Deleuze and Guattari focusing on the unconscious represented through abstract machines, bodies without organs, rhizomes and assemblages
Wikipedia - Selective abstraction
Wikipedia - Set (abstract data type)
Wikipedia - Siri Berg -- American abstract artist
Wikipedia - Stack (abstract data type) -- Abstract data type
Wikipedia - Statistical Abstract of the United States -- Former publication of the United States Census Bureau
Wikipedia - Superplan -- Programming language with strong abstraction from details of hardware
Wikipedia - Suzanne Bergeron -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Tak (game) -- Two-player abstract strategy game
Wikipedia - The Human Abstract (poem)
Wikipedia - Tracey Adams (painter) -- American abstract painter and printmaker
Wikipedia - Victor Deysun -- Ukrainian abstract expressionist painter
Wikipedia - Victor Servranckx -- Belgian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Walter Yarwood -- Canadian abstract painter
Wikipedia - Warren Abstract Machine
Wikipedia - Zebedee Jones -- British abstract painter
Wikipedia - Zentralblatt MATH -- Abstracting and reviewing service for pure and applied mathematics
Wikipedia - Zobrist hashing -- Hash function construction used in computer programs that play abstract board games
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selforum - churn abstract thought of sri aurobindo
Psychology Wiki - Abstract_object
Psychology Wiki - Abstract_thought
Psychology Wiki - Model_(abstract)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - abstract-objects
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Abstract: The Art of Design ::: TV-14 | 45min | Documentary | TV Series (2017 ) -- A look beyond blueprints and computers into the art and science of design, showcasing great designers from every discipline whose work shapes our world. Stars:
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Abstract feat. Alkama -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Abstract feat. Alkama Abstract feat. Alkama -- Abstract stop-motion short film using "lightning doodles" by Tochka. -- Movie - Aug 19, 2017 -- 520 5.24
Cross Ange: Tenshi to Ryuu no Rondo -- -- Sunrise -- 25 eps -- Original -- Action Mecha Sci-Fi -- Cross Ange: Tenshi to Ryuu no Rondo Cross Ange: Tenshi to Ryuu no Rondo -- Angelise Ikaruga Misurugi is the first princess of the noble Misurugi Empire. The kingdom has seen great power and prosperity due to the advancement of the revolutionary technology known as "Mana," an abstract bending of light that has reduced the world's problems of war and pollution to a timeless peace. -- -- However, not all are blessed with the ability to wield Mana. Those who cannot are labeled "Norma," outcasts of society who are considered a threat to civilization and live under constant persecution, and Angelise herself is one of many who want the Norma exterminated. But as Angelise's sixteenth birthday commences, it is discovered in a shocking revelation that she is actually a Norma. Chaos ensues, the public is outraged, and the once adored princess is exiled to Arzenal: a remote military base where Normas are forced into conscription. -- -- Now, the former royal must adapt to a harsh and vastly different lifestyle; piloting mechanical robots known as "Paramail" to fend off large, devastating beasts referred to as DRAGONs. However, a sinister truth about these savage creatures threatens to change everything. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 159,107 7.40
Dreams -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Dreams Dreams -- Abstract animation by Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara. -- Movie - ??? ??, 2011 -- 923 4.28
Duel Masters -- -- Studio Hibari -- 26 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Shounen -- Duel Masters Duel Masters -- The world of Duel Masters is one of five great civilizations. Through a card game, duelists can bring these worlds into existence, making what was previously abstract into reality. These skilled duelists are known as Kaijudo masters. -- -- Shobu Kirifuda is the best player at his local playground, and seeks to become a world-class master like his father. His first step on the road to conquest begins with winning a local tournament. Rather, it should have, except he is destroyed by the best Kaijudo master in the world, Knight. Shobu loses, but upon remembering the words of wisdom his father instilled into him, decides to continue on the road of becoming a duelist who can enjoy the game for what it is. And so begins his journey to victory－and as we all know, the journey is the most important part! -- -- Licensor: -- Hasbro -- TV - Oct 21, 2002 -- 20,207 5.84
Duel Masters -- -- Studio Hibari -- 26 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Shounen -- Duel Masters Duel Masters -- The world of Duel Masters is one of five great civilizations. Through a card game, duelists can bring these worlds into existence, making what was previously abstract into reality. These skilled duelists are known as Kaijudo masters. -- -- Shobu Kirifuda is the best player at his local playground, and seeks to become a world-class master like his father. His first step on the road to conquest begins with winning a local tournament. Rather, it should have, except he is destroyed by the best Kaijudo master in the world, Knight. Shobu loses, but upon remembering the words of wisdom his father instilled into him, decides to continue on the road of becoming a duelist who can enjoy the game for what it is. And so begins his journey to victory－and as we all know, the journey is the most important part! -- TV - Oct 21, 2002 -- 20,207 5.84
Hokuto no Ken Movie -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Adventure Shounen -- Hokuto no Ken Movie Hokuto no Ken Movie -- Following a cataclysmic nuclear war, the world teeters on the brink of complete destruction. Civilization is polarized into a degenerate society where opposing packs of marauding scavengers prey on helpless, homeless nomads. For those who are lucky enough to survive the constant brutality and danger, it is a bleak existence. Life an death blur into abstractions. The only hope left for mankind is to find a hero worthy of becoming the next "Fist of the North Star" - an enlightened warrior - who is capable of leading those with the will to survive out of this barrenness into a new world. But in this savage no-man's land of shifting loyalties and power-hungry demi-gods, heroes are in short supply. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media -- Movie - Mar 8, 1986 -- 17,312 7.20
Hokuto no Ken Movie -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Adventure Shounen -- Hokuto no Ken Movie Hokuto no Ken Movie -- Following a cataclysmic nuclear war, the world teeters on the brink of complete destruction. Civilization is polarized into a degenerate society where opposing packs of marauding scavengers prey on helpless, homeless nomads. For those who are lucky enough to survive the constant brutality and danger, it is a bleak existence. Life an death blur into abstractions. The only hope left for mankind is to find a hero worthy of becoming the next "Fist of the North Star" - an enlightened warrior - who is capable of leading those with the will to survive out of this barrenness into a new world. But in this savage no-man's land of shifting loyalties and power-hungry demi-gods, heroes are in short supply. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- Movie - Mar 8, 1986 -- 17,312 7.20
Kitsutsuki: The Ten Hole Stories -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Kitsutsuki: The Ten Hole Stories Kitsutsuki: The Ten Hole Stories -- G9+1 film. -- Movie - Jul 20, 2009 -- 210 N/A -- -- Don't You Wish You Were Here? -- -- - -- 1 ep -- - -- Dementia -- Don't You Wish You Were Here? Don't You Wish You Were Here? -- "My first abstract animation. What color do you have in your mind?" -- -- (Source: Maya Yonesho) -- Movie - ??? ??, 1997 -- 208 N/A -- -- Templex -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Templex Templex -- One rainy day, a woman wakes up, opens the curtains, and stares at her reflection in the window, noticing her curly hair. She climbs out of bed and begins to wash it, while strange images of self-hatred fill her mind. -- Movie - ??? ??, 2015 -- 208 5.64
Luck & Logic -- -- Doga Kobo -- 12 eps -- Card game -- Action Fantasy -- Luck & Logic Luck & Logic -- "Logic" is the concept that governs emotions, abilities, ideals, memories, and all other abstract properties that make up life in various worlds. With its power, however, alien "Foreigners" are able to pass through portals imbued with their respective world's Logic and pose a threat to other worlds. To counter this problem, the Another Logic Counter Agency (ALCA) from the human world of Septpia employs "Logicalists," people with the power to form bonds with the Foreigners who seek peace and share their Logic, tasked with dealing with all possible dangers. -- -- After overloading his powers two years prior, Yoshichika Tsurugi has lost the ability to use Logic in combat, making him no different from a regular citizen. However, his life soon returns to the battlefield when he meets Athena, a Foreigner goddess from the world of Tetra-Heaven. She brings Yoshichika his missing Logic Card, allowing him to become a Logicalist once again. Soon after, Yoshichika forms a contract with Athena and joins ALCA. There, he meets other Logicalists, and only by working with them can he hope to bring an end to the threats once and for all. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 93,549 6.09
Modern No.2 -- -- - -- 1 ep -- - -- Dementia -- Modern No.2 Modern No.2 -- Minimalistic abstract hand made animation from the award winning Mirai Mizue. -- Movie - ??? ??, 2011 -- 807 5.42
Prayer X -- -- PERIMETRON -- 1 ep -- Original -- Music Dementia -- Prayer X Prayer X -- Music video directed and animated by Ryoji Yamada for the song Prayer X by King Gnu -- -- In the music video Prayer X, King Gnu takes an abstract and animated approach to mental health topics such as paranoia, anxiety, depression, and suicide. The setting is in a grey monotonous world where the main character is trapped inside a repetitive schedule which slowly drives him insane. -- -- (Source: JROCK NEWS) -- Music - Aug 6, 2018 -- 483 6.84
Scrap Diary -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Scrap Diary Scrap Diary -- An abstract work by Keichii Tanaami. -- Movie - ??? ??, 2002 -- 1,285 3.29
Timbre A to Z -- -- - -- 26 eps -- Original -- Music Dementia -- Timbre A to Z Timbre A to Z -- A series of short films where Mirai Mizuki uploaded one abstract representation of a letter of the alphabet every day for 26 days. -- ONA - Jan 22, 2011 -- 597 4.68
Watashi no Kao -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia Horror -- Watashi no Kao Watashi no Kao -- Abstract horror short film about a girl's face. -- Movie - ??? ??, 2005 -- 1,796 4.13
Why -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Why Why -- A boxing ring turns into a stage for abstract animation where the punches thrown in the match and the halftone dots in reprographics gradually become indistinguishable. Tanaami shot a boxing match on a Motordrive camera, made two thousand offset prints, and rephotographed each of them. He explains his inspiration for the work being the experience of watching a boxing match on television but finding the newspaper print the next morning better capturing the exhilaration of the sport. -- -- (Source: Collaborative Cataloging Japan) -- Movie - ??? ??, 1975 -- 364 4.90
Wonder (Movie) -- -- Calf Studio -- 1 ep -- - -- Dementia -- Wonder (Movie) Wonder (Movie) -- The 365 days animation consists of sequence of 8760 pictures, all different shape and color, hand-drawn by the director every day in 365 days. This is the ultimate analog approach by the abstract animated film creator in digital era. -- -- (Source: IMDb) -- Movie - Feb 8, 2014 -- 1,824 6.08
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