New ideas are still coming up, and are still being slapped right back down again. A maverick named Rupert Sheldrake has published a book entitled A New Science of Life; the Hypothesis of Formative Causation. According to a reviewer in TLS: The most grotesque of Sheldrake’s proposed experiments is to check whether rats in one… read more »
The widespread publicity recently given to the atom, as a consequence of public interest in the epoch-making event of the employment of sub-atomic energy as a weapon of war, is naturally devoted only to the direct and more spectacular issues and aspects of the atom’s nature. There is, however, another aspect of the subject –… read more »
It will be obvious that the clarity of our conception of an ideology will largely depend upon the clarity of our conception of the leading terms we employ in its definition and description. We have said that cognitive assumptions and affective identifications are, respectively, the bricks and mortar of which an ideology is composed. Let… read more »
“The life of the contemporary spirit is a cycle of stages, which on the one hand still have a synchronous co-existence, and only from another view appear as a sequence in time that has passed. The experiences which the spirit seems to have behind it, exists also in the depths of its present being.” Hegel,… read more »
What are we to gather from all this evidence from the psychological study of large groups and masses of people? Firstly, we should note how closely the above descriptions of the psychological characteristics of groups correspond with the characteristics of the fascist outlook – as is evidenced by the quotations, given in Chapter 3, from… read more »
Having made out a more or less prima facie case for the possibility of the connection between political outlook and vertical growth of intellect, we shall now proceed to follow up the suggestion and turn our attention to a very general survey, or bird’s-eye view, of those aspects of intellectualism and its development which relate… read more »
The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more it is accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the… read more »