#Computer Typing Part-10

  Typing Exercises

Lesson-13

       Academic education should aim at giving, as a corrective of the specialization which increase of knowledge has made unavoidable, as much as time will permit of what has cultural value in such studies as history, literature, and philosophy. It should be made easy for a young man who knows no Greek to acquire through translations some understanding, however inadequate, of what the Greeks accomplished. Instead of studying the Anglo-Saxon Kings over and over again at school, some attempt should be made to give a conspectus of world history, bringing’s the problems of our own day into relation with those of Egyptian priests, Babylonian Kings, and Athenian reformers, as well as with all the hopes and despairs of the intervening centuries. But it is only of philosophy, treated from a similar point of view, that wish to write.

      Metaphysics, according to F.H.Bradley,' is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.' It is curious to find this pungent dictum at the beginning of a long book of earnest and even unctuous metaphysics, which, through much arducus argumentation, leads up to the final conclusion. 'Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reality, and the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real.' A rare moment of self-knowledge must have inspired the initial aphorism, which was made bearable to its author by its semi-humorous form; but throughout the rest of his labors he allowed himself to be claimed by 'the instinct to find bad reasons'. When he was serious he was sophistical, and a typical philosopher; when he jested, he had insight and uttered un-philosophical truth.

philosophy has been defined as 'an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly'; I should define it rather as' an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously'. The philosopher's temperament is rare, because it has to combine two somewhat conflicting characteristics: on the one hand a strong desire to believe some general proposition about the universe or human life; on the other hand, inability to believe contentedly except on what appear to be intellectual grounds. The more profound the philosopher, the more intricate and subtle must his fallacies be in order to produce in him the desired state of intellectual acquiescence. That is why philosophy is obscure.

         To the completely unintellectual, general doctrines are unimportant; to the man of science, they are hypotheses to be tested by experiment; while to the philosopher they are mental habits which must be justified somehow if he is to find life endurable. The typical philosopher finds certain beliefs emotionally indispensable, but indispensable, difficult; he therefore goes through long chains of reasoning, in the course of which, sooner or later, a momentary lack of vigilance allows a fallacy to pass undetected. After the one false step, his mental agility quickly takes him far into the quagmire of falsehood.

 

Lesson-14

       Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, illustrates perfectly this peculiar mental temper. He would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy it he had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain. Having a passionate desire for certainty, he set to work to think out a new method of achieving it. As a first step, he determined to reject everything that he could bring himself to doubt. Everyday objects his acquaintance, the streets, the sun and moon, and so on-might be illusions, for he saw similar things in dreams, and could not be certain that he was not always dreaming. The demonstrations in mathematics might be wrong, since mathematicians sometimes maze mistakes. But he could not bring himself to doubt. Here at last, therefore, he had an indubitable premises for reconstruction of the intellectual edifices which his former skepticism had overthrown.

So far, so good. But from this moment his work loses all its critical acumen, and he accepts a host of scholastic maxims for which there is nothing to be said except the tradition of the schools. He believes that he exists, he says, because he sees this very clearly and very distinctly; he concludes, therefore, that I may take as a general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true. 'He then begins to conceive all sorts of thing very clearly and very distinctly, ‘such as that an effect cannot have more perfection than its cause. Since he can form an idea of God that is, of a being more perfect than himself this idea must have had a cause other than himself, which can only be God; therefore God exists. Since God is good, He will not perpetually deceive Descartes; therefore the objects which Descartes sees when awake must really exist. And so on. All intellectual caution is thrown to the winds, and it might seem as if the initialskepticism had been merely rhetorical, through I do not believe that this would be psychologically true. Descartes's initial doubt was, I believe, as genuine as that of a man who has lost his way, but was equally intended to be replaced by certainty at the earliest possible moment.

        In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are evidence of bias. While Descartes id being skeptical, all that he says is acute and cogent, and even his first constructive step, the proof of his own existence, has much to be said in its favor. But everything that follows is loose and slipshod and hasty, thereby displaying the distorting influence of desire. Something may be attributed to the need of appearing orthodox in order to escape persecution, but a more intimate cause must also have been at work. I do not suppose that he cared passionately about the reality of sensible objects, or even of God, but he did care about the truth of mathematics. And this, existence and attributes of the Deity. His system, psychologically, was as follows: No God, no geometry; but geometry is delicious; therefore God exists.

Leibniz, who invented the phrase that 'this is the best of all possible worlds,' was a very different kind of man from Descartes. He was comfortable, not passionate; a professional, not an amateur.