Selected verbiage...
baap | 3 May 2005, 8:10pmAnd generally let every student of nature take this as a rule, -- that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion, and that so much the more care is to be taken in dealing with such questions to keep the understanding even and clear.
First, then, there is hearsay knowledge, by which, for example, I know the day of my birth. Second, vague experience, "empirical" knowledge in the derogatory sense, as when a physician knows a cure not by any scientific formulation of experimental tests, but by a "general impression" that it has "usually" worked. Third, immediate deduction, or knowledge reached by reasoning, as when I conclude to the immensity of the sun from seeing that in the case of other objects distance decreases the apparent size. This kind of knowledge is superior to the other two, but is yet precariously subject to sudden refutation by direct experience; so science for a hundred years reasoned its way to an "ether" which is now in high disfavor with the physicist elite. Hence the highest kind of knowledge is the fourth form, which comes by immediate deduction and direct perception, as when we see at once that 6 is the missing number in the proportion, 2:4::3:x; or as when we perceive that the whole is greater than the part.
Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictates of our own reason; although in fact, what our reason pronounces bad is not bad as regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the laws of our own nature taken separately . . . . As for the terms good and bad, they indicate nothing positive considered in themselves. . . . For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.
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1. By gandalf | 12 May 2005, 1:40am
baap that was a very fine dispaly of your strong verbal talents. way to go dude..!
2. By Bigmouth | 15 May 2005, 12:57am
Not true,
2:4 :: 3:5 !!!
By what right can you state the answer as 6 ?? Sad that you call this the highest kind of knowledge.
And why can't things be Evil when you percieve them to be so ?
As for the terms good and bad, they indicate nothing positive considered in themselves
What ? Now you say everything is in the force ? Have you taken ascetism or something ?
Aaah .. Now I'm done. Frustration gone.