Men Without Chests
Page 27
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
Page 28
“The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. But for this claim there would be nothing to agree or disagree about. To disagree with This is pretty if those words simply described the lady’s feeling, would be absurd: if she had said I feel sick Coleridge would hardly have replied No; I feel quite well.”
Page 29
“Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” (Nicomachian Ethics – 1104 B.)
“In the republic, the well-nurtured youth is one “who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.” (Republic – 402 A.)
Page 31
“It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
“And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement [sic]: it that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.”
Page 34
“the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’ The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds – making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation – men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.”
Page 35
“Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”
“I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical [sic] about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat,’ than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who has been brought up among sharpers.”
Page 35-36
“The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.”
(Alanus ab Insulis. De Planctu Naturae Prosa, iii)
Page 36
“It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”
Page 37
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
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