c newsom's List: Research

• So then you have, in these two great populations, Indian and Highland— in the races of the jungle and of the moor—two national capacities distinctly and accurately opposed. On the one side you have a race rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift of it; on the other you have a people careless of art, and apparently incapable of it, their utmost effort hitherto reaching no farther than to the variation of the positions of the bars of colour in square chequers.
• As art seems thus, in its delicate form, to be one of the chief promoters of indolence and sensuality,—so, I need hardly remind you, it hitherto has appeared only in energetic manifestation when it was in the service of superstition. The four greatest manifestations of human intellect which founded the four principal kingdoms of art, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Italian, were developed by the strong excitement of active superstition in the worship of Osiris, Belus, Minerva, and the Queen of Heaven.
• while art has thus shown itself always active in the service of luxury and idolatry, it has also been strongly directed to the exaltation of cruelty

• demons of luxury, cruelty, and superstition?

   
• it never represents a natural fact
• You might then conclude farther, that art, so far as it was devoted to the record or the interpretation of nature, would be helpful and ennobling also.
• Wherever art is practised for its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he does and produces, instead of what he interprets or exhibits,—there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart, and it issues, if long so pursued, in the destruction both of intellectual power and moral principal; whereas art, devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe, is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength, and salvation.

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• Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would  gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness,  but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but  the integrity of your own mind.
• The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to  you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs  the impression of your character
• For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure
• • http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/plato.html
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