It is said that physicians sometimes ask patients, “Do you really wish to get well?” And, to be perfectly realistic in this matter, we must put the question of whether modern civilization wishes to survive. One can detect signs of suicidal impulse; one feels at times that the modern world is calling for madder music…
Read moreWeaver on Democracy
To one group “democracy” means access to the franchise; to another it means economic equality administered by a dictatorship. Weaver, Richard M., Ideas Have Consequences, p. 148
Read moreWeaver on Language
Even empirical investigations of the learning process bear this out. Such conclusions lead to the threshold of a significant commitment: ultimate definition is, as Aristotle affirmed, a matter of intuition. Primordial conception is somehow in us; from this we proceed as already noted by analogy, or the process of finding resemblance to one thing in…
Read moreWeaver on Language
Even empirical investigations of the learning process bear this out. Such conclusions lead to the threshold of a significant commitment: ultimate definition is, as Aristotle affirmed, a matter of intuition. Primordial conception is somehow in us; from this we proceed as already noted by analogy, or the process of finding resemblance to one thing in…
Read moreWeaver on the First Mover
Therefore one inviolable right there must be to validate all other rights. Unless something exists from which we can start with moral certitude, we cannon depend on those deductions which are the framework of coherent behavior. I have read recently that a liberal is one who doubts his premises even when he is proceeding on…
Read moreWeaver on Corruption
A conviction that those who perform the prayer of labor may store up a compensation which cannot be appropriated by the improvident is the soundest incentive to virtuous industry. Where the opposite conviction prevails, where popular majorities may, on a plea of present need, override these rights earned by past effort, the tendency is for…
Read moreWeaver on Self-Investment
It is precisely because providence takes into account the nonpresent that it calls for the exercise of reason and imagination. That I reap now the reward of my past industry or sloth, that what I do today will be felt in that future now potential–these require a play of mind. The notion that the state…
Read moreWeaver on Knowing the Transcendent
The first positive step must be a driving afresh of the wedge between the material and the transcendental. . . That there is a world of ought, that the apparent does not exhaust the real–these are so essential to the very conception of improvement that it should be superfluous to mention them. Weaver, Richard M.,…
Read moreWeaver on Capital
Though capital may, on the one hand, be the result of unproductive activity–or of “theft,” as left-wingers might declare–on the other hand, it maybe the fruit of industry and foresight, of self-denial, or of some superiority of gifts. The attack upon capital is not necessarily an attack upon inequity. IN the times which we describe…
Read moreWeaver on Demagogic Leaders
Demagogic leaders have told the common man that he is entitled to much more than he is getting; they have not told him the less pleasant truth that, unless there is to be expropriation–which in any case is only a temporary resource–the increase much some out of greater productivity. Weaver, Richard M., Ideas Have Consequences,…
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