Motus Mentis

When “anything goes”, everything does.

It’s possible to enjoy this world a whole lot more if you aren’t convinced it’s all there is.

Like animals and plants, humans, too, create complex organic ecosystems that vary according to population, evolutionary history, and environment. Ours are social, cultural, and political. How sensitive we are to tampering with the ecoystems of animals and plants! How careless with our own!

“Continental breakfast” is to breakfast what Continental philosophy is to philosophy: something to chew on, but devoid of nourishment.

I don’t like the tropics; they’re too profuse. Anything goes, completely unchecked. Give me the North. Each winter Life’s follies, feints, and flourishes are weighed, measured and tested. The ones that make it back the following year need to show something serious: at best, ingenuity, but at the very least, genuine toughness. Everything in the […]

What never seems to occur to those who anathematize and seek to bury the past is that they in turn prepare the future for their own erasure. The result is a sullen and solipsistic presentism in which, as Burke foresaw, men become nothing more than “the flies of a summer”.

Conception collapses the biological Eigenfunktion: from an infinite probability-cloud of sperm and ova is instantiated a particular actuality.

People talk about the “second childhood” of old age. What relates the second childhood to the first is high “time preference”: that it cares more about the present than the future. The edges of our lives are unlike the middle. The child is unaware of its future; the old man has none.

“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honour; duty; mercy; hope.” – Churchill

George Santayana said: Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve. We, however, are exempt — and nature reminds us every spring that while she is cyclical, we are linear. For us, spring, and winter, come but once.

The central inconsistency of multiculturalism: the belief that a culture that believes all cultures are of equal value is a superior culture.

“In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs.” – Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

This afternoon, a commenter on our previous post asked me: Malcolm, are you cynical? Meanwhile, an old friend wrote me today to quote something I had, apparently, said to him when I was about 17 or 18. I don’t remember saying it, but here it is anyway: Everyone needs a pack of lies to live […]

Life is hard, but at least it’s short.

There is an agreeable interval between childhood and marriage during which a man may eat what he pleases.