This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Beyond the forms there is . . . the intimation of a transcending, limitless truth. This infinite becomes in part available to us within the finite, through these finite channels that a society inherits and cherishes, and uses to express its faith and to nourish it. Can we learn something of that faith, and appreciate in part that inner meaning, by exploring the significance of these outward forms?
Failure | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Phenomena | Religion | Universe | Failure |
Act…is always identified with the fully complete, the actually present. Pure act, therefore, is simply a correlative of the immutable, i.e., of pure actualized form, complete in all that is proper to it and incorruptible. It is this immutability, self-sufficiency, and incorruptibility which for Aristotle is the primary characteristic of the “divine” and the perfect. In the notion of act so conceived there is no necessary implication of infinity, at least in the substantial order. In fact, Aristotle has no difficulty in admitting some fifty five of his prime movers, each one pure act or pure form but in virtue of its form distinct from all others. Substantial infinity would simply have no meaning in this Aristotelian universe
Determination | Excellence | Meaning | Mind | Right | Universe | Excellence |
W. D. Joske, fully William "Bill"
However, few of us have such high expectations, and we are content to perform tasks that are not fully meaningful. We will endure drudgery if we can accomplish something worthwhile, and we are happy playing pointless games.
Giving | Life | Life | Meaning | Society | Wants | World | Society |
William P. Montague, fully William Pepperell Montague
Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it.
Difficulty | Meaning | Virtue | Virtue |
Suffering makes all places hell - just as mental suffering is greater than bodily suffering so its hell is worse.
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
This perpetual struggle between the magician and the religionist goes on in the mind and heart and will of every man of us. It goes on until it is rightly resolved, until man reborn into a mature religion ceases to try to coerce his God, and says humbly with Dante, “In thy will is our peace.” Religion, then, is not a matter of turning God to account in the realization of our own desires. Religion is trying to discover what God is about and then offering oneself to the Eternal Goodness, “as a man’s hand is to a man.” “It is not in man,” says a modern thinker, “to make religion what he will have her be, but only to become what religion is making him.” Perhaps, then, it is to save a man from the defeat and disillusionment of childish magic that there stands in our Bible that old story of the temptation of Jesus. Its ramifications and restatements are legion. Thou shalt not use thy God to get thy way. Thou shalt not coerce the Infinite to further the headstrong passing whim of the finite. Thou shalt not break the laws of health and then cajole thy God into working thee a miracle of healing. Thou shalt not let thy mind rot in idleness and then look for a sudden inspiration given by reality. Thou shalt not spend thine all upon the world that passes away and ask thy God at thy latter end to give thee the sudden boon of a credible immortality. Thou shalt not take this attitude at all, using the Most High as an amplifier and emergency device for realizing thy solitary and selfish will. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” We are being told on all sides that religion is now breaking down, that its beliefs are an outworn delusion, and that all thoughtful men are being liberated into a perfect skepticism. That is not what is happening. What is happening is this, men are discovering again what they have discovered often before and then have forgotten, that magic will not work. But religion as a final attitude and reference of the finite human spirit towards its infinite universe remains and always must remain. It is the disposition of those disciplined natures of whom we say that they are pure in mind and heart and will. The true alternative to the outworn magic of primitive peoples is not the modern magic of persons disciplined in the applied sciences or the “new thought.” It is no solution of the ultimate moral and intellectual problem to trade self-will from the left hand of primitive magic to the right hand of applied science. What matters is a changed disposition and reference in this whole final commerce of man with his universe. Call it pure religion or pure science, the name does not matter. The one thing needful is that temper and disposition towards the will of God which we find in Jesus, Bernard, Pascal and Lister alike.
Control | Distinction | God | Lord | Man | Meaning | Men | Obedience | Religion | Science | Society | Temptation | Time | Universe | World | Society | Trial | God | Temptation |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
In music, sometimes a man will feel that he comes to the edge of breaking out from prison bars of existence, breaking out from the universe altogether. There is a sense that the goal is at hand; that the boundary wall of the universe is crumbling and will be breached at the next moment, when the soul will pass out free into the infinite.
Beauty | Evil | Good | Heart | Sacred | Strength | World | Worship | Beauty |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.
Anger | Culture | Enlightenment | Error | Evil | Happy | Language | Love | Music | Public | Speech | Strength | Will | Woman | World | Afraid |
My Eternal Man set in repose, The Female from his darkness rose; And she found me beneath a Tree, Mandrake, and in her Veil hid me. Serpent Reasonings us entice Of good and evil, virtue and vice, Doubt self-jealous, Watery folly; Struggling thro’ Earth’s melancholy; Naked in Air, in shame and fear; Blind in Fire, with shield and spear; Two-horn’d Reasoning, cloven fiction, In doubt, which is self-contradiction, A dark Hermaphrodite we stood— Rational truth, root of evil and good. Round me flew the Flaming Sword; Round her snowy Whirlwinds roar’d, Freezing her Veil, the Mundane Shell. I rent the Veil where the Dead dwell: When weary Man enters his Cave, He meets his Saviour in the grave. Some find a Female Garment there, And some a Male, woven with care; Lest the Sexual Garments sweet Should grow a devouring Winding-sheet. dies! Alas! the Living and Dead! One is slain! and One is fled! Vain-glory hatcht and nurst, By double Spectres, self-accurst. My Son! my Son! thou treatest me But as I have instructed thee. the shadows of the Moon, Climbing thro’ Night’s highest noon; Time’s Ocean falling, drown’d; In Agèd Ignorance profound, Holy and cold, I clipp’d the wings Of all sublunary things, And in depths of my dungeons Closed the Father and the Sons. But when once I did descry The Immortal Man that cannot die, Thro’ evening shades I haste away To close the labours of my day. The Door of Death I open found, And the Worm weaving in the ground: Thou’rt my Mother, from the womb; Wife, Sister, Daughter, to the tomb; Weaving to dreams the Sexual strife, And weeping over the Web of Life.
Repentance | Tears |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.
Absolute | Adventure | Art | Beginning | Destiny | Emotions | Faith | Ideas | Important | Life | Life | Man | Order | Sense | Space | Story | Time | Art |
Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce, And dost not know the garment from the man; Every harlot was a virgin once, Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan. Tho’ thou art worship’d by the names divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline, The lost traveller’s dream under the hill.
Darkness | Death | Doubt | Dreams | Eternal | Evil | Father | Good | Haste | Ignorance | Man | Shame | Virtue | Virtue |
Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echardt, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the acts, o historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.
Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street
Evil |
I still think that Boccioni was a great artist and a passionate man. I like El Lissitsky’s painting very much. But Mondrian that great merciless artist, is the only one who had nothing left over. The point they all had in common was to be both inside and outside at the same time. A new of likeness!.. ..for me to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter..
Evil |
As to politics, we were like the rest of the country people in England; that is to say, we neither knew nor thought anything about the matter.
Desire | Evil | Speculation | Thought | Thought |