All that virtue can afford is quietness of conscience and a steady prospect of a happier state; this may enable us to endure calamity with patience, but remember that endurance must suppose pain. Conscience (conscientia), as a subjective mode of revelation, is closely related to the sense of divinity. Conscience too, is part of the native endowment of all humans, written upon the heart of all. It is sort of knowledge whose object is God’s will; or, equivalently, the difference between good and evil, the law of God, or the law of nature. Inward law written, even engraved, upon the hearts of all, in a sense asserts the very same things that are to be learned from the [Decalogue]. Decalogue is the Ten Commandments, the list of ethical principles in Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:4-21 in the Holy Bible. It is a basic set of rules carrying binding authority. The Decalogue requires perfect love of God and of our neighbor. Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. However, no evil is insupportable (unable to be endured; intolerable), but that which is accompanied with consciousness of wrong. 

The subjective awareness of divinity and of its will can be supplemented by reflecting on the structure of the external World and the pattern of history. [God has] not only sowed in human’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole work-human-ship of the Universe. As a consequence, humans cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see God. The Universe is a large book, a mirror, and a theater for the display of God’s attributes—preeminently for the display of his goodness to us but also of his glory, wisdom, power, and justice. God can be known through his works, but not by speculation concerning his essence. It is by nourishing God’s sense of divinity and his conscience, with the contemplation of God’s works, that humans can in principle arrive at a knowledge of God. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly, we feel his presence when his works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where his Worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest his infinitude, his omnipotence, his omnipresence. 

When you would conceive of the great Being truly and fully, you must be able to realize the duration of eternity, obliterate the little periods of time and chronology, which require a starting and resting-place in our human minds—soar out of the reach of the sickly atmospheres which surround these little planets, and stand straight in the broad and fathomless light of God’s own atmosphere. Nothing, but vast wisdom and unlimited power should dare to sweep off humans in multitudes; for it is only the one that can know the necessity of the judgment; and what is there, short of the other, that can replace the creatures of the Lord? Human folly is not needed to fill up the great design of God. There is no stature, no beauty, no proportions, nor any colours in which humans themselves can well be fashioned, that is not already done to their hands. Humans only reap the harvest they have sown in the World. Even in this life, God is just. Long may it remain in this mixed World a point not easy of decision, which is the more beautiful of the Almighty’s goodness—the delicate fingers that are formed for sensitiveness and sympathy of touch, and made to minister to pain and grief, or the rough hard hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and softens in a moment 

Sin is a resistance to God’s demands. Thus, sin is not primarily ignorance about God; although such ignorance, or blindness will always be a consequence. Sin is an active willful opposition to God, as a positive refusal to acknowledge his demands of worship and obedience and as a deliberate alienation from him. Its prime characteristic is perversity, and its root is ordinarily pride and self-love.  A person who does not know God because he or she refuses to worship and obey him can still know or believe a variety of propositions about God that happen to be true. I hold with Christ that afflictions are not sent by God in wrath as penalties for sin. Human’s natural ability to know God is the greatest genius. Certainly, I do not deny that one can read competent and apt statements about here and there in the philosophers. However, knowing or believing competent and apt proposition about is not sufficient for knowing God; human’s proud refusal to worship and obey God led them to resist acknowledging the truth about God. Sin, although primarily a matter of the will, infects human’s reason as well. 

Perversity leads to blindness and distortion, and these people infected by sin always show a giddy imagination. Their seeing does not direct them to the truth, much less enable them to attaint it. Thus, human’s willful alienation from God is not merely that one does not know God, but also that one’s views about God are not so incomplete and distorted that nothing at all can be built on them. People who do not know God are always infuriated and ignorant because the effects of sin are far more pervasive then have been indicated. Not only does sin disrupt human’s relation to God; it thereby spreads corruption throughout the whole of human, animal, and plant life. Of course, sin does not impair the human’s natural faculties as such, not immediately, anyway. Reason and will are humanities chief faculties, and human beings in sin may be as intelligent and as capable of making decisions as the individual who knows God. The corruption is to be found, rather, in the use we make of our native capacities. The greatest spirits, when overwhelmed by their afflictions, are subject to the greatest dejections. 

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil. If we are to state accurately what sin does to human’s use of their native talents, we must distinguish between human’s supernatural gifts, their abilities concerning Heavenly things, and their natural gifts, and their abilities concerning Earthly things. The supernatural gifts comprise human’s ability to know God, to worship him properly, and to obey him inwardly as well as outwardly. However, we have been stripped of these gifts. The natural gifts pertain to matters of the present life, such as government, household management, all mechanical skills, and the liberal arts. Concerning these, our abilities have certainly not been destroyed. Not only are ancient law, medicine, and natural philosophy worthy of the highest admiration, but humans, even in their estrangement from God, retains some sense of the laws that must be obeyed if human society is to be preserved. Humans, through natural instinct, are supposed to foster and preserve society.  

Consequently, we observe that there exist in all human’s minds Universal impressions of a certain civic fair dealing and order…And this is ample proof in the arrangement of this life no human is without the light of reason. However, although the human’s abilities concerning Earthly things have not been destroyed, they have been profoundly corrupted. Both reason and will have been gravely wounded; the mind is both weak and plunged into deep darkness. And depravity of the will is all too well known. If human’s natural gifts are to be restored, their sin must be overcome; they must come to know God. We have already seen that for this purpose human’s conscience, their sense of divinity, and their awareness of God’s revelation in the objective World are all inadequate. How can you remove God from a World he created, and expect people to behave? Because they are not God’s people. They worship meaningless paper, and will burn the flesh and spill blood for paper, because that is their deity. However, God’s people know, no matter what people put you through, all this pain and suffering is better than burning in Hell for eternity. 

Thus, if human life is to be renewed, it is necessary that God should choose some special means. This he in did by revealing himself with special clarity to the World, culminating in the life and words of the Holy Bible. When God leads people to respond to this revelation with faith, then humans again knows God. Indeed, faith, consisting as it does in clear knowledge about God coupled with proper worship and true obedience, is a certain sort of knowledge of God—that sort which focuses on Christ as interpreted in the Scriptures. Thus, there is never a contrast between faith in God and knowledge of God; rather, given human’s prior perversity, faith is the only kind of knowledge of God availed to humans. Also, faith is never understood in scholastic fashion as an assent to divinely revealed propositions. Rather, the object of faith is God as revealed in Christ. The death side—in the process of sanctification, the Spirit of God will strip me down until there is nothing left but myself, and that is the place of death. Lord, show me what sanctification means for me. He will show me. It means being made one with Jesus. Sanctification is not something Jesus puts in me—it is Himself in me!  

 

 

I hope there are not many in this World to whom the thought of honor being tied to money ever appears possible. It was not merely that works of art and culture provide the historian with the most fertile material for the interpretation of previous phases of human experience; history itself is (or should be) a form of art. The mechanical piling up of the results of specialized research, dear to scientific historians, is not enough; there must also be intuition, an imaginative ability to re-create the vision of life underlying the relics left by former times. To see the past in these terms is to see it as the expression of the inexhaustible creative power of the human mind—great individuals, great artistic achievements, great moments of civilization, all exemplified in different ways its potentialities. Scholarship, painstaking investigation, were indeed essential, but they must be properly used and directed. Only thus could a particular source or authority throw light on the character of a person, the significance of a style, the pervasive atmosphere of a period. Ultimately, the subject of historical study is humans themselves, not the hypostatized abstractions of the philosophers of history.  The historical process follows a fixed and predetermined course, betrayed a fundamental blindness to its most striking feature, the revelation of individual originality and creativity. Likewise, their astrological impatience to set the limits to its future by talk of the World plans and metaphysical goals are not only unwarranted, it failed to respect the very conditions of uncertainty and suspense that make human achievement possible. From this point of view, and insofar as the development of humankind is concerned, a future known in advance is an absurdity. The tide of historical speculation is starting to recede. Philosophers, rather than continuing to offer sweeping interpretations of the human past, have turned their attention toward examining the distinctive characteristics of historical thought and inquiry, with prophetic insights displaying in their analysis of contemporary trends the many subtle and individual observations.   

 When they depict the Universe, they draw a serpent devouring its own tail, marked with variegated scales. By the scales, they suggest the stars in Heavens. This beast is the heaviest of the animals, as the Earth is heaviest [of elements]. It is the smoothest, like water. And each year it sheds its skin, it [represents old age]. However, the fact that it uses its own body for food signifies that whatever things are generated in the World by Divine Providence are received back into it by [a gradual process of] diminution. Names are a special form of complex signs. A demon’s name is sometimes meaningful in a simple sense, that sometimes names of spirits are taken from those things over which they are set, being as it were borrowed from the stars, or humans, or places, or times, or such like things, the divine name. For example, Zedekiel is one name of the spirit of Jupiter, from the Hebrew name of Jupiter zedek, or if we call them [these demons] from the Latin words…Joviel. Names have a singular referent—a demonic names refer only to a single demon. At the same time, written names are aggregates, combinations of basic written forms to make up complex, representative structures. Moreover, names were impressed upon objects by Adam, and hence have an arbitrary symbolic character not dependent on the characters or elements of which they are constituted. Adam’s function as nomothete is well known, but it is crucial to recognize the relationship between Adam’s naming and the Divine nominative function. As the great operator doth produce divers species, and particular things by the influences of the Heavens, and by the elements, together with the virtues of planets; so according to the properties of the influences proper names result to things, and are put upon them by hum who numbers the multitude of the stars, calling them by their names, of which names Christ in another place speaks, saying, Your names are written in Heaven.  

Adam therefore that gave the first names to things, gave them all names influences of the Heavens, and propertites of all things, gave them names according to their natures, as it is written in Genesis, where God brought all things that he had created before Adam, that he should name them, and as he named anything, so the name of it was, which names indeed contain in them wonderful powers of things signified. Every voice therefore that is significant, first of all signifies by the influence of the celestial harmony; secondly, by the imposition of humans…However when both significations meet in any voice or name, which are put upon them by the said harmony or human, then that name is with a double virtue, viz. natural, and arbitrary, made most efficacious to act, as oft as it shall be uttered in due place, and time, and seriously with an intention exercised upon the matter rightly disposed, and that can naturally be acted upon by it. Therefore, names like signs in general, can be doubly powerful if they combine natural and arbitrary modes of signification. For Ancient Egyptians, the divine nature of the Universe was manifested in a multitude of ways. The process of syncretism, by which two or more deities were combined to form a single cult, was also central to religion in Ancient Egypt. Two of the most important deities, Amun and Ra, for example, were fused to create Amun-Ra, the god of creation. Amun-Ra means hidden light. He is the ultimate god of the entire Ancient Egypt; man of the Egyptians considered him as the God of Kings and King of Gods! He is the oldest and the most worshiped ruler of ancient Egypt. In the Ptolemaic Period (332-30 BC), Greek gods Zeus and Helios with Osiris and Apis, perhaps in a move towards political and cultural unity.  

The Ancient Egyptians worshiped a number of gods and goddesses, each of whom had different roles or functions, as well as a variety of creations myths. In keeping with the complex and varied nature of their religion, the Ancient Egyptians had several theories of the creation of the Universe. These creation myths evolved in the country’s major cult centres and usually concentrated on the role played by local gods. Ancient Egyptian theology rarely engages with the notion of the end of existence. Where it is mentioned, it is imagined as an apocalyptic destruction followed by a return to the state of the Universe before time began, in which only the gods Atum and Osiris survive. Along with the Sun god, Ra, Osiris, the primary god of the dead, was one of the most important deities in the pantheon. In Ancient Egyptian mythology, Osiris was killed by his evil brother Seth, and his dismembered body was mummified and resurrected by his wife, the Goddess Isis.  During the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC), the deceased pharaoh was identified with Osiris and was believed to experience rebirth in the same way that the murdered god did. During the First Intermediate period (2181-2055 BC), however, it seems that it became possible for commoners to be resurrected in the manner of Osiris, as a sort of ‘democratization of the afterlife’ took place. Mummification was designed to make the deceased resemble Osiris as much as possible, in the hope that this would ensure eternal life in the underworld. Osiris presided over the weighing of the Heart ceremony in the afterlife. In this ritual, the deceased made the negative confession, swearing that they had not committed any of a list of offences, then their heart was weighed against the feather of Maat, symbol of truth and harmony. Osiris judged the results of the ritual and was responsible for deciding whether the deceased was worthy of resurrection.  

The Winchester Mystery House

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Love, the gay child of sympathy and esteem, is, when attended by delicacy, the only happiness worth a reasonable human’s pursuit, and the choicest gift of Heaven. We do not and cannot see our World as a theater of conflict between supernatural powers, the demonic seeking to possess and destroy us, and God intervening to secure our salvation. Moreover, miracle stories lie at the very heart of New Testament belief: If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain (I Corinthians 15.17). Thus, the crucial question is: must a human, in order to be a Christian, commit oneself simultaneously to two mutually incompatible World pictures—that of twentieth century science and that of the first-century prescientific speculation? To attempt this is to make Christian belief unnecessarily difficult. It is equally unrewarding to view Christianity as a strictly and objectively historical religion and anxiously to sift all the evidence for and against the recorded events of the life of Christ. The evidence is substantial enough to show that Christ indeed lived and that he made a quite extraordinary impact upon certain contemporaries. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

However, if religious faith is to stand or fall with the historicity of, say, the birth stories of the Easter narratives, if its degree of assurance must rationally be tempered with the historical probabilities, the assurance will be pitifully uncertain, and faith will almost certainly fall. Some people may properly grant that a very large part of the New Testament message is couched in mythical language and does not record objective history. This mythical material is not, however, an embarrassment, and it need not be discarded. It can be interpreted as indirect description not of the cosmos but of the conditions and possibilities of human existence. Historical studies derive their real seriousness not from sheer factuality but from what they discover about viable ways of life and viable options for human decision. Among such options, the Christian gives pre-eminence to that displayed in the accounts of the cross and the resurrection.  For it is through these that God makes available a distinctively authentic and free mode of existence to all humanity. It is also believed that freedom is a privilege, not a right.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The only way one will have freedom is by obeying conditions and these conditions are both supernatural and human. The rules of God state that we must be good people and have right actions and thought and we will go to Heaven. The human laws state that we much behave sane and obey the laws to keep our privilege of freedom. What happens when we enter into the inner sense of the World? We leave the World of space and enter into the World of movement; the noun World is transformed into a verb. As spatial location is itself a quality of things, so motion from place to place is an objective fact. Our Sun is a star, and all of the stars give out without taking in. The aim of our soul is to increase porosity on the side of giving out and to reduce it on the side of taking in. A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved. However, all humans almost are villains in their hearts because we feel inauthentic life in and after the flesh, the life of the natural human who is alienated from God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

How Hell should become by degrees so natural, and not only tolerable but even agreeable, is a thing unintelligible but by those who have experienced it. The idea of eternal life is Hell is totally scary and this should be enough motivation for people to be good. Habit hath so vast a prevalence over the human mind, that there is scare anything too strange or too strong to be asserted of it. On the authentic type of existence, there is a total acceptance of the fundamental conditions of our life. This involves, for any human, a realization of one’s own death, not as some vague, unpleasant, but indefinite future event, but as something whose constant presence, in possibility, should modify one’s sense of one’s own existence at every moment. Christianity, too, speaks, of renouncing the World and a life entangled with the World, of dying to the life of self. It has, however—or ought to have—some very different thing to say about life eternal. People should see and accept the limitations on our freedom imposed by the given circumstances of our lives as so far lived (facticity); one sees the present moment as the locus of decision, and it is in the future that one will work out those authentic possibilities of existence for which one decides. Earth should not look like a halfway house. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

God speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our ignorance. We show our ignorance of Him in the very way we decide to serve Him. Are we worshipping God in a way that will raise us up to where we can take hold of Him, having such intimate contact with Him that we know His mind about the ones for whom we pray? If we are not heedful and pay no attention to the way the Spirit of God works in us, we will become spiritual hypocrites. We see other people failing, and then we take our discernment and turn it into ridicule and criticism, instead of turning it into intercession. Such projects are the manifestation of a crude and vulgar optimism that springs us from the arrogant and egotistical assumption that our time is the consummation of all time and tended to justify the crimes and disasters of previous ages as necessary to the promotion of what came afterward. The role of moral judgment in history and life cannot be spirited away in this complacent manner; but neither, on the other hand should we allow our views of the past to be distorted by moral predilection peculiar to our own time and society. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Be careful that you do not become a hypocrite by spending all of your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself. What is above all requisite for true historical understanding is a contemplative, disinterested sense of the abiding and tragic aspects of human existence. Only through such detachment from prevailing concerns and preoccupations could the historian transcend the barriers that separate the mental life of one age from that of another. It is not merely that work of art and culture that has provided us with the most fertile material for interpretation of previous phases of human experience; history itself was (or should be) a form of art. The mechanical piling up of the results of specialized research, dear to so-called scientific historians, is not enough; there must also be intuition, an imaginative ability to re-create the vision of life underlying the relics left by former times. Remember our way back to God takes a lot of work. When are born into the World, we sometimes forget our Godly ways, much like people with much like people with Dementia forget the World around them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

The Bible is a way for us to get back to God, much like how in the Netherlands, a radical idea is being tested. There are self-contained villages where people with dementia show, cook, and live together—safely. The village has things that will remind the Alzheimer’s suffers of the World they grew up in, there are Victorian houses, telephone booths, clock towers, cobble stone roads, and the village is closed to the outside World with gates and security fences. To see the past in these terms is to see it as the expression of the inexhaustible creative power of the human mind—great individuals, great artistic achievements, great moments of civilization all exemplified in different ways its potentialities.  So, this is how building and restoring your own faith in God will protect you from ways that are ungodly, it will surround you with God’s armor. Scholarship, painstaking investigation, are indeed essential, and they must be properly used and directed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Only thus could a particular source or authority throw light on the character of a person, the significance of a style, the pervasive atmosphere of a period. My experiences are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source of truth—God. Be relentless and hard on yourself if you are in the habit of talking about the experiences you have had. Faith based on experience is not faith; faith based on God’s revealed truth is the only faith there is. A new creed became mine—a belief in happiness. The wise order of providence has ordained that we shall makes others happy in being so ourselves. The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow. I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

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‘Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil, cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God’s people who need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of love position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: It is the Lord’s to avenge; He will repay. If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if one is thirsty, give one something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. There is hardly a greater difference in intellect between angel and human, than there is between human and human.   

The World is in conspiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us. The causes of violence, like the causes of poor health, do not usually begin in the body. They pass through it, and the marks they leave are often subtle and vague. Sometimes the illusion of knowing is more dangerous than not knowing at all. For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Many the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow God, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the Lord. Not being reconciled to the fact of sin—not recognizing it and refusing to deal with it—produces all the disasters in life. In your human relationships and friendships, have you reconciled yourself to the fact of sin? If not, just around the next corner you will find yourself trapped and you will compromise with it. However, if you will reconcile yourself to the fact of sin, you will realize the danger immediately. I have the person in whom kindness produces no responsive affection, and injustice no swell, no glow of resentment. The knowledge of all law goes but a little way to the discerning the justice of the cause.  

The World, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, one cannot fail to be sustained under one’s trials, and somehow or other to come at last; in which case, though we certainly do not expect it—nobody will be better pleased than we. Whereas, the World would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the most insufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and rendering them the less endurable. Error and evil are not harmonious and hence are not real, but it is equally clear that they are not nothing. Although error and evil are discordant and hence not real, it is possible that they contribute to the harmony of the whole, and if this is possible then we must conclude that it is so even though we do not know how it is possible. For what is possible, and what a general principle compels us to say must be, that certainly is.   

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Considering the Universe as a whole, both directions of time are still indistinguishable, just as space knows no above and below. Yet, at a specific point of the surface of the Earth, we call the direction towards the center the downward direction; in the same way, a living being dwelling in a certain time-phase of such a local World will distinguish the direction towards the more improbable state from the opposite direction, call the former the past, and the latter the future. This seems to be the only method which will allow us to conceive the Second Law of thermodynamics, which asserts the existence of irreversible processes which apparently cannot be explained by the atomic theory. It may well be that initial conditions leading to a reversal in motion are almost never realized in nature. Thus, just as the Universe is created and governed by one God, so both the church and state must be preserving administrative unity. However, since the church is the direct channel of communication between God and his creatures, the state and its subjects must be governed in moral affairs by the church.   

In purity and love have we genius; the Gospel gives beauty and holiness to the soul. There are two ways of life for the soul, one which is subject to the laws of fate and another which, although it recognizes these laws, is able to rise above them and uses them as tools.  You cannot hide the soul. The two great movements of the soul are the desire of honor and the fear of shame. Just as every variation of habit, of fashion is noticeable to those who live outside themselves, so the changes and complexities in the life of the soul are perceived by them who live within themselves. The soul does not measure time by seconds, nor yet by heartbeats, but by modifications in its own quality and character. The watches of the World may stop; the planets may cease to measure the flight of time; the body may retain its pristine vigor—but in an hour, a moment almost, the heart may grow antiquated, the being be transformed. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away.  

It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us.  It was the living death of my own soul that troubled me.  God will see to it that the innocent does not suffer in the afterlife. The conscious subject can be aware of other things only if it is capable at one and the same time of being modified and of remaining identical with itself, or inalterable. The solution of this apparent contradiction might lie in distinguished between consciousness, understood as thought or pure mentality, and sensibility. Consciousness neither is changed by the object nor changes it. The act of consciousness detaches the psychic event from its matrix in reality and thinks its possible essence or its possibility or quiddity or whatever you wish to call it. Upon investigation, both consciousness itself and the relation between the psychic mechanism external to consciousness would lose itself in an endless postponement but rather is a completed penetration of self, the fullness and richness of the activity of thought.   

Creation proceeds from God. All creatures, by an inevitable and eternal process, springs from the creative mind of God through a chain of intermediary causes of continually diminishing perfection. The whole of the cosmic machine was produced in time and from nothing, by one principle only who is supreme and whose power, through immense, still arranges all according to a certain weight, number and measure. It is to be noted that some reject the concept of the eternity of the World, of the eternity of matter, and of a dual principle of good and evil, and the existence of intermediary causes. The perfect power must be free to create varying degrees of perfection, and there is a measure, which suggests the seal of the Blessed Trinity is stamped on every creature. God is final cause and ultimate goal of human’s quest for happiness. Since the Father begets the Son by an external act of self-knowledge, the Son may also be called the wisdom of the Father and expresses in his person all of God’s creative possibilities. And enlightens everyone who comes into the World.   

From his [magisterial] chair in Heaven, Christ teaches us interiorly. If as the Philosopher, the knowable qua knowable is eternal, nothing can be known except through that Truth which is unshaken, immutable, and without limit. I believe this man to be nature’s mode, the exemplar which nature found to reveal the ultimate in human perfection. Christ is God’s model for humanity. He gives us the power of becoming child of God, and he is the one master of all the sciences. If God lacked the exemplar ideas, he would know only himself and nothing of the World. He would be only related to the World only as a final cause and not as a creator. And if that was the cause, there would be no explanations of the cycle of changes of the cosmos, the Universe would be ruled by determinism. However, then humans would no longer be a responsible agent; they would deserve neither reward nor punishment, and divine providence would be a myth. With the recognitions of exemplarism, on the other hand, the whole of creation takes on a sacramental character—this is, it becomes a material means of bringing the soul to God.   

Nature becomes the mirror of God, reflecting his perfections in varying degrees. Although we see only a shadowy likeness (umbra) of trace (vestigium) of the creation in inorganic substances and the lower forms of life, the soul of humans is God’s image (imago) and the angel his similitude (similitude). The recognition of God in nature begins in philosophy, but is continued and perfected in theology. If there are potential beings, then pure act must also exist; composite things imply the existence of something simple; the changeable can only coexist with the unchangeable. Knowing that these ten self-evident conditionals have their antecedents verified in the corporeal World, and explains much about God. The soul, possesses memory, intelligence, and will, and is an image of God, not only mirroring his spiritual nature, but the Trinity itself. Did you stop for a moment to about all of this? That kindly, Fatherly figure could never blame me for being led astray. He would never turn from me because of my minor transgressions.  

 

I have no doubt that the concept of beauty is rooted in the soil of sexual stimulation and signified originally that which is sexually exciting. Covering the body, which keeps abreast with civilization, continuously arouses the sexual curiosity and serves to supplement the sexual object by uncovering the hidden parts. This can be turned into the artistic (sublimation) if the interest is turned from the genitals to the form of the body. The tendency to linger at this intermediary sexual aim of the sexually accentuated looking is found to a certain degree in most normal; indeed, it gives them the possibility of directing a certain amount of their libido to a higher artistic aim. On the other hand, the desire for looking becomes a perversion when it is exclusively limited to the genitals; when it becomes connected with the overcoming of loathing (voyeurs and onlookers at the functions of excretion); and when instead of preparing for the normal sexual aim, it suppresses it. The latter, if I may draw conclusions from a single analysis, is in a most pronounced way true exhibitionists, who expose their genitals with the idea of bringing to view the genitals of others.

Analysis reveals that this perversion—just as most others—has an unexpected multiplicity of motivation and meanings. Exhibitionism, for instance, is strongly dependent upon the castration complex; it would emphasize again the integrity of one’s own (male) genitals and repeats the infantile satisfaction of the lack of the penis in the female. In the perversion, which consists in striving to look and to be looked at, we are even more intensively in the following aberration. The sexual aim exists here in a two-fold formation in an active and a passive form. The force which opposes the desire for looking and though which the latter is eventually abolished is shame (like the former loathing). The tendency to cause pain to the sexual object and its opposite, the most frequent and most significant of all perversions, was designated as sadism for the active form, and masochism for the passive form. The pleasure is secured in all kinds of humility and submission in the foreground.   

Destiny, it may be—the most skillful of stage managers—seldom chooses to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the presence of at least one calm observer.  Some dream of having their lover on all fours with one’s hand in his shirt, around his torso, gripping his cheeks, with their legs wrapped around waist, like a stripper lustfully hanging from a pole, dragging his crisp, white Sea Iceland cotton underwear, that are so soft you could mistake for cashmere or silk, down to his ankles, as they stare as his manhood which stands as erect as the Washington Monument—smooth, but with a juicy, pulsating-veined at the bottom looking like it is ready to erupt. As one holds it with both hands, kissing the length of it, feeling the warmth under one’s tongue, just before taking it into their pretty little mouth. As one he fills your mouth like no man has ever done before, robbing you of your breath. The roots of active algolagina, sadism, can be readily demonstrable in the normal individual. The sexuality of most men shows an admixture of aggression, of a desire to subdue, the biological significance of which lies in the necessity for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by actions other than mere courting. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6

Sadism would then correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and has been brought to the foreground by displacement.  The concept of sadism fluctuates in everyday speech from a mere active or impetuous attitude towards the sexual object to an absolute attachment of the gratification to the subjection and maltreatment of the object. Strictly speaking, only the last extreme case can calm the name of perversion. Too many men have chained themselves to a sexuality that is significantly detrimental to them and others, turning away from what could free them. What a gift it can be to them when other men decisively break this pattern and take a no-bullshit stand for sexuality that is rooted not in unresolved wounding, but in a potently embodied, open-eyed love. A love that makes it impossible to dehumanize or otherwise mistreat those we are being sexual with. A love that is passionate as it is awakened. A love that makes it possible to sexually shift from maximizing pleasure sensation to fully embodying an ecstatically open intimacy.  

There is so creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. All reality is mediation, or the subject-object relation, a dynamic relation that tends ultimately toward the final goal (Endziel) of the reunion of subject and object. As we know not future events, so neither can we tell to what purpose any accident tends; and that which at first threatens us with evil may in the end produce our good. The Urgrund, the primordial stuff prior to the distinction between subject and object, matter and spirit, is moved by an obscure immediate cosmic impulse, which is a hunger. Like busts in marble, so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time. After subject and object have been distinguished, this hunger remains essential to both subject and object. Thus, the reality of both subject and object is in the future, and the category of possibility comes to play a central role in one’s thought. Incidents little in human speculation are great in the eye of fortune.  

In humans, the primordial hunger becomes desire, or hope. Hope presents itself as utopia, as a vision of a possibility that might be realized. Hope is tension toward the future, toward the new. It moves from a mere state of mind (Stimmung) to a representation, and then to knowledge. Although hope is founded on the will, in order to be hope that understands (begriffene Hoffnung, docta spes), it must draw strength from something real that will survive even when hope itself is completely satisfied. One can no more resist the impulse of fate than a Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (a German luxury vehicle) can the force of its driver. This inertia makes hope something more than a project of reason and puts it in relation to what is objectively possible. The future possibility is not just a dream, even if it is heralded in dreams. By the analysis of dreams, we obtain some insight into the composition of this most marvelous and most mysterious know of the unconscious element in our psychic life.  

 

 

 

 

 It is right to be prepared for all things, and if trouble is sent, to remember as it is not sent without a cause. At a New Year’s Eve dinner the host, the patriarch of the family, ushered in the New Years with a speech. One of his sons-in-law, a lawyer, was not inclined to take the antiquated man seriously, especially when in the course of his speech he expressed himself as follows: “When I open the ledger of the Old Year and glance at its pages I see everything on the asset side and nothing, thank the Lord, on the side of liability; all you children have been a great asset, none of you a liability.” On hearing this the young lawyer thought of X., his wife’s brother, who was a cheat and a liar, and whom he had recently extricated from the entanglements of the law. That night, in a dream, he saw the New Year’s celebration once more, and heard the speech, or rather saw it. Instead of speaking, the antiquated man actually opened the ledger, but on the side marked “assets” he saw his name amongst others, but on the other side, marked “liability,” there was the name of his brother-in-law, X. However, the word “Liability” was changed into “Lie-Ability,” which he regarded as X’s main characteristic. The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for all of us.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

To stand after one’s death before one’s children great and undefiled: who would not wish that? If there were only one body in existence there could be no idea of motion, for motion is the change of position of two bodies relative to one another. Thus sensible qualities, without which there could be no bodies, are essential to the very conception of movement. Furthermore, since sensible qualities are passive existences, and hence bodies are too, movement cannot have it source in body; and as we know what it is to move our own bodies, we know that the source of motion must be found in the mind. Created spirits are responsible for only a small part of the movement in the World, and therefore God, the infinite spirit, must be its prime source. A man who nursed his father during his last illness, and who felt his death very keenly, dreamed some time afterwards that his father was again living, and conversing with him as usual, but (and this was the remarkable thing) he has nevertheless dies, though he did not know it. So too our conception of time is inseparable from our ideas in our minds and from the [articular actions and ideas that diversify the day.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

The young man who thought that he was having a conversation with his father was experiencing hypostatized abstraction, which is the belief in humankind’s eternal advance, and to disavow anything that does not fit this preordained vision. And so natural philosophy either presupposed the knowledge of God or borrows it from some superior science. The thesis that God is the ultimate source of motion is a special case of the principle that the only real cause are spirits. This principle has the general consequence, of course, the inanimate bodies cannot act causally upon one another. What are called natural causes are really signs of what follows them. Fire does not cause heat, but is so regularly followed by it that it is a reliable sigh of it as long as “the Author of Nature always operates uniformly.” The kinship of human passion, the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably touches the heart and charms them.  Must like the Crusades had their origin in a great impulse, and in a certain sense, led to great results, amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.  #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Natural laws describe but do not explain, for real explanations must be reference to the aims and purposes of spirits, that is, in terms of final causes. The dream of the man talking to his dead father is intelligible if, after he had nevertheless died, we insert in the consequence of the dreamer’s wish, and if after but he did not know it, we add that the dreamer had entertained the really compassionate thought that it would be a good thing if his father, was by miracle of God, well again. Because God is all powerful and can do supernatural things, mechanical explanations of movements in terms of attraction are misleading, unless it is recognized that they merely recorded the rates at which bodies in fact approach one another. While he was mourining his father’s death, this compassionate wish became an unconscious reproach to heal from the traumatic loss of his father. As a general thing, the dreams of a deceased person of whom the dreamer has been fond confront the interpreter with difficult problems, the solution of which is not always satisfying. The reason for this may be sought in the especially pronounced ambivalence of feeling which controls the relation of the dreamer to the dead person.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

After the loss of his father and tumultuous years afterwards, the dreamer felt like his heart was bleeding and would have pains in his heart when stretching and if he laughed from watching a funny movie.  In such situations, it could be the minds ways of trying to preserve the dreamer’s body by producing an image of the deceased person to be treated at first as living; then it suddenly appears that he is dead; and in the continuation of the dream he is once more living. This has a confusing effect. However, gravity or to force when these are regarded as explanations of the movements of the body do not deny the importance of Newton’s laws, for Newton did not regard gravity as a true physical quality, but only as a mathematical hypothesis. I at last divined that this alternation of death and life is intended to represent the wish of the dreamer (“It is all one to me whether he is alive or dead, as long as I can see him and talk to him.”) This manifestation is very intense and emotional and he rejects the idea that his father is dead. Forces and attractions are not found in nature but are useful constructions in the formulation of theories from which deductions can be made about what is found in nature, that is, sensible qualities or ideas.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

People have observed the intense bond of attachment that usually develops between a parent and their child, a bond that a mother or father enables one to pick up a hurt or frightened child and rapidly eliminate all external signs of pain and fear. So it is plausible that if someone feeds into a delusion of a person in mouring, they might believe that their father or another loved one has come back to life. We laugh at educated adults who pay large sums to go and play youthful games of touching and hug in scientific institutes, and we fail to see the signs. It is surely an extraordinary sign of our times that adults feel the need to relieve their loneliness by going to scientific institutes, and that they should need scientists to legitimize human intimacy. When a loved one dies and a person feels all alone, the human spirit is in distress and they are willing to believe almost anything if it would bring their loved one back. Someone preying on people who have lost a family member are despicable. Especially if that individual has moved beyond the pain and young come back only to remind them of how much it hurt to lose a father. We do not live in a solitary or purely objective World, nor can we live in isolation. We must learn to live together or increase our chances of dying prematurely.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Aristotle pointed out long ago that, “a man wholly solitary would be either a God or a brute.” There is a brutality in many modern human relationships that directly stems from their very objectivity and pervasiveness of such relationships in our culture is an omnipresent testimony to our interpersonal brutality. A purely objective relationship between two human beings can be brutal precisely because it is detached from human feelings—it is a relationship that by definition creates distance, loneliness, and estrangement, and which can, at its worst, permit completely inhumane actions. Medicine, as an adviser to our society, can help restore respect for the healing power of human companionship and can help people see that they too can prevent and cure loneliness—induced disease by simply caring for one another. Foggy-eyed romanticists might want to believe that a loved one will come back from the dead, and the Bible preaches that one day they will. However, be wise enough to know that anyone who loves you would not torment and use and abuse you and laugh at you in their distress, while boasting about how good their life is, and watching you suffering. We must learn that healing is an affair of the heart.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

 The Winchester Mystery House

Your steps echo down the long hall of this historical Victorian mansion. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

A person may go to Heaven with half the pain which it costs one to purchase hell. An ascetic renunciation of the World and its life—and even of the will to survive in life—may be named, as the best-known discipline of peace that has been proposed, as yet, to mankind. And if one may judge from the historic circumstances of its original pronouncement, it arose—or at least caught on—as a response to a desperate general sense of things falling apart. Whatever philosophy and experience may pretend on such subjects, it is certain that humans are disposed to be superstitious in respect to the secret influenced that guide their fortunes, in the dark passage of the World. It is not the persecution, but the catastrophe which is annexed to it, that makes the difference between the tyrant and the sufferer. In mere corporal exertion, the hunter into a new state. Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.  For now, we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Right now, you may not see all clearly. You are only looking at it in part. However, one day it will come into focus.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

Some people oppose those individualist theories of the state that invoke concepts of the social contract and of natural rights, and, on the other, all natural law and organic theories of the state. Persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. Natural rights have some key ideas that all humans are created equal and have inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Few will deny that a genuine revival of Natural Law has occurred everywhere in the Western World. Natural law means that the State is not only an association of associations, but it is the highest natural association. Humans are basically good and the functioning of the states is to develop our good faculty into a habit of actions. The organic theory of society is entertained by nearly every serious thinker of the present time. Everyone seems ready to declare, although often with some reservations, that society is an organism; in other words, humans and nature are one, and so, among many other things, that no device or institution of human life is free from conditions of change. These principles all for the social contract theory.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

Some arguments of the social contract theory have suspicion of it and these suspicions are increased by its being one of those legal fictions in which some see have the root of so much evil. Player are heroes upon the stage; but beggars, sots, or prostitutes in their private lodgings. It was not asserted that every citizen had in fact contracted to obey the law, but only that they should be deemed to have so contracted. However, this is mischievous unless obeying the laws does in fact make for the general happiness. The principle of utility, then, is the real basis of obedience. To suppose anything else is misleading, since it suggests that the individual need not obey any law to which one has not personally assented—a principle that, if taken seriously, could lead only to anarchy. Therefore, to say that humans have inalienable rights is nonsense on stilts, when the assertion is made by way of protest against a government that has in fact alienated right. There would be no need for revolutions if humans were in fact equal, as they are asserted to be: what is meant is that they ought to be treated as equal but as not. Yet each life has equal value. What is a country village without its mysterious personage?  #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

Things unserviceable in one way may with advantage be applied in another.  If we take the doctrine of natural rights as a statement of what governments ought to do, it will be found untenable. No government could continue to govern if it abstained from ever depriving any of its citizens of life, liberty, or property (still less of happiness), since taxation and punishment would then be impossible. So indeed, would law itself, since any law is a restriction on liberty. The only principle that can be justified to the extent that it is backed by coercion, is that the law should not impose restriction on any individual unless this is necessary to avoid greater pain, on balance, to other individuals: in short, the principle of utility. The civilized life of individuals start from the family reaches its top in form of state. Therefore, the family is the starting point and state is the last point of human development. Although most of the needs are fulfilled in family, villages and tribes but the super sufficient life is not possible without state. Therefore, state is a natural requirement of human uplift. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

State is the super-most and top human institution that is a sovereign body and it works for comforting its citizens. Whether bread be cheap or dear do not much signify, if we have nothing to buy it with. States exists for the establishment and preservation of a perfect and healthy life. The State provides a safe and sound environment to enable its people to use their capabilities and potentials for the common good and welfare. Denial of natural law is confusing. Many people wonder how could natural law literally be law, so that an enactment that contravenes it is null and void. This would mean that the supreme governors who makes the laws have a legal duty not to make certain kinds of law. However, that this is my duty to do, which I am liable to be punished, according to law, if I do not do…Have these supreme governors any such duty? No: for if they are at all liable to punishment, according to law…then they are not, what they are supposed to bee, supreme governors. What is meant, doubtless, is that they have either a religious duty or a moral duty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

A religious duty is one whose neglect renders one liable to punishment by God, and a moral duty is one whose neglect renders one liable, not to punishment in a strict sense, but to various unorganized mortifications and inconveniences at the hands of one’s fellow citizens. This is in line with the moral sanctions, which is the fear of public opinion. In this sense, moral duties are certainly political realities: and the ruler is limited by what public opinion will tolerate. However, this is distinguishing from a legal limitation, and both from a nebulous law. Therefore, the legislator ought to make those laws that promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It is clear that a law that, on balance, causes more suffering than it prevents is not necessarily one so unpopular that it provokes the citizens to active resistance. We have at least one moral right: the right to have one’s happiness considered equally with that of other humans. This is clearly not the same as the fact that humans will seek their own happiness, nor does it follow from the further fact that the legislator, seeking his or her own happiness, will see to it, if he or she is wise, that one does not provoke one’s subjects too far.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

When a door closes, you do not know what God is saving you from. If your prayers are not answered the way you want, instead of being discouraged or feeling like God let you down, why do you not have a more comprehensive perspective? You may be discouraged because your plans have not worked out, but those closed doors were not an accident. That was God directing your steps. The reason God closed them is because He has something better in store for you. Will you trust Him? Gods ways are not our ways. They are better than our ways. There will be times when a door closes and you cannot understand why? You may be experiencing that right now. However, will you stay in faith while you wait to see what God is up to? This one bright young man who was in the top five percent of the nation had a dream to become an engineer. However, when he applied for graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California-Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, and others, he was turned down again and again, while some of his friends with lower grades and even undocumented citizens were accepted. He could not understand it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

It had been a bleak few months, for a lot of reasons. He could hardly write through the tears. He crumpled up the poems he had been writing since December and tossed them into the flames. While this well-educated, but distraught young man was waiting, he went on a mission trip with a group of doctors from his church. When he saw the doctors taking care of the people, treating their injuries and aliments, something new was birthed on the inside.  It was like a ray of Sunshine through the clouds. He did not want to be an engineer anymore. He wanted to become a doctor. After he returned home, he applied to medical school and was immediately accepted. God closed the doors to the engineering school on purpose, to open the doors into his divine destiny. God is wonderful in His design and excellent in His working. Believer, God overrules all things for your good. The needs-be for all that you have suffered has been most accurately determined by God. Your course is all mapped out by your Lord. Nothing will take Him by surprise. There will be no novelties to Him. There will be no occurrences which He did not foresee, and for which, therefore, He has not provided. He has arranged all, and you have but to patiently wait, and you shall see an extraordinary deliverance.  #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

 

Sailing with sealed orders, we ourselves are the repositories of the secret packet, whose mysterious contents we long to learn. There are not mysteries out of ourselves. Dear Father in Heaven, You are amazing! Thank you, God, for loving me so much that certain prayers have not been answered. You have not allowed certain people into my life whom I really wanted, because they would have limited my growth. I know that God is in complete control. There is no power greater than the power of God. I believe that my destiny is ordered by God. I know that new opportunities will arise in my life and I will keep a good attitude. I am moving forward in faith, knowing that God has my best interest at heat. I believe the reason God block certain opportunities is because something better is in store. Sometimes we have to realize that God did not break his promise to us, he just needed to delay its fulfillment. The bounty of thoughts, however, will remain undiminished. Far sweeter are mysteries than Sunrises: though the mystery be unfathomable, it is still the unfathomableness of fullness; but the surmise, that is but shallow and unmeaning emptiness.  #RandolphHarris 9 of 9

The Winchester Mystery House

 The spirits come to life once more as tourist explore Mrs. Winchester’s home. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

Artists and scientists deal with the same World, but they differ in their intellectual attitudes and in the techniques they use to recognize and describe objects, person, and events. Artists focus their attention on private experiences, scientists on the generic aspects of nature. This difference in attitudes is so fundamental that the aspects of the World with which science and art are respectively concerned have little in common. Sometimes the idea of being a hip party person who is in the nightclub living it up, listening to techno opera, and talking to swanky people about work, vacations, and all the nice things our sweetheart is doing for us. In a party scene, the feeling type often brings a sense of enthusiasm, joy, conviviality, companionship and togetherness. However, is that all we are? It is enough for us to absorb the teachings of our society, its rules and norms, its definitions and its roles? What of joy? Fear? Anger? What of personal satisfaction, or thrill, risk, all powerful feelings? 

 We really need to look at these and other emotions that are such an essential part of being human. However, in our computer-oriented, information-valuing society, emotions and emotional people are often ridiculed. It is not usually a compliment when you describe someone as emotional. Some of us are the thinking type, in cognitive mode, which is one that focuses on reason, scientific method, logical thinking is dominate. These types of people are inclined to deal with nearly every type of situation and experience as Mr. Spock did, much like a proper computer and not some much emotion nor sarcasm. The sensing organs and the process of picking up information (sensations) through the sense is helpful because human beings are not robots! Human beings are not mechanical or machine like. They have a full range of emotional responses, and if we were honest most of us would admit that we would prefer a bit more feeling in the people around us.  

 Being human (and not a humanoid), we are all emotional, though we may deny it. We all have emotional responses to events and people and potentials for far more feelings than we often express. I actually want a career, but I also know that I need to rest and enjoy life. I feel like I am just waiting and waiting and waiting, and I wonder when the Universe will finally reward me for the good that I have done. I am a good person. I find myself attractive and I like to be happy. When I was younger, I remembered thinking I never wanted to do the same thing every day. I wanted to travel and get around and be a businessperson. And by the time I turned 30, I envisioned I would be in a nice white, two story house, with wood siding, with navy blue, Atlantic premium wood shutters on the exterior, emerald green grass, every green trees, a white picket fence, a BMW sedan and Sports Utility vehicle, and a convertible in the garage, a wife, two kids, hardwood floors, Royal Palace French provincial furniture, lots of windows, and real mahogany wood panels on the walls, with a basement, and a secret passage way in the house. However, I am not sure what I really want, some I am just going to leave that in God’s hands.

 We have to judge between alterative courses of action to consider the consequences of each, in terms of the pleasure and pain of all the people affected. Let us suppose, for example, that I am trying to decide whether to take my small nephew to the circus or to spend my evening at the house with a book. I know that the circus will bore me: I may estimate this boredom at, let us say, 5 units of pain; i.e. -5 units of pleasure. I will, on the other hand, gain some sympathetic pleasure from watching the small boy’s pleased excitement, though not enough, certainly, to compensate for my boredom. I may put this at +2 units of pleasure. However, the boy may be expecting to gain great pleasure from the outing: perhaps 10 units. Taking the child to the circus, then, may be expected to yield (10+2) – 5 units of pleasure; i.e., 7 units. Now, consider the alternative. A quiet evening at the house, though pleasurable, does not transport an adult as much as an evening out does a child: perhaps we may evaluate it at 6 units. My pleasure will be spoiled a little, too, by the sympathetic pain that knowledge of my nephew’s disappointment itself: since both the pains and pleasures of childhood are intense, we may put it at – 8 units. To stay at the house, then, will cause 6 – 2 – 8 units of pleasure, i.e., 4 units of pain. 

The first is clearly the one that will contribute most to the sum of happiness. It is then, the right action in these circumstances. Its rightness is not an intrinsic characteristic, but it depends entirely on its consequences in any given case: if I found the circuses more boring, or the nephew found them less pleasant, staying at the house might become the right action. This is, of course, a comparatively crude example. This type of ingenuity and refining calculus and working out these implications are important for legal reform. Punishment, for example, must be just harsh enough to deter, and no harsher. Any more pain than is necessary for this purpose is unjustifiable. On the other hand, too lenient a punishment is a worse evil, since the pain inflicted on the criminal, being insufficient to deter, will not be counterbalanced by the pain spared future victims of similar crimes. We have just begun to open up the Pandora’s box of surprises that awaits us in the study of our social World. The culture has a tremendously important influence upon us, giving us stuff to put in our near-empty minds at birth, refining and guiding, bullying and encouraging us, so that we will turn out to be pretty much what society needs us to be.

Sometimes no process is superior to the others, though one is probably more appropriate and useful than the others at a given time and situation. It is important to experience life and to relate to the World in terms of emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, of memories, of past and present feelings about a situation. Experiences are good and bad, pleasurable and unpleasureable—but we cannot just take them passively. I know I am blessed and I see you are happier, and that is nice. In the moral realm, freedom has grown so that many choices which were either controlled by law or churchly dictate are personal choices. The right to plan the number of children a family shall have…[and] such choices as drinking, non-criminal gambling, have becomes choices the individual has a right to make. One of our goals as humans is to help other individuals round out their personality so that they are not exclusively one type or another. It seems to me that if we are going to live sanely, then we must respect and be sensitive to differences, realizing that no two individuals are alike, and that is we really understand someone, we understand how one differs from us I really know one thing for such that would make me happy, a big house in the suburbs and privacy.  

 

 The Winchester Mystery House

Come explore the history and lore behind The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/