TWENTY PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES
David Lindsay
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42. Dreams, music,
moments of heroism and self-sacrifice, the sadness of great joy, pride in
past suffering, etc., reveal that the original nature of the Will is not
pleasure, but sublimity.
87. Love is commoner
than sympathy; but the combination of the two is the rarest of all.
102. Beethoven's four
Symphonies, 3, 5, 7 & 9, illustrate his passage from without to
within. The 3rd is historical, the 5th autobiographical, the 7th
sensational, the 9th psychical.
163. The Sublime is
not a mood, but a state of soul, which is reached beyond a certain level
of feeling, like the boiling-point in liquids.
212. A cool head
never hurt any affair.
244. Old crumbling
walls and ancient courtyards create an 'atmosphere' but this is false:
vital nature alone is real.
278. The Viking
spirit:- to treat death, pain, work, trouble, etc. as jokes; this is
certainly the easiest way to get through the world.
284. Imagination
without study is the self-indulgence of the intellect.
336. Dreams tell us
that the imagination is richest when it is unforced. Further, as pleasure
is imagination, the pleasure we will is far inferior in quality to the
pleasure which occurs naturally. The problem for the votary of pleasure is
thus, how to procure pleasure without seeking it.
345. The after-world
is disbelieved in because no man paints it in vivid colours. If, instead
of delicately hinting at a spectral heaven, the writer or speaker would
boldly describe a state more real than reality, who would wish to play the
sceptic?
357. Up to the present
there is no Beethoven of literature.
359. Every
quality has two opposites: verbal and real. For example, the verbal
opposite of purity is corruption; the real opposite is complexity.
The verbal opposite of wildness is tameness; the real
opposite is gregariousness.
361. The Egyptian
religion more nearly approached reality than any other; its two doctrines
are the Immense, and Variety. The first aimed at producing feelings of awe
and unearthly grandeur; the second expressed, by means of its various
divinities, the Variety of the eternal world; which is not One, or God, or
the Many, or gods; but the All, Different, and Ever-Changing, from which
earthly variety is derived.
375. There is no more
vital experience known to us than perfume.
393.
The best moment for work or study never arrives; one should
therefore work whenever one can.
399. New experiences
should be sought, and not shirked.
402. Deep, clear,
flowing streams are peculiarly attractive to the creative mind of the
artist; for they represent his own nature: - the outer world reproduced,
yet beautified.
431. The conception of
Mozart as a delicate, gay and childlike genius is false. His best and most
characteristic music is powerful, stern and austere.
432. Savageness is a
vice of the will, but a virtue of the intellect.
486. When luck
is persistently cruel, it is time to be resourceful; and when friends
stand aloof, it is time to buy a good servant.