Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of ef…

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Bene…

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There wo…

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own; and if no …