Translating

'An idea need have no intrinsic reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode. But any idea that has representative reality must surely come from a cause that contains at least as much intrinsic reality as there is representative reality in the idea. For if we suppose that an idea contains something that was not in its cause, it must have got this from nothing; yet the kind of reality that is involved in something’s being represented in the mind by an idea, though it may not be very perfect, certainly isn’t nothing, and so it can’t come from nothing. It might be thought that since the reality that I am considering in my ideas is merely representative, it might be possessed by its cause only representatively and not intrinsically. That would mean that the cause is itself an idea, because only ideas have representative reality. But that would be wrong. Although one idea may perhaps originate from another, there can’t be an infinite regress of such ideas; eventually one must come back to an idea whose cause isn’t

Habit of mind

'..the doubt of one who would rather walk in mystery than in false lights, who awaits that he may win, and who prefers the broken fragments of truth to the imposing completeness of a delusion.'

Stubborn truth

When Jean Piaget conducted his famous experiments on object permanence-in which once an object was covered up, the baby seemed to forget about it-Piaget concluded that the baby had been unable to store the memory of the object: out of sight, out of mind. The paradigm of the perpetual present has now itself been forgotten. Even infants are aware of the past, as many remarkable experiments have shown. Babies can’t speak but they can imitate, and if shown a series of actions with props, even 6-month-old infants will repeat a three-step sequence a day later. Nine-month-old infants will repeat it a month later.

Roving thoughts

'It was a hot and suffocating day. The windows were all flung open, but there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze, not even the slightest wind coming in from outside. Chekhov sat at his writing desk, immersed in his thoughts. I gazed at his tired, mournful eyes, trying to make a sketch of his head tilting to one side. His mind was on his work, but his face looked drawn, and his features—it seemed to me— were dissolving into the air. He had a kind of curve in his spine, and his entire posture indicated that he was exhausted. He had lost a lot of weight, and he looked gaunt. His posture, including his tilted head, his tired face, the tense movements of his thick hands – all this asserted that this was a person listening to his inner voice, to a voice which a strong, healthy man would never hear, due to the process of the illness going on inside of him. It was very difficult for me to look upon the features of a person so very sick. Yet, at the same time, the experience was invaluable for the entire country. “Have you found anything worth painting?” he asked me about his portrait. I looked at his somber face and replied, “No. It does not look anything like what I wanted to depict. You seem too sad and tired in this portrait.” “Then let us leave it as it is. Please, do not change anything. The first impression is always the most truthful.”'

Droite à gauche

À gauche et tout droit

Reasoning

"shift mental pathways and open possibilities for what the brain can do."

-An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)

-A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)

-A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

Read the four sentences below, and ask yourself which one you like the best. 1. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you enraged. 2. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you charcoaled. 3. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you poured. 4. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you madded. The first sentence should elicit a normal reaction. The brain recognizes that it makes sense, unlike the next two lines, which the brain rejects. The fourth line is an example of functional shift, which is taken from King Lear. Your brain is now thanking Shakespeare.

kernel of truth

And that's the danger of stereotypes, is, the danger of stereotypes is that we use them and then we stick too closely to them, and we're unwilling to revise our impressions afterwards, on the basis of new information. And the other danger is that we think those stereotypes may exist for some good reason, whereas it may not be a good reason for their existence.

Excerpt

It is clear now that his infatuation with the singer — the word is not too strong — has been no passing fancy but constitutes an all-consuming passion. With his new book, Ricks reminds us, on virtually every page, that the word ‘fan’ derives from ‘fanatic.’ All of Ricks’s impressive analytical strengths are on display in Dylan’s Visions of Sin. There is no song, no lyric, no mumbled comment from an interview with Bob Dylan, all cited here with excruciating exactitude, that does not elicit from this most acute of auditors some elaborate and, at times, almost comically inflated gloss. Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Keats, Larkin, and many others are adduced to shore up his case. While Ricks’s learning and range of reference remain as impressive as always, the very scale of the enterprise overwhelms its subject. It is hard to think of any singer or composer, however brilliant or original, whose work could stand up to the claims Ricks makes for Dylan: Schubert would have quailed with dismay, Noel Coward would for once have been speechless.

Weekenduri