classics digests, reflections and reviews
Preface The Prolegomena is a preface to (and summary of) the Critique of Pure Reason. I’ll be publishing a series of posts on these books, as I work through them. Kant acknowledges in the Prolegomena that he has been roused by Davi Hume from “dogmatic slumber”. Hume argues that concepts such as cause and effect are invalid as they not based on experience, and so the study of metaphysics and […]
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It is my regular custom, my lord, to refer to you all questions which cause me doubt, for who can better guide my hesitant steps or instruct my ignorance? I have never attended hearings concerning Christians, so I am unaware what is usually punished or investigated, and to what extent. I am more than a little in doubt whether there is to be a distinction between ages, and to what […]
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When I was last in my native district a son of a fellow townsman of mine, a youth under age, came to pay his respects to me. I said to him, “Do you keep up your studies?” “Yes,” said he. “Where?” I asked. “At Mediolanum,” he replied. “But why not here?” I queried. Then the lad’s father, who was with him, and indeed had brought him, replied, “Because we have […]
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I was delighted to find that you are so zealous a student of my uncle’s books that you would like to possess copies of them all, and that you ask me to give you a complete list of them. I will play the part of an index for you, and tell you, moreover, the order in which they were written: “Throwing the Javelin from Horseback,” one volume; this was composed, […]
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On Harvesting the Mind My Tuscan farms have been lashed by hail; from my property in the Transpadane region I get news that the crops are very heavy but the prices rule equally low, and it is only my Laurentian estate that makes me any return. It is true that all my belongings there consist of but a house and a garden, yet it is the only property which brings […]
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君不见黄河之水天上来，奔流到海不复回。 君不见高堂明镜悲白发，朝如青丝暮成雪。 人生得意须尽欢，莫使金樽空对月。 天生我材必有用，千金散尽还复来。 Behold, waters of the Yellow River, coming down from heaven, running to the sea, never to return. Behold, and lament, white hair in the hall mirror, in the morning it is black like silk, in the evening turns to snow. When a man has full possession of his wits/wishes, he should rejoice to the utmost. Never let the golden chalice be empty, under the gaze of […]
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As a great humanist and artist, Tolstoy was deeply aware of and sympathetic to the prevailing feelings of the common people, although he was an eminent member of the Russian aristocracy. In these essays written between 1890 and 1910, the year of his death, the constant theme is the struggle between his conscience and pacifist convictions, and the society of violence from which he could not extricate himself, and for […]
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