Ethics could teach us only those purposes and ideals. If the teachers seeks insight into the means by which the aim can be reached, into the facts by which the child can be molded, his way must lead from ethics to psychology. (...) Water flows downhill, anyhow, but to bring the water uphill hydraulic forces are indeed necessary. To overcome nature and instead to prepare for a life of ideals, to inhibit personal desires and instead to learn to serve the higher purposes indeed demands most serious and most systematic efforts. It is the teachers' task to make these efforts with all his best knowledge of mind and body, of social and of cultural values.
Hugo MunsterbergRelated topics
aim best body child downhill ethics insight knowledge lead learn life mind nature necessary overcome personal prepare psychology serve social task teach uphill water way means higher facts forcesRelated quotes
It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age. Science builds its structure of hypothetical "elements" and laws of their behavior, touching on reality at crucial points.... But the historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.
Susanne Langer
The second conception of the world via the medium of matter required both a visual and a tactile perception of things. In this case the whole design process tends to emanate from the specific characteristics of the respective medium used. The leader of this movement (Tatlin) assumed.... that the intuitive and artistic mastery of materials would lead to inventions on the basis of which objects could be constructed. He believed he could prove this theory with his design for the 'Monument to the Third International' (1920), [never built]. He accomplished this task without having any special technical knowledge of construction.
El Lissitsky
Giacomo Rizzolatti... calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization-the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. ...one can see a whole new area of biology opening up... that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might... teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders.
Eric Kandel
They [universities] may be said to resemble antiquated coquettes of the last age, who think everything ridiculous and intolerable but what was in fashion when they were young, and yet are standing proofs of the progress of taste and the vanity of human pretensions. Our universities are, in a great measure, become cisterns to hold, not conduits to disperse knowledge. ... they can only be of service as a check-weight on the too hasty and rapid career of innovation. ... The unavoidable aim of all corporate bodies of learning is not to grow wise, or teach others wisdom, but to prevent any one else from being or seeming wiser than themselves.
William Hazlitt
Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea ... can be understood as a series of failed campaigns to contain Darwin;s idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming.
Daniel Dennett
