Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life with living populations and all their pressures and counter pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves. The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no high-minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper. The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.
|
A moment's thought shows that man's feeling of isolation has no foundation, biologically or sociologically. We grow out of the Universe, we are an expression of it. The iron in our blood comes from the high temperature fusion of stars. We constantly interact with our environment. The force of gravity keeps our feet upon the earth and has a vital effect upon our metabolism. The air we breathe comes form the seas and the leaves, and the sun allows the process to take place. Society gives us all that makes us human our culture, our symbols, our concepts and our values. Without society, the notion of the individual would have no meaning.
|
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.
|
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts
|
Reactance theory does not address how harmful or innocuous control can be and may seem to be too circumscribed to explain the nature of general harmful behavior. However, the limitations of its scope to specific and reactive control motivation do not detract from its power to explain battles for control dynamics. It is formulated to anticipate these specific incidents and, in doing so, addresses harm in general. With this purpose and the applicability of reactance theory in mind, the terms control and specific control are used interchangeably and, because reactance is control motivation, the terms reactance and control motivation are also used interchangeably. A control model, subsuming these concepts and general control, is introduced next, in which control (unless identified by a general control descriptor) is the belief in the freedom to engage in a specific nonharmful or harmful behavior to reach a specific nonharmful or harmful goal that can be exercised for a variety of reasons, most particularly when threatened or taken away, arousing reactance in proportion to its distinctiveness and importance.
|
Only a human being who is deeply moved by awe and who remains in a state of reverence does not fall prey to the will-to-explore-and-dominate that which shows itself to him, but remains all ears and eyes for the summons of the awe-inspiring phenomena. The awe-inspired person does not want to get hold of or to possess what he reveres, with the aid of his intellectual concepts. He seeks only to get himself into the frame of mind appropriate to the revered object--one which renders him open to its summons and makes his vision clear for its beckonings. He knows: if he manages to comply with the phenomenon that is worthy of his awe so perfectly that he catches sight of its entire truth, he has succeeded also in releasing himself from the chaos of all delusions.
|
All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences. On the other hand, however, they are products of the spontaneous activity of our minds they are thus in no wise logical consequences of the contents of these sense-experiences. If, therefore, we wish to grasp the essence of a complex of abstract notions we must for the one part investigate the mutual relationships between the concepts and the assertions made about them for the other, we must investigate how they are related to the experiences.
|
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
|
Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers -- they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.
|
We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.
|
They are the best team in the league right now. There's not much more to say about what makes them tough --versatility, execution and understanding of concepts.
|
Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.
|
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
|
Internalization. This occurs when you've exploited impact, when you've molded the standard material to your needs and made it yours, when you've made your new skills strong through hard use. All of a sudden these new concepts stopped churning within you, and a new reality is born: You and the concepts are one. They have literally become you. You have become them.
|
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...
|
Vices are character traits. Sins are specific acts of commission or omission. Once Judaism and Christianity adopted the concepts of vice and virtue from the Greek and Roman moralists, vices were often called sins and sins vices. The seven deadly
|
The physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations for he himself knows best and feels most surely where the shoe pinches.... he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified... The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
|
Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
|
It's not just a revue where one song is done, then another. There are concepts and ideas at work.
|
Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.
|
Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
|
Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.
|
Since open-mindedness and experimentation are supposed to be the indispensable attributes of our 'scientific' civilization, it seems strange that so many scientists are reluctant to try out personally the hypothesis that God came first and man afterward. They prefer to believe that man is the chance product of evolution; that God, the Creator, does not exist. I can only report that I have experimented with both concepts and that, in my case, the God concept has proved to be a better basis for living than the man-centered one. Nevertheless, I would be the first to defend your right to think as you will. I simply ask this question: in your own life, have you ever really tried to think and act as though there might be a God? Have you experimented?
|
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
|
Authenticity matters little, though our willingness to accept legends depends far more upon their expression of concepts we want to believe than upon their plausibility.
|
We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace requires a world of new concepts, new definitions.
|
In the world of human thought generally, and in physical science particularly, the most important and fruitful concepts are those to which it is impossible to attach a well-defined meaning.
|
It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature ... In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
|
All the fundamental concepts which make up the kind of people we are today had their modern conception in the Tudor and Stuart periods. For us, that's the milk in the coconut.
|
Authenticity matters little, though--our willingness to accept legends depends far more upon their expression of concepts we want to believe than upon their plausibility.
|