Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Edwardian amenities of an upperclass household, Tony came to the conclusion that neither his father nor mother was totally right or wrong, "but if you went to life with all your senses open, with your body as well as your mind, with your own fresh feelings instead of abstract laid-down ones, then indeed all men were your enemies...
...spoke no English, painstakingly tabulated his findings. He even listed the quarrels during his stay (43). their ten causes, from insults to insanity. In "the 1,477 minutes spent on matters not directly connected with the life and experience of the talkers." he found the most popular topics were "abstract scientific discussions, economics and government, religion and philosophy, sex from a factual standpoint"; least popular topics were exploration and sporting events. His conclusion: "When I picture the life in the North and here, I say-my stomach is better off here but my mentality lives its best up there...
...This, while on the surface the first section, called Sociological, of the book is a history of the gradual realisation in fact of the Platonic-Christian ideal of the dignity of the human soul, it is, underneath, a justification of Professor Whiteheadi's extreme rationalism, showing that the most abstract ideas, if they are of the right sort, do eventually have a strictly every-day usefulness. The second section, likewise, is a history of cosmologies, on the surface, but the purpose of this history is to demonstrate, first, the necessity of having a cosmology, and, second, that the shortcomings...
...Whitehead student and to the uninitiated. But the title "Adventures of Ideas" should not mislead any one into believing that it is a popularization of Professor Whitehead's ideas. It stands on exactly the same level with the two other members of the trilogy; yet it is not as abstract and difficult to understand as the others, because it deals largely with historical studies...
...narrow and shortsighted is this interpretation of the nature of things; he demonstrates how only a colossal blindness could load one to tenore the fact that Civilization is essentially a humanly-created achievement of harmony amidst the brute Force of Nature; he tells the amazing story of how abstract ideas become men's ideals and how men's ideals become realized in the material forms of the world. In short be offers ideals to a world which has so tragically despaired of them...