Word: propter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There was a hint, through post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning, that one reason for giving us the bums' rush lay in the fact that I had spent part of the year in writing a book about a Third Avenue bar [Third Avenue, New York; Little, Brown; $2]. This is close, but no cigar; I understand that in reality, my failure to report three times weekly in Tim Costello's Social Register Saloon on Third Avenue, a grogshop sometimes known as the Almanac de Gotha Bar & Grill, was one cause of my dismissal...
...Post hoc ergo propter hoe" will be the cry this morning after the Battling Scribes of 14 Plympton Street, champions to these many years of the Inter-Journalistic Simon Pure Touch Football League, meet the lowly kittens of the Princetonian in the field of combat. All editors are requested to turn out for the game in Dave Colter's office at 10 o'clock...
Simple in essence, but by no means so simple as they sound, Mr. Propter's ideas boil down to this: "Time and craving, craving and time-two aspects of the same thing; and that thing is the raw material of evil." Good, impossible within time, exists only on the animal level and on the level of eternity, of "pure, disinterested consciousness." That level is attained in the loss of wilfulness, of desire, of personality...
With that leverage on good and evil, talking with a rational clarity most mystics have lacked, Mr. Propter makes moral mincemeat of everything in sight, "good" or "bad," within the purely human sphere of endeavor. Some of his enemies-war and fascism-are popular pushovers. Others will leave Propter few takers. A partial list of targets for his dialectic: politics, capitalistic society, organized religion, romantic love, science, socialism, humanitarianism, language, virtue, selfless devotion, sex, art-in brief, all activities on the purely human plane, however disinterested, are productive only of evil...
...believe," remarks Propter, "that, if you want the golden fleece, it's more sensible to go to the place where it exists than to rush round performing prodigies of valour in a country where all the fleeces happen to be coal-black...