... ethical and cannot be reached by any who have not trod the long ethical road. Below hides that secret of good in all things which the human being approaches and tries to deliver partially through ethical instinct and ethical idea; above is hidden the eternal Good which exceeds our partial and fragmentary ethical conceptions. Our ethical impulses and activities begin like all the rest in the infrarational... to make us understand, so that the will may come to use the ethical impulses intelligently and turn the instincts into ethical ideas. It corrects man's crude and often erring misprisions of the ethical instinct, separates and purifies his confused associations, shows as best it can the relations of his often clashing moral ideals, tries to arbitrate and compromise between their conflicting claims, arranges ...
... taken only these because these two subjects are very interesting, apart from all the others: beauty and the good. Page 172 Beauty is the aesthetic instinct of man, and the good is his ethical instinct, and these two things are very important in human education and growth; and that is why I have chosen these two chapters for you. But to have the full development of the idea you must read the ...
... Nature permits or stimulates its opposite,—or perhaps Truth and Righteousness are themselves God and there is no other Divinity. But, behind all this practical or rational enforcement of the human ethical instinct, there is a feeling that there is something deeper: all these standards are Page 631 either too narrow and rigid or complex and confused, uncertain, subject to alteration by a mental ...
... human creed and the intellect of man holds despotic empire for a while at the expense of his heart and his ethical instincts, until Nature revenges itself and saves the perishing soul of mankind by flooding the world with a religious belief which seeks to satisfy the heart and the ethical instincts only and mocks at and tramples upon the claims of the intellect. In this unnatural duel between faculties... by which its assertions can be tested and confirmed; the law of being it has discovered seizes not only on the intellect but on the deepest emotions of man and calls into activity his highest ethical instincts; and its whole aim and end is to bring the individual self into a perfect and intimate union with the Eternal. Chapter II [ This chapter was not written. ] Page 412 ... knowledge, by realising oneself in Him by Love as God the Beloved, or by realising Him as the Lord of all in His universe and all its creatures by works. This realisation is the true crown of any ethical system. For whether we hold the aim of morality to be the placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, or the fulfilment of man's nature, or the natural evolution of man in the direction of his ...
... limited ethical question is transcended. It is doubtful whether the solution can be called ethical when it is so contrary to ordinary ethical instincts. There would have been a strain of didacticism if I had made the story the illustration of a normally noble or virtuous action. But here you have a transcendence — and the mere emphasis or intensity of it need not be a fault — of ethical values... while fiction is not. Your remarks — "They lack point of concentration, a quality so essential in a short story; then, the background is too philosophical and the final effect always presenting an ethical problem" — are very interesting indeed. You have read with care enough to see things in a certain focus and even if I were to disagree with your pronouncement I would feel flattered at finding that... sake is entirely absent. What is at work is an imaginative passion, a life-thrill coloured or touched by a veiled mystic vision of art. In The Hero I present an artist deluded in spite of his instinct; in A Mere Manuscript, an artist triumphant in face of the most powerful temptation. The closing speech of the old maestro in which he rails at Andre Chau-danson is no cheap intellectual tag: ...
... its separate existence and pluming itself upon its free will, is an ignorant tool of Nature, and that all its vaunted endowments of intelligence and independence of judgment, conscience and ethical instincts, are but instrumental gifts controlled and directed from behind and above by the one universal Shakti of whom it is only an expressive medium. This triple nature of mind, life and body has to... and in the utterances of the mystics, is a supra-intellectual knowledge, not born of reason and reflection, but self-revealed to the silent and surrendered mind, and it is this knowledge that is instinct with Truth, and not what we call knowledge in the pretentious ignorance of our struggling mind. In the Integral Yoga, the surrender of the mind as, indeed, of every other part of our nature, has ...
... validate its scheme of morals and an aim which will provide man the stimulus he needs, if he is to surmount his anti-ethical instincts and either subdue them or eradicate. Man is not a purely ethical being; he has immoral and nonmoral impulses which are primarily stronger than his ethical tendencies. To check the former, to liberate, strengthen and train the latter is the first object of all practical... religious or non-religious. The first requisite to this end is a true knowledge of human nature and its psychology; for if an ethical system is psychologically untrue, if it is seriously mistaken in its view of human nature or fails to discern and reach his highest and noblest instincts, it will either be ineffective or possibly even do as much harm as good to the moral growth of humanity. But even a psy... He who discerneth, in whom all creatures have become Himself, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have sorrow in whose eyes all are one?" In these two stanzas the Upanishad formulates the ethical ideal of the Karmayogin. It has set forth as its interpretation of life the universality of the Brahman as the sole reality and true self of things; all things exist only in Him and He abides in all ...
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