All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
Interpretation
Progressive ideals challenge the status quo and shape the future more than they reflect past experiences.
In this quote, William James argues that revolutionary ideas are not merely about analyzing what has come before us; instead, they are about envisioning what could be. Such ideals can act as catalysts for change, urging society to adapt to new paradigms and possibilities that they introduce, influencing both our environment and the lessons we draw from our experiences.
In practice
In a speech about innovation, one might say, 'As William James noted, all the higher ideals are revolutionary, guiding us to shape the future.'
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.
This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.
If Christians should vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease. They would elect every clean candidate in the United States, and defeat every soiled one. Their prodigious power would be quickly realized and recognized, and afterward there would be no unclean candidates upon any ticket, and graft would cease.
What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.
We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast
The whole of the 20th century has always put the car at the center. So by putting the pedestrian first, you create these livable places, I think, with more attraction and interest and character.
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