A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that when we experience discomfort or a loss of our usual vitality, we become more introspective and aware of deeper, often melancholic truths about life.
William James reflects on the idea that moments of emotional or physical downturn can lead us to confront the deeper, often hidden aspects of our existence. By experiencing a cooling down of our typical excitement and vitality, we become more aware of the underlying sadness and complexities of life, prompting a philosophical reflection on our nature and existence.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of self-reflection during tough times, this quote could serve as a poignant reminder.
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.
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.
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.
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?
Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero.
I fear that too many have sadly surrendered their agency to the adversary and are saying by their conduct, 'I care more about satisfying my own desires than I do about bearing the Savior's power to bless others.'
Realise this: one day your soul_x000D_ will depart from your body and you will_x000D_ be drawn behind the curtain that floats between us_x000D_ and the unknown. While you wait for that moment, be happy,_x000D_ because you don't know where you came from and_x000D_ you don't know where you will be going.
Naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk... It's as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.'
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.