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.
Interpretation
Understanding governments deeply requires engaging with their complexities rather than seeking simple definitions.
William James suggests that a profound understanding of governments comes from a direct engagement with their many specific characteristics rather than trying to fit them into a neat, abstract definition. By becoming intimately acquainted with the nuances of various governments, one may find that overarching definitions can often obscure the real intricacies involved, making them more misleading than helpful in understanding their true nature.
In practice
In a political science lecture when discussing the nature of governance.
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.
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.
It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
The person who does not believe in miracles surely makes it certain that he or she will never take part in one.
Silence is the nest and music is the bird. The bird leaves the nest early in the morning and returns to the nest in the evening. Similarly, in the spiritual world, divine music comes from the inmost soul of Silence.
How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.
A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.
There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.
This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
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