Carolina QuotesWe cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“Letter to R. T. Eubanks, January 19, 1961, p. 56.
- form
- letter
- work
- Language is Sermonic (1970)
- year
- 1961
- locator
- p. 56
Cite this record
“We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and po…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-4DBD02A1F4. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/4dbd02a1f4
More from Richard M. Weaver
Part of life has a public orientation, but part of it does not. He has a private self that looks inward, and he should be able to feel with some distinctness the difference between public and private roles. It strikes me that those eighteenth century individuals who wrote letters to the newspapers signed “Publius” or something like that, were giving expression to this difference. When the writer appeared before the public in the common interest, he was conscious of stepping outside of his private considerations and entering into another capacity, of assuming a posture. The rest of the time he was his own man, which his thoughts and feelings reserved for himself.
A prejudice may be an unreasoned judgment, he [Hibben] pointed out, but an unreasoned judgment is not necessarily an illogical judgment. … First, there are those judgments whose verification has simply dropped out of memory. … The second type of unreasoned judgments we hold is the opinions we adopt from others … The third class of judgments in Professor Hibben’s list comprises those which have subconscious origin. The material that furnishes their support does not reach the focal point of consciousness, but psychology insists upon its existence.
All of us have had the experience of finding a particularly felicitous phrase in poetry and of feeling: “This is what the world really means; he has hit it closer than anyone has ever hit it before.”