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Home » 2018 Issues » 83 FR (05/04/2018) » 2018-09487. Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Mentor-Protégé Program Modifications (DFARS Case 2017-D016)
2018-09487. Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Mentor-Protégé Program Modifications (DFARS Case 2017-D016)
Defense Acquisition Regulations System, Department of Defense (DoD).
DoD is proposing to amend the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) to implement sections of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 that provide modifications to the DoD Pilot Mentor-Protégé Program.
Comments on the proposed rule should be submitted in writing to the address shown below on or before July 3, 2018, to be considered in the formation of a final rule.
Submit comments identified by DFARS Case 2017-D016, using any of the following methods:
○ Regulations.gov: http://www.regulations.gov. Submit comments via the Federal eRulemaking portal by entering "DFARS Case 2017-D016" under the heading "Enter keyword or ID" and selecting "Search." Select the link "Submit a Comment" that corresponds with "DFARS Case 2017-D016." Follow the instructions provided at the "Submit a Comment" screen. Please include your name, company name (if any), and "DFARS Case 2017-D016" on your attached document.
○ Email: osd.dfars@mail.mil. Include DFARS Case 2017-D016 in the subject line of the message.
○ Fax: 571-372-6094.
○ Mail: Defense Acquisition Regulations System, Attn: Ms. Jennifer D. Johnson, OUSD(AT&L)DPAP/DARS, Room 3B941, 3060 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301-3060.
Comments received generally will be posted without change to http://www.regulations.gov, including any personal information provided. To confirm receipt of your comment(s), please check www.regulations.gov, approximately two to three days after submission to verify posting (except allow 30 days for posting of comments submitted by mail).
Start Further Info Start Printed Page 19678
Ms. Jennifer D. Johnson, telephone 571-372-6100.
End Further Info End Preamble Start Supplemental Information
This rule proposes to revise the DFARS to implement section 1823 and paragraph (b) of section 1813 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 (Pub. L. 114-328). Sections 1823 and 1813 provide modifications to the DoD Pilot Mentor-Protégé Program ("the Program"). Section 1823 revises the definition and requirements associated with affiliation between mentor firms and their protégé firms. Both sections add new types of assistance for mentor firms to provide to their protégé firms.
II. Discussion and Analysis
This rule proposes amendments to DFARS subpart 219.71 and Appendix I as summarized in the following paragraphs:
A. Subpart 219.71, Pilot Mentor-Protégé Program. Section 219.7100, Scope, is amended to reflect the date of the most recent statutory changes to the Program.
B. Appendix I, Policy and Procedures for the DoD Pilot Mentor-Protégé Program.
Section I-101, Definitions, is amended to add the definition of "affiliation" provided in section 1823.
Section I-102, Participant eligibility, is amended to add new paragraph (e), which specifies that a mentor firm may not enter into an agreement with a protégé firm if the Small Business Administration (SBA) has made a determination of affiliation. In addition, paragraph (e) addresses the conditions under which DoD will request a determination from SBA regarding affiliation.
Section I-106, Development of mentor-protégé agreements, is amended to add women's business centers under 15 U.S.C. 656 as a form of assistance that a mentor firm can obtain for a protégé firm.
Section I-107, Elements of a mentor-protégé agreement, is amended to add new paragraph (h), which implements the requirement provided in section 1813 for mentor-protégé agreements to include assistance the mentor firm will provide to the protégé firm in understanding Federal contract regulations, including the FAR and DFARS.
III. Applicability to Contracts at or Below the Simplified Acquisition Threshold (SAT) and for Commercial Items, Including Commercially Available Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Items
This rule does not propose to create any new provisions or clauses or impact any existing provisions or clauses.
IV. Executive Orders 12866 and 13563
Executive Orders (E.O.s) 12866 and 13563 direct agencies to assess all costs and benefits of available regulatory alternatives and, if regulation is necessary, to select regulatory approaches that maximize net benefits (including potential economic, environmental, public health and safety effects, distributive impacts, and equity). E.O. 13563 emphasizes the importance of quantifying both costs and benefits, of reducing costs, of harmonizing rules, and of promoting flexibility. This is not a significant regulatory action and, therefore, was not subject to review under section 6(b) of E.O. 12866, Regulatory Planning and Review, dated September 30, 1993. This rule is not a major rule under 5 U.S.C. 804.
V. Executive Order 13771
This rule is not subject to E.O. 13771, Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs, because this rule is not a significant regulatory action under E.O. 12866.
VI. Regulatory Flexibility Act
DoD does not expect this proposed rule to have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities within the meaning of the Regulatory Flexibility Act, 5 U.S.C. 601, et seq., because of the relatively small number of small entities who participate in the DoD Pilot Mentor-Protégé Program. However, an initial regulatory flexibility analysis has been performed and is summarized as follows:
This rule proposes to amend the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) to implement section 1823 and paragraph (b) of section 1813 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 (Pub. L. 114-328), which provide modifications to the DoD Pilot Mentor-Protégé Program ("the Program"). Specifically, section 1823 revises the definition and requirements associated with affiliation between mentor firms and their protégé firms. Both sections add new types of assistance for mentors to provide to their protégés.
The objective of this rule is to implement statutory modifications to the Program. The legal basis for the modifications is sections 1823 and paragraph (b) of section 1813 of the NDAA for FY 2017.
The rule will apply to small entities that participate in the Program. There are currently 85 small entities participating in the Program.
The rule does not impose any reporting or recordkeeping requirements on any small entities.
The rule does not duplicate, overlap, or conflict with any other Federal rules.
There are no known, significant, alternative approaches to the proposed rule that would meet the requirements of the applicable statute.
DoD invites comments from small business concerns and other interested parties on the expected impact of this rule on small entities.
DoD will also consider comments from small entities concerning the existing regulations in subparts affected by this rule in accordance with 5 U.S.C. 610. Interested parties must submit such comments separately and should cite 5 U.S.C. 610 (DFARS Case 2017-D016), in correspondence.
VII. Paperwork Reduction Act
The rule does not contain any information collection requirements that require the approval of the Office of Management and Budget under the Paperwork Reduction Act (44 U.S.C. chapter 35).
Start List of Subjects
List of Subjects in 48 CFR Part 219 and Appendix I to Chapter 2
End List of Subjects Start Signature
Amy G. Williams,
Deputy, Defense Acquisition Regulations System.
End Signature
Therefore, 48 CFR part 219 and appendix I to chapter 2 are proposed to be amended as follows:
Start Amendment Part
1. The authority citation for 48 CFR part 219 and appendix I to chapter 2 continues to read as follows:
End Amendment Part Start Authority
Authority: 41 U.S.C. 1303 and 48 CFR chapter 1.
End Authority Start Part
[Amended]
End Part Start Amendment Part
2. Amend section 219.7100 by removing "November 25, 2015" and adding "December 23, 2016" in its place.
End Amendment Part Start Amendment Part
3. Amend appendix I to chapter 2 as follows:
a. In section I-101 by—
i. Redesignating sections I-101.1 through I-101.6 as sections I-101.2 through I-101.7, respectively; and
ii. Adding new section I-101.1.
b. In section I-102 by— Start Printed Page 19679
i. Redesignating paragraphs (e) and (f) as paragraphs (f) and (g), respectively;
ii. Adding new paragraph (e); and
iii. In newly redesignated paragraph (f), removing "Subpart 9.4" and adding "subpart 9.4" in its place.
c. In section I-106 by adding paragraph (d)(6)(v).
d. In section I-107 by—
i. Redesignating paragraphs (h) through (o) as paragraphs (i) through (p), respectively; and
ii. Adding new paragraph (h).
End Amendment Part
The additions read as follows:
Appendix I to Chapter 2—Policy and Procedures for the DoD Pilot Mentor Protégé Program
I-101.1 Affiliation.
With respect to a relationship between a mentor firm and a protégé firm, a relationship described under 13 CFR 121.103.
I-102 Participant eligibility.
(e) A mentor firm may not enter into an agreement with a protégé firm if SBA has made a determination of affiliation. If SBA has not made such a determination and if the DoD Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP) has reason to believe, based on SBA's regulations regarding affiliation, that the mentor firm is affiliated with the protégé firm, then DoD OSBP will request a determination regarding affiliation from SBA.
I-106 Development of mentor-protégé agreements.
(d) * * *
(6) * * *
(v) Women's business centers described in section 29 of the Small Business Act (15 U.S.C. 656).
I-107 Elements of a mentor-protégé agreement.
(h) The assistance the mentor will provide to the protégé firm in understanding Federal contract regulations, including the FAR and DFARS, after award of a subcontract under the Program, if applicable;
End Supplemental Information
[FR Doc. 2018-09487 Filed 5-3-18; 8:45 am]
Defense Acquisition Regulations System
Comments on the proposed rule should be submitted in writing to
Docket Numbers:
Docket DARS-2018-0019
CFR: (1)
48 CFR 219.7100


4th March 2011. The Johor Bahru Happy and Joyous club had the honour of welcoming the founder of the Laughter Yoga Movement, Dr Madan Kataria aka Guru of Giggling and his wife to Johor Bahru yesterday.
Dr Madan and his wife are here on a four-day visit. They are scheduled to visit and share the benefits of laughter with leaders and members of several non-profit organisations, including the Breast Cancer Support Group, National Stroke Association, Hospital Permai, Alzheimer Association (Jobada) and also the Johor Police Contingent head office over the next three days.


Having long since run out of good names for their tablets, HP has launched a tablet that merely has a model number in place of a name.
The HP 8 1401 is an iPad Mini sized tablet which is just launching today in the US. HP is listing the retail at $169, which is a rather steep price given the unimpressive screen resolution, underwhelming CPU, and generally meh specs.
This tablet is running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean on an Allwinner Quad-Core A31s CPU. It has 1GB RAM, 16GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, and 2 cameras. At 7.85", the screen is about the same size as on the iPad Mini, but at 1024 x 768 the resolution is only that of the original iPad Mini.
This tablet has an accelerometer, gyro, stereo speakers, and a VGA camera on the front and a 2MP camera on the back. It weighs in at 11 ounces and comes equipped with a 3.8Ah battery which is projected to offer 7 hours of runtime before needing to be recharged.
All in all, this tablet offers little to justify its price - not even the CPU. I've encountered the Allwinner A31s chip before, and it offered about the same performance as dual-core CPUs. If you're lucky, the cameras will be better than average but I would not bet on it.
I think you might want to fix your title.
I might want to fix that, yes. Thanks!
After I use it. It's ok for play.
But The next gen for HP 1401. Please improve battery and chip processor for quick response.


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Q: Bootstrap file input by Krajee after upload file preview with icon disappears The file preview disappears after uploading a file. The process uploads to a location not on the server where the site is hosted. The link to the uploaded document is not available after upload, but we are using icons instead of a preview of the file.
Specs:
ASPNET MVC C#,
Razor pages,
Targeting framework 4.6.1,
HTML markup

        Uploader configured via JS

            <input id="input-js" name="input-js[]" type="file" multiple>

JS and fileinput config
 $('#input-js').fileinput({
            showUpload: true,

            previewFileType: 'image',
            dropZoneEnabled: true,
            browseOnZoneClick: true,
            uploadAsync: true,
            theme: 'fas',
            uploadUrl: "/Home/FileUpload",
            deleteUrl: "/Home/FileDelete",
            maxFileCount: 3,
            maxFileSize: 240,
            maxFilePreviewSize: 10240,
            initialPreviewAsData: true,
            overwriteInitial: false,
            preferIconicPreview: true,
            previewFileIconSettings: {
                // configure your icon file extensions
                'doc': '',
                'xls': '',
                'ppt': '',
                'pdf': '',
                'zip': '',
                'htm': '',
                'txt': '',
                'mov': '',
                'mp3': '',
                // note for these file types below no extension determination logic
                // has been configured (the keys itself will be used as extensions)
                'jpg': '',
                'gif': '',
                'png': ''
            },
            previewFileExtSettings: { // configure the logic for determining icon file extensions
                'doc': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(doc|docx)$/i);
                },
                'xls': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(xls|xlsx)$/i);
                },
                'ppt': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(ppt|pptx)$/i);
                },
                'zip': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(zip|rar|tar|gzip|gz|7z)$/i);
                },
                'htm': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(htm|html)$/i);
                },
                'txt': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(txt|ini|csv|java|php|js|css)$/i);
                },
                'mov': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(avi|mpg|mkv|mov|mp4|3gp|webm|wmv)$/i);
                },
                'mp3': function (ext) {
                    return ext.match(/(mp3|wav)$/i);
                }
            }
        });

Json returned from upload
initialPreview: "/Content/greencheckmark.jpg"
initialPreviewAsData: true
initialPreviewConfig: Array(1)
0:
key: "a9483866-251c-4be2-aa49-6f0b5088434d"
caption: "Gas Heating.pdf"
size: 183294
fileId: "a9483866-251c-4be2-aa49-6f0b5088434d"
url: "/Home/FileDelete"
extra:
fileName: "Gas Heating.pdf"
spId: "a9483866-251c-4be2-aa49-6f0b5088434d"
__proto__: Object
type: "pdf"
filetype: "application/pdf"

The JSON response is built per document, 'initialPreviewConfig' is different per document but always with a single value in the array.  'initialPreview' and 'initialPreviewAsData' are the same for all documents.
When a single file is uploaded nothing shows in the preview. When 3 files are uploaded; 2 return correctly one returns a preview with no information view snapshot.
I am lost on what is wrong or why the behavior is inconsistent.
Thank you in advance for assisting with this issue.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


A number of environmental factors that can also diminish sperm production and sperm activity. The most prevalent is smoking. Tobacco, in all forms, is a major health risk [source: Wald et al]. Studies show that smokers can suffer close to a 25 percent reduction in sperm concentration and more than 10 percent decline in sperm motility.
Even prescription medications taken with a physician's consent -- such as drugs to control chronic conditions like high blood pressure -- can inhibit sperm development. Be sure to check with your doctor. Men who are about to undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatment for cancer should consider having their sperm frozen.
Furthermore, you should exercise caution when using common household and workplace chemicals, such as pesticides and solvents, which can adversely effect sperm production.
Want to know more about boosting your fertility? We have lots more information below.
Some like it hot, but sperm definitely don't. That bastion of the 1970s and '80s after-hours scene -- the hot tub -- can wreak havoc on sperm production. Sperm thrive in slightly cooler temperatures, which is why the male scrotum hangs away from the body (though the recommendations of boxer-style underwear instead of tight briefs are generally considered myth). Avoid sitting for long periods.


For all of you not attending an Oktoberfest (for if you have the opportunity to partake and are yet reading this blog, you are an unsuccessful drinker), I welcome you to Porter season with open arms. For those of you who have little idea of what a Porter is (or you think Michelob invented the style), I am providing a short description and a hit list. Porter is a dark ale brewed with roasted malts that carries a distinct flavor. It is a predecessor to stout, but isn't nearly as heavy.
You may have noticed that the Banjo tends toward bottled beers, and there is a purpose to this: beer is a community-oriented beverage, and judging by population figures, I live in Montana and you don't. Therefore, if I can drink a bottle and you can drink the same (albeit elsewhere), we can share the happiness. Certainly, draught beer is often better, but don't be such a damned snob.
1. St. Peter's Porter: A fine example of an English Porter, and the bottles are awesome.
2. LaConner Brewing Porter. Sure, you'll have a tough time finding this one, but drinking is not for sissies.
3. Kettle House's Hemp Porter. This may be one of the weirdest food items I've consumed since a chicago-style hot dog. It's brilliant, and tastes wonderful. Find it at your peril.
Go forth and drink successfully.


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Blogging from Lucknow: The Romance of Rumi Darwaza, Bhul Bhulaiyan & Imambadas
Rumi Darwaza, Lucknow
Once again I was in Lucknow, the City about which poets said that it haunts you more when you are away from it.
Walking past the historic Rumi Darwaza, which was built in 1780s by Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, I was filled with nostalgic memories.
Even if you have seen these structures from your childhood, the splendour of the entire area has an impact every time you pass by these marvels of architecture.
As you walk from Chowk towards the Bada Imambada [also Bara Imambara], the sight of Husainabad Clock Tower or the Ghantaghar, which is the tallest clock tower in the country, strikes you.
With the imposing Rumi Gate in the front, the Bada Imambada and the Bhulbhulaiyan [maze] on the right and the Tile Wali Masjid visible on the other side, anyone would feel impressed by the sheer magnificence of architectural heritage in this City, which has not been properly publicised internationally.
The entrance to Imambada (left) and Rumi Gate in the front.
Rumi Gate symbolizes Lucknow but it hardly gets the sort of attention which other historical gates like Hyderabad's Char Minar gets.
Frankly, it is Rumi Gate that fascinates me more, but is it because Lucknow is the City of my birth and I am biased in favour of it!
In the eighties, when one could climb up to the top of the darwaza, I often went there and found Yaqub, an interesting man, always enjoying the breeze and the view of Gomti.
Whenever he saw someone, he would get up, share interesting tales about the City and the citizens. He spent nearly 15-18 hrs there. He did nothing else for livelihood. Yaqub was graceful and would happily accept even a rupee or two which visitors happily gave. But then he disappeared later.
A view of the Rumi Gate from the other side.
It was difficult even then to reach the top as staircase had been crumbling and some arches had collapsed. I didn't have to courage to venture there once again and see the decay.
The Rumi Gate [called Turkish gate also as it was modelled on lines of a structure in Constantinople], the entrance of the historic Old City of Lucknow, has stood proud for over two centuries.
But unrestricted movement of heavy vehicles and traffic that pass through it round the clock has caused tremendous damage to the structure.
Sadly there are only half-hearted efforts to preserve the structures. Much has been written about the architectural beauty of Bada Imambada, the Asafi Masjid on its premises and the world renowned Bhulbhulaiyan that has labyrinthine lanes and symmetrical arches and corridors that confuse the visitor.
Inside bhulbhulaiya
People are bewildered as once inside the building, they fail to find which way leads to the top and how to get to the exit. The three dimensional maze has nearly 490 identical corridors and passages which flummox the visitors, especially when they take a staircase downwards but find that they have landed on the higher plane.
The bhul-bhulaiyan also has amazing acoustics. A whisper or the sound of tearing a paper is heard loudly across the other corner. So there was no room for conspiracies. But conspiracies eventually did take place and the British captured Oudh but that's another story.
There was a similar underground maze which was shut for visitors long ago. It is believed that it was impossible to come out of it without a guide. And few guides had remained who could successfully take a person in and bring him out without getting lost.
The locked entrances to the lower bhool-bhulaiyan are visible though. It is also rumoured that there was a 'surang' [underground tunnel] that connected the Imambada complex to Faizabad.
With Chhota Imambada and the incomplete Satkhanda tower nearby, this part of Lucknow is truly unrivalled in terms of heritage as it represents the epitome of Indo-Islamic architecture in Awadh.
It is well-known that Asaf-ud-Daula undertook the construction of the Imambada, Rumi Gate and Bhulbhulaiyan to give employment opportunities to people in the times of drought.
Those who were reluctant to do the job of construction labourers, could even work at night, and avoid the embarrassment. Everything is bound to change. But the change should be steady, not sudden and abrupt as it leads to chaos.
One hears much about erosion of cultural values [tehzib, zabaan] of Awadh, still a lot remains. The structures have also survived the ravages of time and inspite of government apathy.
After independence, the Congress-led governments in Uttar Pradesh showed little interest in conservation of the structures that dated back to the Nawabi past.
Composite culture was a term used more frequently in speeches now but not put in practice on the ground. The tombs of Urdu poets disappeared or were encroached upon.
The great Mir Taqi Mir's grave also fell victim and vanished. After the turbulent 80s that saw the rise of fanaticism in Uttar Pradesh and the after-effects of which were seen in the nineties as well, things cooled down a bit in the last decade.
After Mayawati came to the helm, statues of Dalit icons appeared in Lucknow. It was understandable also, as the neglected icons of history belonging to backward classes like the tribal freedom fighters in other parts of the country were given their due.
Of course, there was wide criticism also, predictably from the urban and educated class over the expenditure and the changing skyline that showed Dalit assertion.But it was unlike BJP government that had in its revivalist zeal even changed the name of Begum Hazrat Mahal park
The park named after the great freedom fighter, was changed to Urmil Vatika.
Despite protests, BJP had refused to budge and the name was restored only when the State government fell.
As the BSP government has now gone beyond its Dalit cultural agenda and went about refurbishing Hazratganj, which has earned government the goodwill of the middle-class, it's time the neglected monuments of Lucknow that need restoration and upkeep should also be taken care of.
Will the Lucknow residents raise a strong voice?
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


See, this is one of the big reasons I started this blog: I have zero experience with Ethiopian cuisine. And who knows when I would have tried it otherwise — the inspiration for this particular excursion was entirely blog-related.
My dining companion and I shared both the meat and vegetarian Bayaaynatu, which the menu translates as "of each kind," and is essentially a sampler plate. It all came on one enormous platter bearing a kaleidoscopic assortment of tastes and textures. I'm not even going to try to describe them all, but I will say that there wasn't a weak selection in the bunch. I was particularly impressed by the diversity of flavours here; I sort of figured that everything would taste similar, but with few exceptions, each selection in the assortment had a personality of its own.
I really enjoyed it, though the meat in the dish at the top of the header photo was a bit tough, and the whole spread felt like it could have used more spice (hot sauce was provided, however).
There's no classy way to eat this. There's no cutlery to be seen; you just tear off a piece of injera — a wheaty Ethiopian flatbread that's kind of like a thin, spongy pancake — and start scooping. The whole thing is served on a piece of that same bread, so eventually you'll start tearing pieces off and eating that too. Only one napkin was provided (though I'm sure I could have — and should have — asked for more), and without getting into too much detail, I'll say that by the end of the meal that napkin had seen better days.
It's also an intimidating amount of food. My dining companion and I were defeated by the enormous spread, and neither of us are exactly dainty eaters. Still, we did our best; when the food is this good, how could you not?


text:
William James Quotes
Birth Date: 1898-04-01 (Friday, April 1st, 1898)
Date of Death: 1910-08-26 (Friday, August 26th, 1910)
william james life timeline
Battle of the Boyne (Gregorian calendar)The armies of William III defeat those of the former James II. Wednesday, July 12th, 1690
Commodore William James captures the pirate fortress of Suvarnadurg on west coast of India. Wednesday, April 2nd, 1755
All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, - nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.
The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, - the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.
Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
The 'through-and-through' universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable allpervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.
Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.
Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition, - the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it.
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
The concrete man has but one interest - to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits...A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.
Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.
So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
A thing is important if anyone think it important.
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.
If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities - his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
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.
There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: 'There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.' This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.
There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.
Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.
Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.
Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.
Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. ... The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice - inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there - that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill.
We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.
Quoting an unnamed writer: 'To this day,' she writes, 'I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commandments of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me', answered my God. 'I do, I do,' I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or . . . to wait until I should be satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter? . . . Since then I have had direct answers to prayer - so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment.'
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us - they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.
Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work of it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.
The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether.
The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity, unless one has been through the experience one's self. The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same. The certainty of God's 'grace,' of 'justification,' 'salvation,' is an objective belief that usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same - you will recollect the case of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where the assurance of personal salvation was only a later result. A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind. The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism. A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo. 'An appearance of newness beautifies every object,' the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my relating some examples. This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without one is one of the commonest entries in conversion records.
One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self - it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence.
A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies. Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed. Christians who have it strongly live in what is called 'recollection,' and are never anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharine of Genoa it is said that 'she took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession, moment by moment.' To her holy soul, 'the divine moment was the present moment, . . . and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after.' Hinduism, mind-cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.
The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity . ... It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
Is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.
I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.
The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion.
This practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the history of nations by being blind for the time to other causes. Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends. We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So of many of the saints we have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.
Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false. We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself. First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously? And second, ought we to consider the testimony true? I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: - 1. An uneasiness; and 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.
This thoroughly 'pragmatic' view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word 'bosh!' Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament - more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?
The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the 'God' of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be 'one and only,' and to be 'infinite'; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both 'pass to the limit' and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set.
The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.
History is a bath of blood.
Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.
We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with bluff, but they couldn't stay there; the military tension was too much for them.
At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.
It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical.
The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration. Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.
Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock - if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection, - so that Roosevelt's weaklings and mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the face of nature.
Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. ... So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.
Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.
I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.
I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.
The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not some day feel that is it worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark until the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all, - this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now - and this is my idea - there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.
Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the 'moral equivalent' of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.
For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.
The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.
Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.
Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.
I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: 'This is the real me!'
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition - it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind - yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.
'I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields.The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone.It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully- and losing it- just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.'
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.
A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Who Were Also Born On April 1st
Who Also Died On August 26th
Wangari Maathai
Edgar Wallace
Ralph Vaughan Williams


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Q: why is this type of variable not compatible with string? I am trying to ask the user what they want to name a file that is about to be created on my desktop. When I try to add the variable to the string, it gives me this error:
appendFile = open('%s.txt', 'a') % cusername
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for %: '_io.TextIOWrapper' and 'str'

Here is my program:
def CNA():
    cusername = input("Create username\n>>")
    filehandler = open("C:/Users/CJ Peine/Desktop/%s.txt", "w") % cusername
    filehandler.close()
    cpassword = input("Create password\n>>")
    appendFile = open('%s.txt', 'a') % cusername
    appendFile.write(cpassword)
    appendFile.close()
    print ("Account Created")

How do I make the variable compatible to the string?

A: Try doing
cusername = input("Create username\n>>")

filehandler = open("C:/Users/CJ Peine/Desktop/" + cusername + ".txt", "w")

instead. Or you're just trying use modulus operator % on open function.

A: The % operator for formatting strings should take a string str as a first argument but instead you're passing the object returned from open(...). You can use this expression instead:
open("C:/Users/CJ Peine/Desktop/%s.txt" % cusername, "w")

Alternatively, Python 3 supports using the str.format(str) method ("C:/Users/CJ Peine/Desktop/{}.txt".format(cusername)), which IMHO is much more readable, and Python 3 is much better than Python 2 anyway. Python 2 has been out of active development for ages and is scheduled to no longer be supported; please don't use it unless you absolutely have to.