Blind people who have Anton syndrome are convinced that they can see, and they speak easily and at length about whatever visual experience they believe themselves to be having at any given moment. Korsakoff syndrome causes people to have false memories that are as real to them as memories of things that have actually happened. The most terrifying

An eleventh commandment certainly would have been helpful here, especially for theologians. For if curiosity is forbidden, we have no business seeking the logos of our theos.

And trust is exactly what suffering patients lack. They cannot believe that the revelation of a truth about themselves won't bring the world crashing down around them. That is why they resist treatment and their therapists.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round. —Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

In 1933 the race-obsessed German philosopher Alfred Bäumler gave a lecture in Berlin, “Against the Un-German Spirit,” in which he contrasted the manly political education of the Spartans, aimed at forming citizen-soldiers, with the effeminate, Jew-infected democratic education of the Weimar Republic. He then called on his student audience, many in

At one extreme, there is the person who treats his life as a journey of discovery, expecting pleasure and happiness from it—homo viator. At the other, there is the person who anticipates loss and harm, and so builds dikes against the tides and flees if the waters crest over the top—homo fugiens. Two human types, two ways of living for us to choose

The more the nineteenth century progressed in science, industry, and even politics, the more nostalgic it became in spirit. Such are the hydraulics of historical consciousness.

The Hebrew Bible forbade the public sacrifice of children and constrained the power of parents over their sons and daughters. It proclaimed in no uncertain terms that our children are not extensions of ourselves; they are dependent creatures who must be protected until they can live autonomously. Without this moral advance it is hard to imagine

After all, didn’t Saint Paul declare, If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new? The fantasy is that we can wipe the psychological slate clean and start over; the reality is that such superficial converts learn to sweep things under the rug and become even greater mysteries to