Sublime

In regard to ultimate matters, you do not know what is true and no one else does either.

Although accepting a given picture (and the associated convictions) is not irrational, inflexible adherence to it may be.

Since faith in revealed truth had been found to be incompatible with rationality (which requires an openness to criticism), many people nevertheless yearned for an ultimate foundation to things in which they could believe.

And this theorizing disease is rarely under our control: it is largely anatomical, part of our biology, so fighting it requires fighting one’s own self. So the ancient skeptics’ precepts to withhold judgment go against our nature. Talk is cheap, a problem with advice-giving philosophy we will see in Chapter

But each honest thinker who is basically an empiricist has to have some truth in his position, no matter how extremely he has formulated it. The problem is to find the truth underneath the exaggeration, to cut away the excess elaboration or distortion and include that truth where it fits.

The objectivists can’t account for the host of values they unavoidably know though they can’t be proven. And the subjectivists make their own assertions meaningless and contradictory. Where do they get the certainty of knowledge necessary to say that no one has the right to be certain?

One of the most incomprehensible features of a crowd is the tenacity with which the members adhere to erroneous assumptions despite mounting evidence to challenge them.