Keith

“In Hume, Rationalism and scepticism existed peacefully side by side. Scepticism was for the study only, and was to be forgotten in the business of practical life. Moreover, practical life was to be governed, as far as possible, by those very methods of science which his scepticism impugned. Such a compromise was only possible for a man who was in equal parts a philosopher and a man of the world; there is also a flavour of aristocratic Toryism in the reservation of an esoteric unbelief for the initiated. The world at large refused to accept Hume’s doctrines in their entirety. His followers rejected his scepticism, while his German opponents emphasized it as the inevitable outcome of a merely scientific and rational outlook. Thus as the result of his teaching British philosophy became superficial, while German philosophy became anti-rational—in each case from fear of an unbearable Agnosticism. European thought has never recovered its previous whole-heartedness; among all the successors of Hume, sanity has meant superficiality, and profundity has meant some degree of madness. In the most recent discussions of the philosophy appropriate to quantum physics, the old debates raised by Hume are still proceeding.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Will to Doubt

“Memo from the CEO As the forces operating in today’s marketplace become more shadowy and incomprehensible we must recommit ourselves every second of every day to a ceaseless striving for that elusive dream which we all share and which none of us can remember, if it ever existed in the first place. And if anyone thinks that, as all the world races toward the same elusive dream, our competition isn’t fully prepared to gnaw off its own genitals to get to the promised land before us and keep it for themselves … think again.”
― Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror

“For Leadbeater, the resurrection of Christ is our symbolic awakening from material slumber into astral life. If we can awaken to the reality of our situation despite our embodied condition, then we achieve a sort of solidity of soul that allows us to jump outside the cycle of reincarnation. In this state we can incarnate at our leisure in the vehicle of our choice. Now hinting at a sort of Bodhisattva-Christ ideal, Leadbeater suggests we might, after our own awakenings and ascensions into the astral (and then the transastral) planes, descend again to aid the evolution of humanity.”
― Simon Paul Cox

“In the first place, 'lycanthropy' is a fact of human nature. Men and women have actually been possessed by the belief that they are wolves or other animals, and they have, no doubt, acted on their delusion. In the old legends we are told that such a person was a woman by day and a wolf by night, and no doubt the 'fit' which transformed the human being into a creature of blind ferocity, running on all fours, gnashing its teeth and tearing to pieces all whom it encountered, occurred when the darkness came on, at the hour in which all that is morbid in mind and body is strongest. The were-wolf, then, is not a superstition but a fact, and a fact which goes very far in clearing up the early belief in metamorphosis.”
― Arthur Machen, Collected Fiction Volume 1: 1888-1895