Reading Notes: September 11th, 2024

“Though earth and moon were gone / And suns and universes ceased to be / And Thou wert left alone / Every Existence would exist in thee // There is not room for Death / Nor atom that his might could render void / Since thou art Being and Breath / And what thou art may never be destroyed.” (Brontë, No Coward Soul is Mine, lines 21-28)

“In the first place, we must ask what is a sign or symbol? To say that A is a symbol of B implies, of course, that A is something different from B, but (and this is often forgotten) it also implies that it is in some respect the same as B. The most remote, far-fetched symbol in the world must have something in common with that which it symbolizes; i.e., the person to whom it has the symbolic meaning must have some (however little it may be) of the same feeling or experience when he experiences the symbol, as he has when he experiences that which it symbolizes. In other words, there are such things as symbols just because the most different things in the world have something in common.” (Nettleship, Philosophical Lectures and Remains, Vol. I, 23-24)

“In the first place, ‘testing’ clearly implies that the test we employ is something different from the thing tested; we cannot in strictness speak of testing a thing by itself.” (Nettleship, Philosophical Lectures and Remains, Vol. I, 181)

“The first truth to be noticed in considering the nature of all objective measurement is this: such measurement is always an affair of relations; it is a relating activity on the mind’s part, which implies, however, some sort of a correlation belonging to the real being and actual arrangement of the things measured….Let it be noticed, also, what are the things that are measured—the existent “that-which,” to which the measuring process is thus naïvely applied.” (Ladd, A Theory of Reality, 302-303)