Tuesday, March 29, 2011

From the godlike to the villainous

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

There are two lectures, Reading and Writing, which he delivered as part of Yale University's Tanner lecture series. Filled with marvellous quotes and thoughts. Page 221.
Anybody who cares about the matter knows that the intellect requires constant attention and renewal. The notion that someone who has graduated from a university has thereby been victualed for a long voyage through life as an intelligent human creature, is totally contradicted by common observation. And when I speak of intellect, you must not suppose that I mean merely that really rather humble ratiocinative ability — that power to reason about the ordinary concerns of life and to reach conclusions from given facts. I do not even mean that same ratiocinative faculty carried to a higher level, where it attacks complex, but still wholly finite problems. I use “intellect” to include all that vast realm of thinking and feeling that goes beyond the merely puzzle-solving work of the mind and establishes, so to speak, the very fabric and atmosphere in which life is lived and from which it is perceived. And when I talk of education I have no desire to belittle the powers of reason, but only to assert the power of feeling, the power of sympathy in the true meaning of that word, which enlarges our understanding of every aspect of our lives. We are quick to say that it is man’s power of abstract thought that separates him from the animal world, but how rarely do we say that it is man’s power to feel through a broader spectrum of emotion and sympathy that also makes him human — and, because human, capable of conduct that ranges from the godlike to the villainous.

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