Word: instinctiveness
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...like the animals. I can feel the future as it approaches. Some instinct guides and warns me. My blood speaks! I must listen to my blood." Thus Signor Mussolini is wont to explain the promptings of his extraordinary political intuition- promptings which he has ever translated into action with disconcerting speed. Last week these sanguinary omens may be presumed to have fired his brain afresh. While most Italians slept he harangued a meeting of all but one of his ministers. By morning a sheaf of Cabinet decrees were issued which bade fair to alter the whole course of daily life...
...necessity for religion. There followed the massive metaphysical webs of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in Germany. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the first German to assume Kant's metaphysics and proceed to something new. A sex-starved bachelor, he opened men's eyes to the importance of instinct, despite his pessimism, which argued: there is a life-force (Will) which makes us reproduce, then leaves us to struggle on; only intellect can save us, by objectifying self and studying life detachedly until the "wisdom of death" comes. He also saved Genius from being eliminated as a factor...
...befit memorial calendars than good paintings. Critics have hinted that Miss Cassatt might have painted better if she had been married; maternity would then have had less fascination for her. This is a shallow suggestion; if she had borne children she might not have made paintings. She projected her instinct in oil and, since she possessed a first class intellect, and submitted herself to rigid discipline, she learned how to paint superbly...
...between indecency and art? Does Eugene O'Neill deserve the same latitude as Shakespeare? Obviously if a hidebound Grand Jury is given rein much classic and modern expression will be throttled. Obviously if the lid is lifted altogether unscrupulous producers will grow fat pandering to the peep-show instinct of the populace...
...perhaps pardonable to mistake for an abiding spirituality that enlightened fear which secures credit and maintains the sanctity of contract. One might even pass over the intrepidity of an attempted explanation of American economic history in terms of a mysterious religious instinct that inheres in residence on this continent. But the unabashed hardihood of justifying the whole past and present of American industrialism by making it one with the deepest spiritual feelings of the people--especially at a time when that industrialism has just flowered in one of the most insidious assaults on democratic government that our history records--ought...