Words&Dirt

“Reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of social arts; it has something to do.  It liberates man from the bondage of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom.  It projects a better future and assists man in its realization.  And its operation is always subject to test in experience.  The plans which are formed, the principles which man projects as guides of reconstructive action, are not dogmas.  They are hypotheses to be worked out in practice, and to be rejected, corrected and expanded as they fail or succeed in giving our present experience the guidance it requires.  We may call them programmes of action, but since they are to be used in making our future acts less blind, more directed, they are flexible.  Intelligence is not something possessed once for all.  It is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn and courage in re-adjustment.”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. 96-7

“‘The strong survive.  The frail die.  The exotic fish die because the aquarium isn’t heated.  The common guppy lives.  So does the tough catfish.  The house cat turns hunters and eats the pet bird.  If he didn’t, he’d starve.  That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to be.’

Florence had stopped crying.  ‘You mean, with humans?  You mean, humans are going to have to turn savage, like Sir Percy?  Well, I can’t do it.  I don’t want to live in that kind of a world, Randy.’

‘You’ll live, Florence,’ Randy said.

Walking back to his own house, Randy said, ‘Florence is a guppy, a nice, drab little guppy.  That’s why she’ll survive.’

‘What about you and me?’ Lib said.

‘We’re going to have to be tough.  We’re going to have to be catfish.’”

––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 176-7