Author: Redactor

But now we come to the most important thing. Those diverse projects or programs of life which our fancy elaborates, and among which our will, another psychic mechanism can freely choose, are not presented to us as looking all alike; a strange voice emerging from some intimate and secret depth of our own calls on us to choose one of these and to bar the others. All these programs, please note, are presented to us as possible — we may have the ability to be one kind of person or another, but one and only one appears to us as the one which we have to be. This is the strangest and most mysterious ingredient in man. On the one hand, he is free, he is not forced to be any single thing as is the star; and yet in the face of this freedom something always rises with a certain character of necessity about it, as thought saying to us, “You are able to be whatever you want; but only if you choose this or that specific pattern will you be what you have to be.’ That is to say, among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call ‘vocation.’ But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it.

Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (Mildred Adams, trans., 1958), p. 179.

Descendants of the theologians of the Middle Ages, and heirs of the nation of fools so carefully elaborated by our old university; with our minds full of the formulas of our lawyers, and the dogmas of our priests, and moulded by a memoria technica education; instead of being brought up to observe facts, we are accustomed to think in the abstract, so that in the sciences we take energy, motion, matter, race, species, &c. — which are simply convenient terms for classification — for realities, having an existence of their own.
If in regard to such matters as these we commit such errors, we do worse when we enter upon the examination of social questions. We create for ourselves entities, such as order, morality, religion, society, and then, on the pretext of defending order, morality, religion, and society, the stronger crush down the weaker. In the same way as Calino discovers that the forest prevents him seeing the trees, behind these words we no longer see the individuals without whom, nevertheless, there would be neither society, religion, morality, nor order amongst men.

Yves Guyot, Prostitution Under the Regulation System (Edgar Beckit Truman, M.D., F.C.S., trans., 1884), p. 2.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the great French artist André Gill (1840-1885).

“We should be very jealous of who speaks for science, particularly in our age of rapidly expanding technology. A misinformed or uninformed public can stop anything even when it is clearly in society’s benefit. How can the public be educated? I do not know the specifics, but of this I am certain: The public will remain uninformed and uneducated in science until the media professionals decide otherwise, until they stop quoting charlatans and quacks, and until respected scientists speak up.”

Dixy Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, 1990