TWO:It took only seconds for the race to conclude.
TWO:The rules for distinguishing between truth and falsehood98 are given in the famous Epicurean Canon. On receiving an image into the mind, we associate it with similar images formerly impressed on us by some real object. If the association or anticipation (πρ?ληψι?) is confirmed or not contradicted by subsequent experience, it is true; false, if contradicted or not confirmed.187 The stress laid on absence of contradictory evidence illustrates the great part played by such notions as possibility, negation, and freedom in the Epicurean system. In ethics this class of conceptions is represented by painlessness, conceived first as the condition, and finally as the essence of happiness; in physics by the infinite void, the inane profundum of which Lucretius speaks with almost religious unction; and in logic by the absence of contradiction considered as a proof of reality. Here, perhaps, we may detect the Parmenidean absolute under a new form; only, by a curious reversal, what Parmenides himself strove altogether to expel from thought has become its supreme object and content.188
TWO:It was a puzzling one, too. Every policeman who had been on night duty in Lytton Avenue for months was closely examined. Once or twice a night the doors of the house had been tried without effect. Nobody had ever been seen to come away or enter. No suspicious characters had been seen loafing about. Not one of the officers had ever seen a light in the place.In the last chapter we dealt at length with the theories of art, and especially of tragic poetry, propounded in Aristotles Poetics. For the sake of formal completeness, it may be mentioned here that those theories are adapted to the general scheme of his systematic philosophy. The plot or plan of a work answers to the formal or rational element in Nature, and this is why Aristotle so immensely over-estimates its importance. And, just as in his moral philosophy, the ethical element, represented by character-drawing, is strictly subordinated to it. The centre of equilibrium is, however, not supplied by virtue, but by exact imitation of Nature, so that the characters must not deviate very far from mediocrity in the direction either of heroism or of wickedness.
TWO:402I had a rather amusing meeting at Tongres, with a Netherland colleague, who was on his way to Louvain.