For when a thing has reached the stage when it is by nature capable of sight, it will be said either to see or to be blind, and that in an indeterminate sense, signifying that the capacity may be either present or absent; for it is not necessary either that it should see or that it should be blind, but that it should be either in the one state or in the other.
For 'Socrates has sight' is the opposite of 'Socrates is blind' in the sense of the word 'opposite' which applies to possession and privation.
Style in general means 'manner of writing.' In the broad sense it includes everything pertaining to the author's spirit and point of view--almost everything which is here being discussed.
It may be asked further of poetry, whether the meter and stanza structure are appropriate to the mood and thought and so handled as to bring out the emotion effectively; and whether the sound is adapted to the sense (for example, musical where the idea is of peace or quiet beauty).
Another point in which Stout's remarks seem to me to suggest what I regard as mistakes is his use of "consciousness." There is a view which is prevalent among psychologists, to the effect that one can speak of "a conscious experience" in a curious dual sense, meaning, on the one hand, an experience which is conscious of something, and, on the other hand, an experience which has some intrinsic nature characteristic of what is called "consciousness." That is to say, a "conscious experience" is characterized on the one hand by relation to its object and on the other hand by being composed of a certain peculiar stuff, the stuff of "consciousness." And in many authors there is yet a third confusion: a "conscious experience," in this third sense, is an experience of which we are conscious.
(1) Can we observe anything about ourselves which we cannot observe about other people, or is everything we can observe PUBLIC, in the sense that another could also observe it if suitably placed?
"If Roland was not a more graceful person than your worship has described," said the curate, "it is no wonder that the fair Lady Angelica rejected him and left him for the gaiety, liveliness, and grace of that budding-bearded little Moor to whom she surrendered herself; and she showed her
sense in falling in love with the gentle softness of Medoro rather than the roughness of Roland."
The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art.
The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception.
Though both alike, we admit it cordially, have a genuine sense of the eternal moral charm of "renunciation," something even of the thirst for martyrdom, for those wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation, eternal also in their aesthetic charm.
This indispensable intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape background, for the most part English.
"As to the circumstances of her birth, though in a legal
sense she may be called Nobody, it will not hold in common
sense.
Among our still more modern and dashing young gentlemen -- who are extremely averse to superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their native language -- the formula is still further curtailed by the use of "to feel" in a technical
sense, meaning, "to recommend-for-the-purposes-of-feeling-and-being-felt"; and at this moment the "slang" of polite or fast society in the upper classes sanctions such a barbarism as "Mr.
'Life by Forster', and I think there is a deeper and sweeter
sense of Goldsmith in it.
But I was merely thoughtless of a God or a Providence, acted like a mere brute, from the principles of nature, and by the dictates of common
sense only, and, indeed, hardly that.
