Fallen Leaves

This rational capacity to think and to act in obedience to absolute or transcendental values constitutes a dependency of consciousness upon a dimension of reality found nowhere within the physical order. It is a capacity for something that nature cannot “see,” and a desire at once inexhaustible and often remarkably impractical.

have never bothered or asked”, Goethe said to Friedrich Soret in 1830, “in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result.”35 In the Middle Ages the same view prevailed. “It is n

Once, the ancients saw the adoption of the wise, rational life as a kind of co-existence with the gods. These rational natures, they believed, constituted the deific part of us, and the philosophical life offered a route to transcend ordinary existence. It allowed us to glimpse those higher realms of divinity (according to Plato) or perhaps move in