Words&Dirt

“The exhausted swimmer, struggling to reach shore, isn’t worried about starving to death afterwards.”

––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 135

“To respect matter means to respect the conditions of achievement; conditions which hinder and obstruct and which have to be changed, conditions which help and further and which can be used to modify obstructions and attain ends.  Only as men have learned to pay sincere and persistent regard to matter, to the conditions upon which depends negatively the positively the success of all endeavor, have they shown sincere and fruitful respect for ends and purposes.  To profess to have an aim and then neglect the means of its execution is self-delusion of the most dangerous sort.  Education and morals will begin to find themselves on the same road of advance that say chemical industry and medicine have found for themselves when they too learn fully the lesson of wholehearted and unremitting attention to means and conditions––that is, to what mankind so long despised as material and mechanical.  When we take means for ends we indeed fall into moral materialism.  But when we take ends without regard to means we degenerate into sentimentalism.”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. 72-3