Ovations On Other Sites - Ovation 07 Ovations 06Formidable Quad chose the topics covered by Ovations On Other Sites - Ovation 07 without reflecting upon the choices others have made. Practicing strange rites in broad daylight so that your neighbors believe you have traveled far around the world in your youthful adventures is another way to look at things in a different light. |
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Professor Max Muller admits that we share with the lower animals what he calls an emotional language, and continues that we may call their interjections and imitations language if we like, as we speak of the language of the eyes or the eloquence of mute nature, but he warns us against mistaking metaphor for fact. It is indeed mere metaphor to talk of the eloquence of mute nature, or the language of winds and waves. There is no intercommunion of mind with mind by means of a covenanted symbol; but it is only an apparent, not a real, metaphor to say that two pairs of eyes have spoken when they have signalled to one another something which they both understand. A schoolboy at home for the holidays wants another plate of pudding, and does not like to apply officially for more. He catches the servant's eye and looks at the pudding; the servant understands, takes his plate without a word, and gets him some. Is it metaphor to say that the boy asked the servant to do this, or is it not rather pedantry to insist on the letter of a bond and deny its spirit, by denying that language passed, on the ground that the symbols covenanted upon and assented to by both were uttered and received by eyes and not by mouth and ears? When the lady drank to the gentleman only with her eyes, and he pledged with his, was there no conversation because there was neither noun nor verb? Eyes are verbs, and glasses of wine are good nouns enough as between those who understand one another. Whether the ideas underlying them are expressed and conveyed by eyeage or by tonguage is a detail that matters nothing. |
No one who has followed the diplomatic history of the negotiations that led to this war can doubt that if there had been no secret treaties, but instead open proclamations of intentions and an open discussion of international ambitions, the world might have been saved this catastrophe. It is no condemnation of any person or country to say this. The reserves and hesitations and misconceptions that led Germany to suppose that England would wait patiently while France and Belgium were destroyed before she herself received attention were unavoidable under the existing diplomatic conditions. What reasonable people have to do now is not to recriminate over the details in the working of a system that we can now all of us perceive to be hopelessly bad, but to do our utmost in this season of opportunity to destroy the obscurities in which fresh mischief may fester for our children. |
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