The fundamental principle of all morality is that man is a being naturally loving justice. In Emile I have endeavored to show how vice and error, foreign to the natural constitution of man, have been introduced from outside, and have insensibly altered him.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The “classical” point of view I take to be this. Man is by his very nature essentially limited and incapable of anything extraordinary. He is incapable of attaining any kind of perfection, because, either by nature, as the result of original sin, or the result of evolution, he encloses within him certain antinomies. There is a war of instincts inside him, and it is part of his permanent characteristics that this must always be so.
—T. E. Hulme
The history of philosophers we know, but who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers?” Thus did the Imagist poet and essayist T. E. Hulme begin “Cinders,” a posthumously published collection of notes and aphorisms about art, life, and language that he scribbled in his early twenties while traveling across Canada working on railways, farms, and in timber mills. Hulme (the name is pronounced “Hume”) was himself a conspicuously philosophical amateur. Or perhaps one should say “amateur philosopher” (I use “amateur,” as he did, in its most flattering sense). Among much else, he was a translator and—for a few years, anyway–champion of the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson; he was an early and voluble reader of Edmund Husserl, G.
