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Robert Musil

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... the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
--
“The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics” (1913), B. Pike and D. Luft, trans., Precision and Soul (1978), p. 23

 
Robert Musil

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Spencer "was incapable", our critic haughtily re marks, "of discerning the difference between a homogeneity in matter, necessarily and blindly tending toward a heterogeneity, , and such a law of organism [sic], progress, and growth as requires a spiritual intelligence to originate and maintain it." Perheps he was a poor man! or perhaps he thought he had better discern and formulate progress where he could do it to the best advantage, and leave the postulating of spiritual intelligences to those who had a greater talent than he for building in the region of the unverifiable.

 
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They offer me neither food nor drink — intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained.

 
John Maynard Keynes
 

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

 
Lawrence Lessig
 

The vain man is in like cause with the avaricious — he takes the mean for the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it, ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him that congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd.

 
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Ethical religion affirms the continuity of progress toward moral perfection. It affirms that the spiritual development of the human race cannot be prematurely cut off, either gradually or suddenly; that every stone of offence against which we stumble is a stepping-stone to some greater good ; that, at the end of days, if we choose to put it so, or, rather, in some sphere beyond the world of space and time, all the rays of progress will be summed and centred in a transcendent focus.

 
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