"VIRGINIA WOOLF: "MIND" AND "MATTER" ON THE PLANE OF A LITERARY CONTROVERSY
by Wyndham Lewis
"We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments." --
Virginia Woolf
But with such a challenging capitulation as that of Body and Soul, or Mind and
Matter, a misunderstanding is to be anticipated, and its action must now be
forestalled. It has not been courted by me, but I have allowed the issue which
might be responsible for it to remain dormant, in the margin, possibly dogging
my progress, in order to deal with it at the conclusion of this phase of my
argument.
The effect of what I have said so far might be to throw the reader into one
camp or the other--and he might certainly have got the idea that only two,
clearly defined, generally recognized, positions were involved: and he might in
the end find himself in what, even from his own standpoint, was the wrong camp.
But Body and Mind, I need not remind the reader of such a book as this, are,
philosophically, two very shadowy counters. There are, on the market today,
patterns of belief extending from the extreme position, on the one hand, that
there is in fact no traceable psyche, but only one stuff, out of which our
world is composed, properly neither "matter" nor "mind"; to the extreme
position on the other, which, as a matter of fact, is much the same as the
former, only with a more strongly marked subjective flavouring. The single
basic stuff is more soulful at that end that it is at the other, the
deterministic end, that is all."
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/lewis.html
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