The Ninth Street Center

Quotations About Psychological Polarity

Many people, famous and not so famous, notice the importance of psychological polarity from time to time. Most of them don't go on to write ground-breaking theoretical treatises on their observations, and in fact most of them probably don't realize how their observations relate to this essential dynamic of human nature. But for any historian of the subject, the following quotes must seem like the smoke that seeps up from underbrush before actual flames have erupted in human consciousness.

      Let the truth be told; let right be done.

-- Anonymous: traditional closing of British petitions to the king,
quoted in the last sentence of Paul Rosenfels:
Psychoanalysis and Civilization.

      Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

-- Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

      The Deity said, "O sinless one! I have already declared, that in this world there is a twofold path -- that of the Sankhyas by devotion in the shape of true knowledge; and that of the Yogins by devotion in the shape of action."

-- Bhagavadgita

      There are two classes of men: the prolific and the devouring. Religion is an endeavor to reconcile the two.

-- William Blake: Poetical Works, i, page 249.

      As we reflect on the course of psychology down through the ages, we see that three great trends of thought have dominated its historical development from the days of the Greeks. . . They are: the tradition of Democritus which is the spirit of materialism; the tradition of Plato which is idealistic in its outlook; and the tradition of Aristotle which is a combination of the two. . . Between these extremes [of Democritus and Plato] there is a doctrine and a tradition which is empiric or objective and idealistic or subjective at the same time; which has the authentic ring of common sense, yet is profound in its analysis of reality. . . If we are looking for an idea that expresses the central aspect of philosophic psychology, then the concept of man as a creature composed of body and soul is as faultless as any. . . For one who shares with Aquinas the view that man is a single substance, made up of contrasted psychic and somatic elements, there can be no idealistic fear that psychology will end by materializing the spirit of man; just as there can be no positivistic fear that psychology will vanish into the realm of the unknowable by dematerializing the body of man. . . The first mistake [of modern psychology] is in the point of view that the sole subject matter of scientific psychology is either consciousness and its phenomena, or behavior and its phenomena. Obviously the Cartesian wedge is still doing its work effectively when it can divide investigators into such widely opposed camps. A dichotomy of this sort not only fails to recognize the difference between the psychological, as such, and the physiological; but it also fails to see that man reconciles both within the depths of his human nature. . . Thus under the influence of Kant, on the one hand, and of Comte, on the other, the scientists have been completely bogged down by their special preferences, either for the informations of subjective consciousness alone, or for the data of objective behavior alone. . . Finally, let me urge once more the point that not every philosophy is useful to the science of psychology, but only that analysis which expounds the truth of human nature. Such, I take it, is the analysis which was formulated over two thousand years ago by Aristotle, which was subsequently taken over, refined, and developed by Aquinas, and which is now known as the "traditional psychology". This is the position which denies the idealistic creed that psychology is nothing but a philosophy of spirit: and, with equal vigor, denies the positivistic position that psychology is simply a physiological discipline.

-- Robert Edward Brennan:
History of Psychology from the Standpoint of a Thomist,
1945, Macmillan.

      It is from the realities of life that the highest idealities are born.

-- Clarence Darrow

      "We're trying to sum up what's been worth while in our life together," I said.
      "May I know what it's been?" asked the doctor. Then Rhea managed to answer, though out of breath as if she'd been running hard along the lake shore.
      "It's easy, Doctor. Just two seven-letter worlds is all. We've tried for honesty and courage."

-- Paul De Kruif: The Sweeping Wind, page 245.

      There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is -- to teach; the function of the second is -- to move.

-- De Quincey: Lives of the Poets: Pope.

      Men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

-- Denis Diderot

      Thus in life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional nature -- the mind that reasons, and the mind that feels. Of one come the men of action -- the generals and statesmen; of the other, the poets and dreamers -- artists all.

-- Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, page 462 of the 1961 Signet edition.

      What man's mind can create, man's character can control.

-- Thomas Alva Edison

      Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. . . . The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance.

      When there are two people of whom one can say what life is, the other (almost) what the soul is, it is only right that they should see each other and talk together often. . . . No one can replace the intercourse with a friend that a particular -- and perhaps feminine -- side of me demands.

-- Sigmund Freud:
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, page 301-2,
quoted on page 76 of Paul Rosenfels:
Freud and the Scientific Method.

      Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems; they are also types of two distinct human natures, which from immemorial time, under every sort of cloak, stand more or less inimically opposed. But pre-eminently the whole medieval period was riven by this conflict, persisting even to the present day; moreover, this battle is the most essential content of the history of the Christian Church. Though under different names, always and essentially it is of Plato and Aristotle that we speak. Enthusiastic, mystical, Platonic natures reveal Christian ideas and their corresponding symbols from the bottomless depths of their souls. Practical, ordering, Aristotelian natures build up from these ideas and symbols a solid system, a dogma and a cult.

-- Heinrich Heine: Deutschland.

      Moral philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners; each of which has its peculiar merit, and may contribute to the entertainment, instruction, and reformation of mankind. The one considers man chiefly as born for action; and as influenced in his measures by taste and sentiment; pursuing one object, and avoiding another, according to the value which these objects seem to possess, and according to the light in which they present themselves. . . . The other species of philosophers consider man in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being, and endeavor to form his understanding more than cultivate his manners. They regard human nature as a subject of speculation; and with a narrow scrutiny examine it, in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us to approve or blame any particular object, action, or behavior. They think it a reproach to all literature, that philosophy should not yet have fixed, beyond controversy, the foundation of morals, reasoning, and criticism; and should for ever talk of truth and falsehood, vice and virtue, beauty and deformity, without being able to determine the source of these distinctions.

-- David Hume:
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Section 1).

      If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with [ie. accept] the offer.

-- Thomas Henry Huxley:
Materialism and Idealism.

      The true . . . is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.

-- William James: Pragmatism,
quoted on page 558 of Will Durant's
The Story of Philosophy.

Click here to read about William James and Paul Rosenfels

      There are two generic fundamental biases in character. . . two conspicuous types of character. . . one in which the tendency to action is extreme and the tendency to reflection slight, and another in which the proneness to reflection greatly predominates and the impulse for action is feebler.

-- Furneax Jordan:
Character as seen in Body and Parentage, 1896, page 5.

      The existence of two distinct types is actually a fact that has long been known: a fact that in one form or another has dawned upon the observer of human nature or shed light upon the brooding reflection of the thinker; presenting itself, for example, to Goethe's intuition as the embracing principle of systole and diastole. The names and forms in which the mechanism of introversion and extraversion has been conceived are extremely diverse, and are, as a rule, adapted only to the standpoint of the individual observer. Notwithstanding the diversity of the formulations, the common basis or fundamental idea shines constantly through; namely, in the one case an outward movement of interest toward the object, and in the other a movement of interest away from the object, towards the subject and his own psychological processes.

-- Carl Jung: Psychological Types, page 11.

      Wagner, the advocate of love. . . and Nietzsche, the advocate of power. . . both strive after similar goals, while at the same time creating irremediable discord, for, where love is, individual power can never prevail, while the dominating power of the individual precludes the reign of love.

-- Carl Jung: Psychological Types, page 298.

      People from my country believe -- and rightly so -- that the only thing separating man from the animals is mindless superstition and pointless ritual.

-- Andy Kaufman: Latka Gravis, TAXI.

      Reunited, the families enjoyed the simple pleasures of being together, having learned something they already knew: that courage, loyalty and love are the strongest forces in the universe.

-- George Lucas: "The Ewok Adventure", 1984

Weyrmman, watch; weyrman, learn
Something new in every Turn.
Oldest may be coldest, too.
Sense the right; find the true!

-- Anne McCaffrey: Dragonrider, 1967.

      In the Western Desert they found an inscription. An officer in the Roman army years and years ago, serving in the Western Desert, had reached the conclusion that there were two things in life that you could pursue -- love and power -- and no one could pursue both.

-- Malcolm Muggeridge:
an interview with William F. Buckley on Firing Line.

      In philosophy ever since the time of Pythagoras there has been an opposition between the men whose thought was mainly inspired by mathematics and those who were more influenced by the empirical sciences. Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and Kant belong to what may be called the mathematical party; Democritus, Aristotle, and the modern empiricists from Locke onwards, belong to the opposite party.

-- Bertrand Russell:
A History of Western Philosophy, 1945, page 828.

      There are, perhaps, no contrasts, be they never so subtle, never so slight, into which the theory we are advancing may not some day make its way. For the present, however, we must shut our eyes to that, focusing our attention on those contrasts which seem to imply a deep-seated necessity, on those contrasts on which our very life and all its values seem to hinge.

-- Geoffrey Sainsbury:
The Theory of Polarity, 1927, page 199.

      This brings me to a very remarkable psychological antagonism among men in an age of progressive civilization, an antagonism which, because it is radical and rooted in the innate emotional constitution, is the cause of a sharper cleavage among men than the accidental quarrel of interests could ever bring about . . . in short an opposition which is responsible for the fact that no work of the mind and no deed of the heart can make a decisive success with one class, without thereby drawing upon it a condemnation from the other. This opposition is, without doubt, as old as the beginning of culture, and to the end it can hardly be otherwise . . . Whoever counts himself among the former class can be called a realist, and whoever numbers himself with the latter an idealist.

-- Friedrich Schiller:
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795.

      Through their own conduct [people] often lock themselves out of the best that is within them. Only afterward do they realize how poor they have become. They have cut themselves off from the world of goodness and beauty within them. . . . So many people have to bear this burden. It is what makes them lose heart. They pass a garden and know that the flowers blossoming in it are no longer for them.

-- Albert Schweitzer:
quoted in Thoughts for Our Times,
Peter Pauper Press, 1975.

      The first, and some would say the greatest, achievement of your own "Western" culture was the conceiving of two ideals of conduct, both essential to the spirit's well-being. Socrates, delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in that flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of neighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worshipage Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.

-- Olaf Stapledon:
Last and First Men. New York, 1931.

      The world is comic to people who think, and tragic to people who feel.

-- Horace Walpole