The New Age, February 10, 1916

Alright, I lied about doing a post on a different magazine before returning to The New Age. The weekly pace is too quick!

These notes will be too quick too:

Hastings/Morning/Anonymous's "Men and Manners" continues, commenting on the rudeness of swearing. She satirizes the crowd at the Cafe Republique, which rang a dim bell in my mind. Googling, I found that part of the recent Paris attacks took place outside the Cafe Republique. So strange.

Then, she continues her story about the rogue peri, this time titled "A Yarn for Marines." The peri ends up on a dreadnought, where she seduces an officer. Rollicking, if a bit silly. No sign yet of the alleged backlash in the correspondence pages. I just noticed that "Peri" and "Paris" are pronounced similarly.

T.E. Hulme continues his notes on abstraction, making an interesting argument about the frameworks that undergird thought. Our logic eventually must rest on self-evident truths, but the problem is that we find our self-evident truths largely through culture, which means they aren't true at all. But he doesn't stop there--things get a little weird first. He argues that there are in fact objective self-evident truths, and that they are often found at the heart of religious dogmas. His belief in original sin, that a human "is a wretched creature that can yet apprehend perfection," is valid, while the humanist optimism about humanity is not (354). It's the large, underlying category of original sin that can change the way we perceive the world. He's going to shift to discussion of literature soon, and I look forward to that. Maybe if Hulme hadn't died, he'd have been T.S. Eliot.

Off to the dissertation.