The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    finest civilisations, China and Greece. The wisest and most recognisably greatest practical philosophers of both these lands have believed that the whole of life, even govern¬ ment, is an art of definitely like kind with the other arts, such as that of music or the dance. We may, for instance, recall to memory one of the most typical of Greeks. Of Protagoras, caluminated by Plato,—though it is interest¬ ing to observe that Plato’s own transcendental doctrine of Ideas has been regarded as an effort to escape from the solvent influence of Protagoras’s logic,—it is possible for the modem historian of philosophy to say that “ the greatness of this man can scarcely be measured.” It was with measurement that his most famous saying was con¬ cerned : “ Man is the measure of all things, of those which exist, and of those which have no existence.” It was by his insistence on Man as the active creator of life and knowledge, the artist of the world, moulding it to his own measure, that Protagoras is interesting to us to-day. He recognised that there are no absolute criteria by which to judge actions. He was the father of relativism and of phenomenalism, probably the initiator of the modern doctrine that the definitions of geometry are only approxi¬ mately true abstractions from empirical experiences. We need not, and probably should not, suppose that in under¬ mining dogmatism he was setting up an individual subjectivism. It was the function of Man in the world, rather than of the individual, that he had in mind when he enunciated his great principle, and it was with the reduc¬ tion of human activity and conduct to art that he was mainly concerned. His projects for the art of living began
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