Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life. E.O. Wilson, 1984

11 Dec 2013

Darwin on Art

“In one respect my mind had changed during the last twenty or thirty years…Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music gave me very intense delight. But now… I have almost lost my taste for pictures or music… My mind seems to have become a sort of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact… The loss of these tastes, this curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes, is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
Autobiography, 1887

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