Look at it! Think of it! A hundred and twenty men and women having no patronage, no promise of any earthly favor, no endowment, no wealth--a company of men and women having to get their living by common daily toil, and busied with all the household duties of daily life--and yet _they_ are to begin the conquests of Christianity! To them is entrusted a work which is to turn the world upside >down. None so exalted but the influence of this lowly company shall reach to them, until the throne of the Cæsars is claimed for Christ. None so far off but the power of this little band gathered in an upper room shall extend to them until the whole world is knit into a brotherhood! Not a force is there on the earth, either of men or devils, but they shall overcome it, until every knee shall bow to their Master, and every tongue shall confess that He is Lord.
Fame alone rises towards heaven, because God looks with favour on virtuous things; infamy must be represented upside >down, because its works are contrary to God and move towards hell. Fame should be depicted covered with tongues instead of with feathers and in the form of a bird.
People have such terrible assumptions about ghosts — you know, phantoms that haunt you, that make you scared, that turn the house upside >down. Yin people are not in our living presence but are around, and kind of guide you to insights. Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you've hit the jackpot. Yin people ring the bells, saying, "Pay attention." And you say, "Oh, I see now." Yet I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule. … To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, "What will people think of me for writing something like this?" But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses.
TIPS FOR PERFORMERS: Playing cards have the top half upside->down to help cheaters. There are a finite number of jokes in the universe. Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music longer than they would ordinarily. There is no music in space. People will pay to watch people make sounds. Everything on stage should be larger than in real life.
Of the old Peruvian mummies in the Kircherian Museum at Rome, several are of women with babies in their arms, whence it is evident that a mother had her suckling buried with her; it would console her in the next world and could hardly survive her in this. The practice of burying ornaments, tools and weapons with the dead characterizes the inhumations of the Quaternary epoch, as if in that dim and remote age death was already regarded as the portal of another life closely resembling this. The cups, tools, weapons, ornaments and other articles deposited with the dead are often carefully broken or turned upside >down and inside out; for the soul or _manes_ of objects is liberated by such fracture or inversion and so passes into the dead man's use and possession. For the same reason where the dead are burned, their properties are committed to the flames. The ghost of the warrior has a ghostly sword and buckler to fight with and a ghostly cup to drink from, and he is also nourished by the impalpable odour and reek of the animal victims sacrificed over his grave. Instead of valuable objects cheap images and models are often substituted; and why not, if the mere ghosts of the things are all that the wraith can enjoy? Thus Marco Polo (ii. 76) describes how in the land of Kinsay (Hang-chau) "the friends and relations make a great mourning for the deceased, and clothe themselves in hempen garments, and follow the corpse, playing on a variety of instruments and singing hymns to their idols. And when they come to the burning place they take representations of things cut out of parchment, such as caparisoned horses, male and female slaves, camels, armour, suits of cloth of gold (and money), in great quantities, and these things they put on the fire along with the corpse so that they are all burned with it. And they tell you that the dead man shall have all these slaves and animals of which the effigies are burned, alive in flesh and blood, and the money in gold, at his disposal in the next world; and that the instruments which they have caused to be played at his funeral, and the idol hymns that have been chaunted shall also be produced again to welcome him in the next world." The manufacture of such paper _simulacra_ for consumption at funerals is still an important industry in Chinese cities. The ancient Egyptians, assured that a man's _ka_ or double shall revivify his body, took pains to guard the flesh from corruption, steeping the corpse in natron and stuffing it with spices. A body so prepared is called a mummy (q.v.), and the custom was already of a hoary antiquity in 3200 B.C., when the oldest dated mummy we have was made. The bowels, removed in the process, were placed in jars over the corpse in the tomb, together with writing tablets, books, musical instruments, &c., of the dead. Cemeteries also remain full of mummies of crocodiles, cats, fish, cows and other sacred animals. The Greeks settled in Egypt learned to mummify their dead, but the custom was abhorrent to the Jews, although the Christian belief in the resurrection of the flesh must have been formed to a large extent under Egyptian influence. Half the superiority of the Jewish to other ancient religions lay in this, that it prescribed no funeral rites other than the simplest inhumation. Entry: 3
First of all there was formed a human individuality, which was wanting in the middle ages. As J. Burckhardt has said, the man was changed into the individual. He began to feel and assert his own personality, which was constantly attaining a fuller realization. As a consequence of this, the idea of fame and the desire for it arose. A really cultured class was formed, in the modern meaning of the word, and the conception was arrived at (completely unknown in former times) that the worth of a man did not depend at all on his birth but on his personal qualities. Poggio in his dialogue _De nobilitate_ declares that he entirely agreed with his interlocutors Niccolò Niccoli and Lorenzo de' Medici in the opinion that there is no other nobility but that of personal merit. External life was growing more refined in all particulars; the man of society was created; rules for civilized life were made; there was an increasing desire for sumptuous and artistic entertainments. The medieval idea of existence was turned upside >down; men who had hitherto turned their thoughts exclusively to heavenly things, and believed exclusively in the divine right, now began to think of beautifying their earthly existence, of making it happy and gay, and returned to a belief in their human rights. This was a great advance, but one which carried with it the seeds of many dangers. The conception of morality became gradually weaker. The "fay ce que vouldras" of Rabelais became the first principle of life. Religious feeling was blunted, was weakened, was changed, became pagan again. Finally the Italian of the Renaissance, in his qualities and his passions, became the most remarkable representative of the heights and depths, of the virtues and faults, of humanity. Corruption was associated with all that is most ideal in life; a profound scepticism took hold of people's minds; indifference to good and evil reached its highest point. Entry: 3
In this and in other features of his work a _dualism_ reveals itself which is also often observable in his actions in life--the alternating predominance of the spirit of the scholar and the spirit of the radical revolutionary. Marx originally entitled his great social work _Criticism of Political Economy_, and this is still the sub-title of _Das Kapital_. But the conception of _critic_ or _criticize_ has with Marx a very pronounced meaning. He uses them mostly as identical with fundamentally opposing. Much as he had mocked the "critical criticism" of the Bauers, he is in this respect yet of their breed and relapses into their habits. He retained in principle the Hegelian dialectical method, of which he said that in order to be rationally employed it must be "turned upside >down," i.e. put upon a materialist basis. But as a matter of fact he has in many respects contravened against this prescription. Strict materialist dialectics cannot conclude much beyond actual facts. Dialectical materialism is revolutionary in the sense that it recognizes no finality, but otherwise it is necessarily positivist in the general meaning of that term. But Marx's opposition to modern society was fundamental and revolutionary, answering to that of the proletarian to the _bourgeois_. And here we come to the main and fatal contradiction of his work. He wanted to proceed, and to a very great extent did proceed, scientifically. Nothing was to be deduced from preconceived ideas; from the observed evolutionary laws and forces of modern society alone were conclusions to be drawn. And yet the final conclusion of the work, as already noted, is a preconceived idea; it is the announcement of a state of society logically opposed to the given one. Imperceptibly the dialectical movement of _ideas_ is substituted for the dialectical movement of facts, and the real movement of facts is only considered so far as is compatible with the former. Science is violated in the service of speculation. The picture given at the end of the first volume answers to a conception arrived at by speculative socialism in the 'forties. True, Marx calls this chapter "the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation," and "tendency" does not necessarily mean realization in every detail. But on the whole the language used there is much too absolute to allow of the interpretation that Marx only wanted to give a speculative picture of the goal to which capitalist accumulation would lead if unhampered by socialist counteraction. The epithet "historical" indicates rather that the passage in question was meant to give in the main the true outline of the forthcoming social revolution. We are led to this conclusion also by the fact that, in language which is not in the least conditional, it is there said that the change of capitalist property into social property will mean "only the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people." In short, the principal reason for the undeniable contradictions in _Das Kapital_ is to be found in the fact that where Marx has to do with details or subordinate subjects he mostly notices the important changes which actual evolution had brought about since the time of his first socialist writings, and thus himself states how far their presuppositions have been corrected by facts. But when he comes to general conclusions, he adheres in the main to the original propositions based upon the old uncorrected presuppositions. Besides, the complex character of modern society is greatly under-estimated, so that, e.g., such important features as the influence of the changes of traffic and aggregation on modern life are scarcely considered at all; and industrial and political problems are viewed only from the aspect of class antagonism, and never under their administrative aspect. With regard to the theory of surplus-value and its foundation, the theory of labour-value, so much may be safely said that, its premisses accepted, it is most ingeniously and most consistently worked out. And since its principal contention is in any case so far true that the wage-earning workers as a whole produce more than they receive, the theory has the great merit of demonstrating in an admirably lucid way the relations between wages and surplus-produce and the growth and movements of capital. But the theory of labour-value as the determining factor of the exchange or market value of commodities can with justification be disputed, and is surely not more true than those theories of value based on social demand or utility. Marx himself, in placing in the third volume what he calls the _law of value_ in the background and setting out the formation of the "price of production" as the empirical determinator of prices in modern society, justifies those who look upon the conception of labour-value as an abstract formula which does not apply to individual exchanges of commodities at all, but which only serves to show an imagined typical example of what in reality to-day is only true with regard to the production of the whole of social wealth. Thus understood, the conception of labour-value is quite unobjectionable, but it loses much of the significance attributed to it by most of the disciples of Marx and occasionally by Marx himself. It is a means of analysing and exemplifying surplus labour, but quite inconclusive as to the proof of the surplus value, or as an indication of the degree of the exploitation of the workers. This becomes the more apparent the more the reader advances in the second and third volumes of _Das Kapital_, where commercial capital, money capital and ground rent are dealt with. Though full of fine observations and deductions, they form, from a revolutionary standpoint, an anti-climax to the first volume. It is difficult to see how, after all that is explained there on the functions of the classes that stand between industrial employers and workers, Marx could have returned to those sweeping conclusions with which the first volume ends. Entry: MARX