
At the conclusion of his speech on Indian tradition he recited a passage from Matsyapurana, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".
We conscious individuals manipulate it in manners best adapted to the satisfaction of our desires. We barricade its rivers, plow its seas, ingulf its vegetations, enslave its atmospheres, torture its soils, and perform upon it any other surgery or enormity that will help us in the satisfaction of these driving desires of ours. The inanimate is. if reason is not treason, the gigantic accessory of the consciousnesses that infest it. The animate environment, on the contrary, is related to each living being, not as means, but as end.
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 78–79
At the conclusion of his speech on Indian tradition he recited a passage from Matsyapurana, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".
“Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Context: Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man. And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature — that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Ideal, pp. 146–147
Book II: On the soul; In: Aristotle (1808). Works, Vol. 4. p. 63 (412a-424b)
De Anima
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, pp. 19–20