In this age of the rule of brute force, it is almost impossible for anyone to believe that any one else could possibly reject the law of the final supremacy of brute force.
Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.
But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?
Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.
The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.
Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.