91É«ÇéƬ

We have it in our power to begin the world over again, but understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone. You must consider whether your nature is more suited to practical activity or to quiet study and reflection. Combine the two, perhaps, by discovering how to philosophise with a hammer? Nature seems made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Perhaps that is why the face of nature may be compared to a yielding surface, driven inwards by incessant blows. It seems that people nearly always follow the tracks made by others, so perhaps these phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse can give the flavour of Penguin’s new series, Great Ideas (£3.99 each). You’re reading Paine, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Nietzsche, Hazlitt, Orwell, Machiavelli, Schopenhauer and Darwin. After all, subjectivity consists in this: that the writer is satisfied so long as she herself understands what she means: the readers may be left to make of it what they can.