Philosophically Speaking

This morning as I was sorting through the wall of books that wraps around my one-room apartment, I re-discovered in an obscure critique of Kant an irregularly folded page of handwritten text. It wasn’t dated but it seemed to be in the same hand that had inscribed "George Glover / Knox College, 1923" inside the cover. I remember that the first time I read it I decided I must keep the book if for no other reason than to protect this artifact.

As far as I was able to determine this was George Glover’s only achievement in philosophy.

In our highly evolved being we have become objective, remote, and godlike. Having reached our evolutionary apex, we reflect back on ourselves as if looking at something beneath or behind us. While we know ourselves as the being that thinks and feels and desires, we forget that the object of our attention is us. We have become the anthropologist who fills with copious notes his notebooks, memo pads [sic] and miscellaneous scraps of paper. Who sees but is not seen. Who questions but is not questioned. Who judges but is not judged. We have exposed the eclectic superstitions of our primitive selves and replaced them with an incorrigible system of truth. We have removed the nearsighted empathy of the human animal and have substituted for it the omniscient perspective of absolute mind. We have become our own gods.