AoM-Ch.1 Men Without Chests

1.) "The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotios about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions" (Lewis 15).

As we discussed in class, Lewis is arguing that saying something is sublime does not mean you feel sublime, it is that you in fact feel humbled because of that object. The object is in itself sublime, and that sublimity warrants your own feelings to surface and describe it as such. The same can be said for vile or annoying. The object itself is so vile or annoying that it stimulates your own feelings to describe it as such. We do not feel the word, we feel that object described is the word.

2.) "It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal" (25).

Here, Lewis speaks of three factions of the body--the mind, the chest(or heart), and the stomach(or body). The mind and the body are the two ends of the spectrum, the heart acting as the middleground that connects them. It is what makes us human, not, as Lewis writes, purely spirit or purely animal. The combination of both is what makes us human. Lewis is saying that The Green Book is essentially robbing the students it teaches of their feelings, what makes them human. Basically, men without chests, only a mind and body.