P.D. Ouspensky - Men cannot do

" Man is a machine. He has no independent movements, inside or outside of himself. He's a machine brought into motion by external influences and external impacts. All his movements, actions, words, ideas, emotions, moods, and thoughts are produced by external influences. By himself, he's just an automaton with a certain store of memories of previous experiences, and a certain amount of reserve energy."

Here comes the fascinating part,

"In the English language there are no impersonal verbal forms which can be used in relation to human actions. So we must continue to say that man thinks, reads, writes, loves, hates, starts wars, fights, and so on. Actually, all this happens."

Ouspensky is a Russian "philosopher" whose first language I assume is Russian. When I first started learning the Russian language, I discovered a very fascinating and somewhat unique aspect of Russian - Russian is very impersonal and passive. It's inevitable that such nature of the language has an impact on people who speak it.

However, even though I see some correlation between Ouspensky's theory and the language he speaks, I'm not going to insist that Ouspensky's theory of the incapacity of humans is heavily influenced by the nature of the language he's most accustomed to. Such claim would be clumsy and dangerous. And so, read on...