Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison

“ It is only for the psychologist, I say, that the investigation of this mechanism, as a mechanism, has an interest. To all the rest of mankind ideas or presentations are interesting only for the knowledge they give us of a reality beyond themselves. In point of fact, we never pause to consider them as what they are in themselves, — we treat them consistently as significant, as ideas of something, as representative or symbolic of a world of facts. Now it is from this latter point of view that epistemology considers ideas. ”

“ Metaphysically, Idealism is opposed most ordinarily to Materialism; in the widest sense it is the opposite of what may be called the mechanical and atheistic view of the universe, whatever special form that may take. Is self-conscious thought with its ideal ends, — the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, — the self-realizing End that works in changes and makes it Evolution? or are these but the casual outcome of a mechanical system — a system in its ultimate essence indifferent to the results which in its gyrations it has unwittingly created and will as unwittingly destroy? ”

“ He now proceeded to distinguish three moments in God, the first of which is the pure indifference which, in a sense, precedes all existence the primal basis or abyss, as he calls it, in agreement with Boehme. But, as there is nothing before or besides God, God must have the ground or cause of His existence in Himself. This is the second moment, called nature in God, distinguishable from God, but inseparable from Him. It is that in God which is not God Himself; it is the yearning of the eternal One to give birth to itself. ”

“ For any idea that has a principle of growth in it, any idea that takes hold of man’s spiritual life on many sides, is certain, as it developes, to produce wide divergencies, and even to call forth much antagonism and conflict between its supporters. A doctrine that passes unchanged from hand to hand, is by that very fact shown to have exhausted its inherent force; and those ideas have been the most fruitful both in religion and philosophy, which, accepted as a common starting-point, have given rise to the most far-reaching controversy. ”

“ Whereas Plato's main problem had been the organization of the perfect state, and Aristotle's intellect had ranged with fresh interest over all departments of the knowable, political speculation had become a mockery with the extinction of free political life, and knowledge as such had lost its freshness for the Greeks of the Roman Empire. Knowledge is nothing to these men if it does not show them the infinite reality which is able to fill the aching void within. ”

“ Is the ultimate essence and cause of all things only "dust that rises up, and is lightly laid again"; or is it the Eternal Love of Dante's Vision — "the love that moves the sun and the other stars"? That is the fundamental metaphysical antithesis. If we embrace the, one alternative, however we may clothe it in detail, we recognize the universe as our home, and we may have a religion; if we embrace the other, then the spirit of man is indeed homeless in an alien world. ”

“ Teresa herself was very humble, and thought their explanation might be true; she took her case to her confessor and to the provincial-general of the Jesuits. The latter put her under a course of discipline: she was to flog herself with a whip of nettles, to wear a haircloth plaited with broken wires that would tear the skin, and to meditate daily on the details of Christ's passion. One day, while thus occupied, her trance came upon her, and she heard a voice say, "Thou shalt have no more converse with men, but with angels." ”

“ Mysticism, on the other hand, is marked on its speculative side by even an overweening confidence in human reason. Nor need this be wondered at if we consider that the unity of the human mind with the divine is its underlying presupposition. Hence where reason is discarded by the mystic it is merely reason over leaping itself; it occurs at the end and not at the beginning of his speculations. Even then there is no appeal to authority; nothing is accepted from without. ”

“ If it is objected that this view of psychology, as limited to the subjective world, is insufficient, seeing that in great part of his work the psychologist is bound to assume the correlation of mind and body, and the existence of an external cause of impressions, I reply that, on its physiological or experimental side, psychology simply places itself at the point of view of the other sciences. ”

“ A volume of Essays such as the present, touching on so many important topics, can be only a small contribution to that critical reconstruction of knowledge which every time has to accomplish for itself. But it will, I believe, serve the purpose of its writers, if it shows in some degree how the principles of an idealistic philosophy may be brought to bear on the various problems of science, of ethics, and of religion, which are now pressing upon us. ”

“ They must believe, therefore, that they have grasped the inmost principles of that nature: so much is involved, indeed, in the construction of an absolute system. But it is to be noted that, though there is much talk of God in such systems, the known universe—the world that now is—is nowhere transcended; God is really no more than the principle of unity immanent in the whole. ”

“ Whether we can absolutely prove so much or no, it is certain that so much is involved in every constructive system of metaphysics; and certainly we cannot believe less without lapsing into scepticism. If we put this metaphysical sense upon the words, then I most certainly believe, in Berkeley's phrase, that "the absolute existence of unthinking things are words without a meaning." There is no metaphysical thing-in-itself, no res completa, except the universe regarded as a self-existent whole. ”

“ In this he showed how a deep faith in certain principles may be united with the questioning temper of science, and even with a scrupulous scepticism which is ever ready to go back to the beginning, that it may exhaust everything that can be said against them. For such a mind there must always be a wide division between faith and reason, or (what in philosophy comes to the same thing) between a principle and its development into a system. ”

“ But for myself, I question whether he does not go too far in admitting an undifferentiated sensuous consciousness as the primordial fact in the evolutionary process. It is in vain that we project our imaginations towards such a hypothetical beginning: it has nothing in common with what we understand by knowledge, and is therefore perfectly unrealizable by us. Being thus totally heterogeneous, it cannot form a step on the road to knowledge: I mean that it does not in any sense pave the way for it or render the emergence of cognition easier to conceive. ”

“ Moreover, this change of the mental atmosphere and environment is itself part of a development which must affect the doctrine also, if it is no mere dead tradition, but a seed of new intellectual life. Anyone who writes about philosophy must have his work judged, not by its relation to the intellectual wants of a past generation, but by its power to meet the wants of the present time — wants which arise out of the advance of science, and the new currents of influence which are transforming man’s social and religious life. ”