William Wallace

“ The very moment when we begin to think, says Descartes, when we cease to be merely receptive, when we draw back and fix our attention on any point whatever of our belief,—that moment doubt begins. If we even stop for an instant to ask ourselves how a word ought to be spelled, the deeper we ponder that one word by itself the more hopeless grows the hesitation. ”

“ The soul is, as Hegel has said, the awakening of mind from the sleep of nature [7] : it is nature gathering itself out of its absorption in its dispersion, the breath of life and feeling striving through the scattered members of the material world, and finding itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying current that flows through and makes continuous the various portions of the universe. It is the earliest real, felt unity in which the logical or synthetic pulse—as yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised by science—re-appears in the actual concrete world. ”

“ There is a source of knowledge within us by which we know, and more intimately than we can ever know anything external, that we will and feel. That is the first and the highest knowledge, the only knowledge that can strictly be called immediate; and to ourselves we as the subject of will are truly the "immediate object." It is in this sense of will - of will without motives, but not without consciousness of some sort - that reality is revealed. Analogy and experience make us assume it to be omnipresent. It is a mistake to say will means for Schopenhauer only force. ”

“ In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Wordsworth in his Platonic ode) the Soul has in other spheres of being dwelt with the gods and seen the secret of the world: it is itself one of the immortals, and as it is here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of birth, the living sample of humanity has left his original glory behind; and a deep forgetfulness—only short of absolute—cuts it off from his every-day consciousness. ”

“ The fact of beauty is a witness to the presence in the mere copiousness of sensible existence of a sub-conscious symmetry or spirit of harmony which realises without compulsion and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence which intellect requires. Nature itself has something which does the work that intellect was charged with, and does it with a subtle secret hand which does not suggest the artificer. ”

“ But on this stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound up with its natural being in such a way as to feel itself a fixed and restricted centre, sunk in the living environment so as to see no further, and to deem itself in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive fact. It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated, but inclusive and all-embracing. It is no longer a mere consciousness—a mere receptive and synthetic unity of apperception—but a reason and a mind. And a reason and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and confined by the same limits as seem appropriate to the soul. ”

“ We have to go back to Hegel in the same spirit as we go to Kant, and, for that matter, to Plato or Descartes: or, as the moderns may go back—to borrow from another sphere—to Dante or Shakespeare. We do not want the modern poet to resuscitate the style and matter of King Lear or of the Inferno. Yet as the Greek tragedian steeped his soul in the language and the legend of Homeric epic, as Dante nurtured his spirit on the noble melodies of Mantua's poet; so philosophy, if it is to go forth strong and effective, must mould into its own substance the living thought of former times. ”

“ It is only later—if ever—that he understands that the path of philosophy is no wandering from land to land more remote in search of a lost Absolute, a vanished God; no setting forth of new and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation in fuller and fuller truth of the immanent reality in whom we live, and move, and have our being,—the manifestation in more closely-knit unity and more amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal, which was always present among us, though we saw but few, perhaps even no, traces of its power and glory. ”

“ It frees the fact from the limitations which our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes and fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still, after art has dealt with it, to all appearance a single fact: but it now has the universe behind it and within it. It carries us away from the incompleteness, the pressure of externals, the solicitude for the future and the regrets for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality, into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and action which involves no toil. ”

“ In Logic, so regarded, thought is no longer merely our thought. It is the constructive, relational, unifying element of reality. Without it reality would not articulately be anything for us: and such thoughts seem to be its net extract, its quintessence, its concentrated meaning. But really they are only the potent form of reality. Or, more exactly, in its limits, under its phases, must come all reality if it is to be part and parcel of our intelligent possession, our certified property. Such a thought is the frame-work, the shape-giver of our world, of our communicable experience. ”

“ Reality and concreteness as estimated by the one line of thought are the very reverse of those of the other. A mere sense-world to the philosopher is a world which wants unity, which is made up of bits imperfectly adjusted to each other, and always leading us to look for an explanation of them in sources outside them. The single things we say we perceive,—the here and the now we perceive them in—are found, upon reflection and analysis, to depend upon general laws, on relations that go beyond the single,—on what is neither here nor now, but everywhere and timeless. ”

“ The 'plain man,' especially if he be of high character and of 'noble' religiosity, has a feeling that the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of life, and endangers things which are deservedly dear to him. In such an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'—the calm pursuit of truth at all costs, so characteristic of Lessing—is inferior to the 'enthusiasm of life,'—a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the stronghold of self, and sets personality—our human personality—in the throne of the Eternal. ”

“ Philosophy, said one of the ancients [2] , begins in wonder, and ends in wonder. It begins from the surprise that something could be what it purports to be: it ends in the marvel of our having thought anything else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive age in which the soul goes freely forth, wandering from one novelty to another, curious to find out all that can be known,—like the young wanderer on the sea-shore whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to fill his basket. ”

“ In the reality of experience there is always the presence of thought: and thought is only real when it is wedded with nature in the truth of man's mind. So far Bacon and Hegel coincide. Man—in so far as he is Mind—and of course Mind in its fullness is not merely subjective nor merely objective, but absolute—is the measure of all things, the central and comprehensive reality. Such a man—and such a mind—is, we need hardly add, not the man in the street, nor the man in the study: but the infinite, universal, eternal mind in whom these and all others essentially have their being. ”

“ Reflection and speculation are to him always somewhat of a disease—whence philosophy is to carry us—almost magically if possible—to rest again in the primeval unity of life. It is only an instrument towards a great end—and that end a godlike, even if you like a religious, Epicurean life. From such a standpoint it would be easy, in youth, to relapse into naturalism; it would be equally easy, in later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy—at least as Hegel understood it—is merely neither: but the life, which never can quite cease to be an effort, of idealism. ”

“ The subject-matter of philosophy is that which is always realising and always realised—the world in its wholeness as it is and has been. It seeks to put before us, and embody in permanent outlines, the universal law of spiritual life and growth, and not the local, temporary, and individual acts of human will.
Those who ask philosophy to construe, or to deduce a priori a single blade of grass, or a single act of a man, must not be grieved if their request sounds absurd and meets with no answer. The sphere of philosophy is the Universal. ”

“ As he pictures out this invisible self, it may assume various forms more or less imaginative. At times it may seem a far away, and yet intimately near, being of beings,—the common father of all souls, the eternal self-existent centre of life and love, the omnipresent bond of nature, the omniscient heart of hearts,—on whom he can lean in closest communion; though he is only too well aware how often he lives as if God were not, and human beings were roaming specks in chaos. ”

“ So too the person—that close concretion or coalescence of mind with material—that identification of self with its 'clothes,' its property and all it can vulgarly be said to own, is only an aspect of truth which tends to be over-estimated when it is reflected upon, and must notwithstanding be over-ridden and merged. Withdrawing itself from its clothing of earth and water, and even perhaps from its inner mansion of flesh and bone, personality floats in the free air as the impersonal personality of conscience,—the ethereal realm where pure practical reason rules. ”

“ The principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh, ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,—free in the absolute sense. ”

“ But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal history, when the mind withdraws from its immersion in active life, and reflects upon its own behaviour as on the proceedings of some strange creature, of which it is a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to reflect upon the partial scene, and close our eyes to the totality, doubts begin to arise, whether our procedure is justified when we unify and combine the isolated phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own subjectivity, the laws of our imagination and thought, into the natural world? ”

“ With an attempt to get a philosophy of history,—i. e. of man and mind as the culminating truth of things, we see ourselves confronted with the opposition of fatalism and chance. On one hand history is only possible for beings who have an ideal in view,—one persistent aim and principle which their work and will is the means of realising. And yet it is an ideal which only the series of generations, only the whole race, can realise. Man's license to do or to refrain rests upon a larger, latent, divine necessity which constrains it. ”

“ These grand sentiments find themselves, naturally and without taking a single step, centred in the very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is genius, with its deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources of true being, and these rockets are not the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insights are only to be gained by the labour which comprehends and grasps its object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce the universality of science. ”

“ For criticism philosophy always is: always the reflection upon fixed dogma, and the discussion of it till it becomes sensible of its defects, and stands upon another and higher plane. And to some it may seem that this is the sole function which philosophy can legitimately undertake. 'Yet,' as Aristotle remarked, 'the good critic must know what he criticises.' He must not merely reflect upon it from outside, but deal with it from the plenitude of experience, from the abundance of the heart. If he be a critic then, he cannot be a mere critic, but also an agent in the work of reconstruction. ”

“ They can be correlated, reduced, and unified: we may even say, they can be identified; but if we use such a term, we must mean that there is some totality beyond and above them in which they all find a place and all are harmonious; in which all when brought to their Truth are really one and the same. This birthright of human nature in all ages and countries—this central essence of man's spirit—is the realm of Platonic ideas. They are the great elements, or constituent members, of humanity and of reality: the framework of his mind and of the world. ”

“ But implicitly Kant's idea of reason's autonomy,—of the 'I ought' as in its supreme truth an 'I will,'—is an eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after Kant, is the standpoint which explains life and conduct and which makes conduct possible. It is the assertion that the completeness is, and is my inmost being, the source of my action, my chief good, and that chief good not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward to as reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And this joy is what is hidden under the austere gravity of the categorical imperative. ”

“ Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit, humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. ”

“ But Thought has not deposited all its burden, or uttered all its meaning in Being. Being is the veriest abstraction,—the very rudiment of thought—meagre as meagre can be. It is on one side the bare position or affirmation of thought: on the other hand it is the very negation of thought,—if thought be only possible under difference. For a mere 'Is' is a mere indescribable without-difference. There is no such thing as mere Being: or mere Being is mere nothing: mere Being is not. ”

“ But the bent towards unity is a natural law making itself felt even in the period of differentiation. And it makes itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of broken harmony. And that pain—which is the sign of an ever-present life that refuses to succumb to the encroaching elements—is the stimulus to re-construction. Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs, and deadens, does it involve stagnation: as pain proper, felt as resistance to an inner implicitly victorious principle, it stimulates and quickens to efforts to make life whole again. ”

“ It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds apart and utterly alien. ”

“ Human nature in order to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were, to lose its life in order to gain it. The individual had to sacrifice part of his all-sided development in order that he might gain it again, and in a larger measure, through the medium of society. This process is the process of civilisation: the long and, as it often seems, weary road by which man can only realise himself by self-sacrifice: can only reach unity through the way of diversity, and must die to live. ”

“ There is an objective reality—outside and beyond him—yet somehow to be reached by a daring leap,—whereby, out of sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes to the temporal and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love. ”