Alexander Campbell Fraser

“ It is for the philosopher to reconcile the speculative and the practical part of human nature, either by giving evidence that all our beliefs and notions are explicable, or else by exhibiting those of them that are mysterious in contrast to those of them which can be explained. ”

“ Gravitation itself, for instance, or polarity, or electricity, need still to be accounted for, in order to satisfy philosophy, and explanations of them, if obtained, are only steps on the road of an infinite regress of analogous questions. But as an infinite number of receding explanations is in itself an absurdity, and at variance with the limitation of the human understanding, there must be some point into which the answers shall finally converge. That ultimate point must be admitted to be the original structure of the mind of man. ”

“ Thus, when I imagine a scene described in the Iliad, or when I remember the events of yesterday, the immediate objects of my knowledge are certain phenomena of my own mind. Let the siege of Troy, or the events of yesterday be enacted before my senses, and the immediate objects of my knowledge are radically qualities of matter. When we know the possible and the past, the very operation of knowing is the only object of which the mind is conscious. ”

“ Those to whom the written word is the centre of all truth, regarding the “things unseen and eternal,” and the moral mystery of human life, cannot count valueless, thoughtful answers to such questions as refer to the manner in which the positive evidence of religion is reached by man, so that his thought, even while confined, by the necessity of its original structure, to the level of the relative and the conditioned, may be exercised on the objects of a religious faith, that precisely meets the wants of the human intelligence as well as of the human conscience. ”

“ Other portions of our physical knowledge approach more or less nearly to the dignity of scientific, in proportion as their parts are joined in the tie of defined relations which, as the first principles of the science, at once unite and explain them. ”

“ It is as much for the sake of this illumination, as for the purposes of defence, that we need to foster those habits which send us in quest of the First Principles of metaphysics. Nature is usually sufficiently strong to defend, for all the uses of life, those portions of knowledge which the powerful original motives of human activity require to be converted into practice, and she can always silence, by means of action, the objections of the few sceptical adventurers who seek to find their way behind the scenes, and ingeniously contrive literally to lose themselves in the attempt. ”

“ But, on the other hand, it is possible to speculate without any impulse from the conscience, and to find materials of science, among the objects of religious faith, which pervade the whole region of the higher philosophy, without forming the habit of converting the scientific knowledge into practice. An habitual employment, merely as the ministers of pure speculation, of those objects which, of all others, are most fitted to alter the character for good, is appropriately punished in the agonies of religious scepticism. ”

“ If these specimens, by Sir William Hamilton, of what a profound knowledge of the history of opinion really is, incite some men to an exact study of the books of foreign countries and of former generations, they are also fitted to rouse the still more dormant spirit that seeks direct and independent intellectual contact with the real problems themselves, which have afforded nourishment to the high philosophy of the great thinkers of other ages. ”

“ If the finite power of reasoning may be proved incapable to grasp the theory that is sufficient to account for responsible actions, consistently on the one hand with our belief regarding causation, and on the other, with the limitation of the series of causes which is assumed in those principles of the theistical argument that are at variance with the hypothesis of an infinite chain of derived causes, common sense includes among its other beliefs the conviction that we are created by God moral agents, responsible for those actions which we perform in relation to Him and to one another. ”

“ In a word, on the side of liberty, man is lost in the mystery of absolute commencement. On the side of universal necessity, he is lost in the mystery, or rather the contradiction, of infinite dependent succession. And thus it seems a conclusive inference, that this long-debated problem is indeed insoluble by man, or by any other being whose power of thought is limited like his. ”

“ The disinterested love of science and philosophy is a counterpoise upon the tendency of less elevated minds, to pervert the very meaning of the word truth, and to assume that those opinions which are or which seem best adapted to gratify some other active principle of the mind, subordinate to, or at least quite distinct from, the desire for speculative activity, are to be received as a standard of belief. ”

“ On neither hypothesis do we get directly beyond the objects of self-consciousness, and, therefore, as each is said to violate that utterance of the original judgments of our nature which declares that we do, on neither can we get beyond the succession of our own thoughts and feelings, while in both even this self-knowledge itself becomes illusory, and must fall with the original faith that has been, in both hypotheses, assumed to be deceitful. ”

“ But although David Hume worked this sceptical method with success against a metaphysical hypothesis which resolves all knowledge into experience alone, and accounts for its entrance, and its various kinds, by means of representations, the practical part of our nature always declares, by continuing in a state of activity, that human knowledge is in itself susceptible of a consistent defence, and at all events of a relative explanation, for a sane man hardly ever acts the sceptic, at least in the affairs of this life. ”

“ The world of speculative reason differs from the actual world of living men, for man, as he is, differs from man as he ought to be. Philosophical theories are the nourishment of the purely rational principle; but they tend, unless the influence is counteracted by strength of mind, and an attentive observation of the infinite variety of the existing modifications of the instincts, affections, and other irrational causes of action, to deaden, or at least to distort, the keen perception of the common mechanism of man’s practical nature ”

“ What we have illustrated of physical induction holds good also of the results of deduction. Every explanation must rest on the inexplicable, and every demonstration must rest on the indemonstrable, while the last alleged inexplicable and indemonstrable belief is an instinct of human nature. ”

“ Locke, Butler, Hume, and Reid, made no pretension to a complete and exact acquaintance with the history of speculation.
Reading is valuable to the philosopher chiefly as one means for exciting his own power of thinking. Only a few minds, however, possess sufficient independent force to convert what they read into a source of intellectual nourishment; and even great intellects have been averse from an extensive acquaintance with books, from an apprehension of their tendency to fetter the independent working of the mental faculties. ”

“ It is desirable, for the sake of the common good, that society should in each generation possess at least a few men in whom the habit of speculation, and the love of comprehensive thinking and speculative completeness, occupy a very predominant place among the motives which keep the mind in a state of activity. ”

“ From Thales, Xenophanes, and Pythagoras in the Greek philosophy, and the still older inspired complaints of the patriarch of Idumea, down to our own century, the apparent discord of the theory of knowledge, arising from the real limitation of its sphere; the great objects of knowledge—God, self, and the world;—together with the riddles of creation, and of independent moral action, which these involve, have attracted, with a scientific interest, a succession of minds of different schools. ”

“ And although a desire for knowledge is a common profession, it cannot be doubted that this sort of mental development is really of extremely rare occurrence. “The abstract love of truth,” it has been well said, “is a principle with those only who have made it their study, who have applied themselves to the pursuit of some art or science in which the intellect is severely tasked, and learns by habit to take a pride in, and set a just value on its conclusions. ”

“ As human nature and society are constituted, it is however well that instances of an exclusive development of the faculty for abstract or highly generalized science should be rare. A rigorous separation of the speculative from the practical, is apt, by causing a disruption of the complex nature of man, to infuse the spirit of scepticism into the operations of the understanding, and to occasion weakness and vacillation in the conduct of life. ”

“ In this view of perception, the intercourse of the mind with the external world is through the intermediate sensations which alone are perceived by it; but in self-consciousness it is in direct intercourse with its objects. As in the less refined hypothesis of representation, the sphere of immediate knowledge is still confined within the mind itself, only instead of a succession of representative entities, distinct at once from the percipient mind and from the material object, the understanding is presented with a succession of its own states. ”

“ A mental experience of the divinity of the gospel system, which is gained by acting it out in the details of a holy life, is certainly a practical escape from those questions of science. Without this, even the speculative task of the theologian cannot be accomplished, and it is chiefly in order to foster and render intelligent that habit of life that the task is worth his toil. ”

“ A quality or phenomenon of mind, e.g., a sensation, judgment, or desire, is evidently an object of knowledge to the mind itself not less than a quality or phenomenon of matter is. On the doctrine of the representationalist philosophers to whom we have referred, the observing mind is in fact in closer connexion with its own observed qualities than with the observed qualities of matter, and, in the opinion of many of them, we know the latter through the medium of the sensations which they occasion in the former. ”

“ This theory of the knowledge of what self once was conscious of, in the modes or qualities of self, contrasted with the more direct sort of knowledge of consciousness, suggests a variety of questions, and, among others, an inquiry into the laws according to which those objects of the mind that are at first observed, in a direct experience of the inner and outer world, become, as objects of memory and imagination, converted into mental modes, and pass into the current of our associated thoughts. ”

“ Without the gravitation of forces such as those we have indicated, the spirit of unmixed speculation would (unless in the case of a genius of extraordinary strength) quit its hold of the lower and more palpable departments of universal knowledge, and find sufficient occupation among the most abstract, and general relations of things. Contemplating the framework which contains knowledge more than the knowledge which the framework contains, the mind is apt to lose a direct acqaintance with the actual and the individual, in the splendid theory of the possible. ”

“ To gain a clear understanding of a disputed question, and of the conditions which must be conformed to before a true answer to it can be obtained, while it is usually a more painful and less manifest stage in the progress of a science or a doctrine, is often a more important one than the subsequent solution of its difficulties. It helps to fill the intellect with suggestive hypotheses of a kind appropriate to the peculiarities of the phenomena which are exposed for scientific explanation. The solution itself is frequently obvious when a new general principle has been obtained ”

“ The imperfection or one-sidedness of Locke’s philosophy, as regards the expression of its fundamental principles, was exhibited, in what is virtually the form of a reductio ad absurdum, by David Hume, in his “Treatise of Human Nature,” where, on the principles of Locke, all knowledge is reduced to a succession of phenomena, while absolute existence and human philosophy are proved to imply a tissue of contradictions. ”