Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison

“ 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." ”

“ In this wise is created the world as we know it. In every natural existence there are, therefore, two principles to be distinguished—first, the dark principle, through which this is separated from God, and exists, as it were, in the mere ground ”

“ The theosophist, on the other hand, is most at his ease when moving within the circle of the Divine essence, into which he seems to claim absolute insight. This, however, would be insufficient to distinguish theosophy from those systems of philosophy which are sometimes called "speculative" and "absolute," and which also in many cases proceed deductively from the idea of God. In a wide sense, the system of Hegel or the system of Spinoza may be cited as examples of what is meant. Both thinkers claim to exhibit the universe as the evolution of the Divine nature. ”

“ The soul of man, which as a microcosmos resumes the nature of things, strives by self-abnegation or self-annihilation to attain this unspeakable reunion (what Eckhart calls being buried in God) . Regarding evil simply as privation, Eckhart does not make it the pivot of his thought, as was afterwards done by Boehme, but his notion of the Godhead as a dark and formless essence is a favourite thesis of theosophy. The followers of Eckhart are either practical mystics, or reproduce at most what may be called their master's speculative theology, till we come to Boehme. ”

“ We divine the system of the whole from the part we know, just as from a torso we may reconstruct a work of art; but the process of reconstruction must, in the case of philosophy, remain approximative. Our position forbids the possibility of a final system. Instead, therefore, of constantly beginning afresh in speculation, it should be our duty to attach ourselves to what may be considered the permanent results of historic development. The classical expression of these results Trendelenburg finds mainly in the Platonico-Aristotelian system. ”

“ In other words, while an emotional and practical mysticism may exist without attempting philosophically to explain itself, speculative mysticism is almost another name for theosophy. There is still a certain difference observable, however, in so far as the speculative mystic remains primarily concerned with the theory of the soul's relation to God, while the theosophist gives his thoughts a wider scope, and frequently devotes himself to the elaboration of a fantastic philosophy of nature. ”

“ But in correspondence to the first stirring of the Divine existence there awakes in God Himself an inner reflexive perception, by means of which—since no object is possible for it but God—God beholds Himself in His own image. ”

“ THEOSOPHY, as its derivation implies, is a term used to denote those forms of philosophic and religious thought which claim a special insight into the Divine nature and its constitutive moments or processes. ”

“ In irrational creatures the particular will or greed of the individual is controlled by external forces, and thus used as an instrument of the universal. But in man the two principles are consciously present together, not, however, in inseparable union, as they are in God, but with the possibility of separation. This possibility of separation is the possibility of good and evil. In Boehme's spirit, Schelling defended his idea of God as the only way of vindicating for God the conscious ness which naturalism denies, and which ordinary theism emptily asserts. ”

“ Trendelenburg's philosophizing is conditioned throughout by his loving study of Plato and Aristotle, whom he regards not as opponents but as building jointly on the broad basis of idealism. His own standpoint may almost be called a modern version of Aristotle thus interpreted. While denying the possibility of an absolute method and an absolute philosophy, as contended for by Hegel and others, Trendelenburg was emphatically an idealist in the ancient or Platonic sense; his whole work was devoted to the demonstration of the ideal in the real. ”

“ God is rather regarded as the transcendent source of being and purity, from which the individual in his natural state is alienated and afar off. Theosophy accepts the testimony of religion that the present world lies in wickedness and imperfection, and faces the problem of speculatively accounting for this state of things from the nature of the Godhead itself. Theosophy is thus in some sort a mystical philosophy of the existence of evil ”

“ Proceeding on the principle that like can only be known by like, Trendelenburg next reaches a doctrine peculiar to himself (though based upon Aristotle) which plays a central part in his speculations. Motion is the fundamental fact common to being and thought; the actual motion of the external world has its counterpart in the constructive motion which is involved in every instance of perception or thought. From motion he proceeds to deduce time, space, and the categories of mechanics and natural science. ”

“ Trendelenburg's Naturrecht may, therefore, be taken as in a manner the completion of his system, his working out of the ideal as present in the real. The ethical end is taken to be the idea of humanity, not in the abstract as formulated by Kant, but in the context of the state and of history. Law is treated throughout as the vehicle of ethical requirements. ”

“ Qual " or torture, as it were, of this diremption, the universe has qualitative existence, and is knowable. Even the three persons of the Trinity, though existing idealiter beforehand, attain reality only through this principle of nature in God, which is hence spoken of as their matrix. It forms also the matter, as it were, out of which the world is created; without the dark and fiery principle, we are told, there would be no creature. Hence God is sometimes spoken of as the father, and the eternal nature as the mother, of things. ”

“ On the one side stand those which acknowledge none but efficient causes, which make force prior to thought, and explain the universe, as it were, a tergo. This may be called, typically, Democratism. On the other side stands the "organic" or teleological view of the world, which interprets the parts through the idea of the whole, and sees in the efficient causes only the vehicle of ideal ends. ”

“ The latter view, which receives its first support in the facts of life, or organic nature as such, finds its culmination and ultimate verification in the ethical world, which essentially consists in the realization of ends. ”

“ Balked thus of their desire, they played at hermits, making themselves cells in the garden, and giving away their pocket-money to beggars. Teresa lost her mother early, and as she grew up the vanities and flirtations of a pretty girl took the place of these pious imaginations. Her father deemed it best to send her to be educated in an Augustinian convent in the town, but without any thoughts of her adopting a religious life. She would probably have married like her sisters, had it not been for an attack of illness. ”

“ Systems like Spinozism, which seem to form a third class, neither sacrificing force to thought nor thought to force, yet by their denial of final causes inevitably fall back into the Democritic or essentially materialistic standpoint, leaving us with the great antagonism of the mechanical and the organic systems of philosophy. ”

“ In all such systems, God is the terminus ad quern, a direct knowledge of whom is not claimed, but who is, as it were, the hypothesis adopted, with varying degrees of certainty in different thinkers, for the explanation of the facts before them. ”

“ It is true matter can never be completely resolved into motion, but the irreducible remainder may be treated like the irpwrrj uArj of Aristotle as an abstraction which we asymptotically approach but never reach. The facts of existence, however, are not adequately explained by the mechanical categories. The ultimate interpretation of the universe can only be found in the higher category of End or final cause. Here Trendelenburg finds the dividing line between philosophical systems. ”

“ A private house in Avila was secretly got ready to serve as a small convent, and, when the bull arrived from Rome, Teresa went out on leave from the Incarnation and installed four poor women in the new house dedicated to her patron St Joseph. It was on the 24th of August 1562 that mass was said in the little chapel and the new order constituted. It was to be an prder of Descalzos or Barefoots, in opposition to the relaxed parent body, the Calzados. The sisters were not to be literally shoeless, but to wear sandals of rope ”

“ You deceived me in saying she was a woman," writes one of her confessors; "she is a bearded man." She was brave in the face of difficulties and dangers, pure in her motives, and her utterances, some of which have been quoted, have the true ethical ring about them. ”

“ THERESA, St (1515-1582) .⁠Teresa de Cepeda, perhaps the favourite saint of modern Spain, was born at Avila, in Old Castile, on the 28th of March 1515,—at the very time, adds her biographer, "when Luther was secreting the poison which he vomited out two years later." She was one of a large family—eight sons and three daughters. Her father was a Spanish gentleman of good family, whose time was chiefly occupied with devotional reading and works of charity. Teresa's mother, his second wife, was a beautiful woman, confined generally to a sofa by delicate health. ”

“ Her own nuns, too, were not always as single-minded and obedient as the ideal sisterhood of her hopes had been. Those at St Joseph in Avila mutinied for a meat diet; the prioress at Medina answered her impertinently. Her last journey of inspec tion was cut short at Alva, where she died on the 29th of September 1582, and was laid in her first, but not her last, resting-place. ”

“ In 1840 appeared the first of his important works, which, under the modest title of Logische Untersuchungen, develops a coherent philosophical theory, besides acutely criticizing other standpoints, and in particular the then dominant Hegelian system. ”