Anonymous

“ The equality of the concept with itself is only the objectified expression of the identity of the self. Since knowledge is possible only through categories, and that, too, only when the categories form an immanent unity with the identity of the self, and since the identity of the self involves the relativity of its object, all knowledge, and so the entire world-picture, is only subjective. This applies not only to things, but to selves. All spirits are only in my spirit — every self is only a phenomenal form of my self. ”

“ But we also predicate equality in the judgment of reality; what can the empirical sense of such a proposition be when the sense of equality is alleged to be non-empirical? We present reality to ourselves in a space and time order. What sense has this idea? We ourselves and our body belong to the idea which we have of reality. We represent things as acting upon our sense-organs and connect these with our psychical processes. The actual coincidence of these results with what we actually experience, warrants our ideas of what we call objective reality. ”

“ Every one who is the object of respect and reverence may feel a general security and confidence that he will meet with no hinderance from his fellows, but he may follow his impulses and work for the accomplishment of his desires. When the desire to live in peace and to sleep in security takes possession of the mind, the conscience arises and becomes the judge of all our particular inclinations. ”

“ The divinity, itself without effect, without time, a working force, becomes will only in man. In this will the force expends itself in time and is subject to effect. The will is free in its choice, but its operation in the world is conditioned through the force of God, who determines the world's complex. The divine force employs every determination of will for good. Out of the reciprocal activity of the divine force and the free individual human will, arises the complex of history. ”

“ We are accustomed to speak of ideas as reproduced, as passed from mind to mind, as similar or dissimilar to one another. But taking the word 'idea' in the sense of an event in an individual consciousness, it is clear that an idea once past is gone forever, and any supposed recurrence of it is another idea. These two ideas are not present in the same state of consciousness, and therefore cannot be compared. All relation, being between ideas, can exist only in some consciousness; now that past idea was in no consciousness but that past consciousness that alone contained it ”

“ Indeterminism signifies pure chance; what place could responsibility have in such a scheme? It would make morality uncertain. Determinism is the postulate of morality as well as of science. We may call a volition free that conforms to all the tendencies of one's nature, one that systematizes or co-ordinates our desires and acts. Such freedom lies at the basis of responsibility. Personality, liberty, finality, systematization, responsibility, define the same general fact: the co-ordination, the teleological unity of psychical elements. ”

“ The dynamic principle on which advance in culture depends is found in new men, who, free from the cramping influence of the old schools, throw themselves, fresh and untrammelled, into the work to be done. The traditions which had become to the men of the old ways of thinking ends in themselves are to the new men of value only as means. In the history of Greece we find each city bringing in turn some new element to enrich the Greek ideal. In Rome progress was always owing to new self-made men. Christianity grew up as a new society formed out of elements despised by both Jew and Gentile. ”

“ The authority of public opinion is stronger than the former two, but is itself dominated by the authority of the leaders of moral feeling and of intellectual activity. Yet even their influence is permanent only in proportion as it tends to improve society. All permanent authority rests on a social basis. The seat of authority for the individual is his own conscience; where this is in doubt recourse should be had to the records of past experience especially of great men as a guide in conduct, and to living leaders as a guide in thought. ”

“ Time and space are unities; their nature imposes on us a conception of life (quite different from that of Leibniz and Descartes) according to which the living being constitutes its organs instead of resulting from them.
All duration and extension, then, are one before being manifold. We see in duration a double nature: succession and simultaneity mutually imply each other. Neither pure succession nor pure simultaneity of parts of time can be conceived; both render time and thinking impossible. Absolute succession means absolute multiplicity without any principle of unity ”

“ The highest principle of knowledge is the unity of self-consciousness in which I am conscious of a necessary synthesis a priori, through which all the given states of consciousness are brought under an original synthetic unity of apperception without which they would not be mine. Kant saw clearly that our consciousness is completely determined on one side by external forces acting upon our sense organs, and that it supposes on the other hand a reaction proceeding wholly from the subject. ”

“ Responsibility is not a question of causality, of free will or determination, but of finality. It rests on the solidarity of the diverse tendencies forming the individual. A person is responsible for his acts in so far as he is their cause. ”

“ It cannot be gainsaid, however, that the state is gradually extending the boundaries of its activity. Humanism does not require the sacrifice of the individual and of individual consciousness; the individual must act, and, in order to act, must feel himself as a personality, a demand which makes a certain amount of egoism necessary. It is, however, no absolute egoism, but one that feels itself one with a wider circle, whose welfare it furthers as its own. ”

“ There are not two distinct realms, one of movement and one of thought. For the philosopher the world is but a phenomenon. It is vain to seek a real activity or causality in such a physical world, there being but successions of phenomena in time and space here. The true activity must be ascribed to the reality which dwells beneath the system of visible and tangible appearances. It is will. Will and feeling consciousness are everywhere. Philosophy will come to see in physical energy the external expression of psychical energy, i.e. will, which constitutes reality. ”

“ It is an abstraction, a necessary consequence from the fundamental principle that the universe is a unity, and that there is an absolute connection between all phenomena. Each phenomenon has for its antecedents and conditions all the other phenomena of the universe. Scientific knowledge of a particular existence is therefore impossible. A divine intellect would understand phenomena not according to laws and causes, but by the concrete principles of which each concrete reality is formed. Motion is a law of nature, the most abstract and general of all laws. ”

“ Kant's conception of the highest moral principle appeared to him not definite enough. In the critical philosophy, morality and happiness are separated from each other in order to determine which of the two is the absolute good. Morality, however, is not a good but a perfection. Good and perfection are two heterogeneous things, which are scarcely capable of comparison. Moral happiness, at which the moral instinct aims, is self-satisfaction, personal worth, and dignity, — full participation in the life of an intelligent moral being. ”

“ The living being possesses these characteristics. What makes the universe an object of consciousness is that it is an object of science. What renders it an object of science is the unity established in every phenomenal series by the mechanical correlations of all the phenomena of the series. Science is mechanical, and can be nothing else. But when it excludes all metaphysics, it does itself become metaphysical par excellence. Finality, though commonly understood as the principle and condition of the metaphysical unity of the living, is in reality but a consequence of this. ”

“ In rejecting universal mechanism, we have apparently rejected the only conception which renders intelligible the unity of the phenomenal world and perhaps repudiated the notion of causality itself. And by abandoning the law of final causes we have evidently lost our only means of comprehending the co-ordination of the parts of the universe and of organic life. Causality may not be able to be reduced to mechanism, yet it exists ”

“ In philosophy, the Scottish school represents the same effort of thought to reduce reality to terms of touch. The real external world which this school of philosophy so bravely defends, and tries so hard to express, is not a world known by some inexplicable divine intuitive act of consciousness as they thought, but the single, and hitherto unattended to, phenomena of the special sense of touch. ”

“ Anthropology and sociology indicate that certain individuals have a criminal nature. They are habitual or incorrigible criminals and, as such, should be rendered harmless to society, for as long a period as possible. This bold position of the International Criminological Association breaks with the idea that the criminal is punished for his deed, and takes the stand that he should be punished for his mental and moral condition. In other words, punishment is transformed into judicious treatment, the element of pain is eliminated, as it already has been from the care of the insane. ”

“ We may conclude that it is only necessary to conceive of a determinism much more complex, and at the same time much more flexible, than that of the Associationist school which divides the mind into ideas or separate states, in order to combine them like the stones in a mosaic. It is necessary also to take account of the reaction exercised upon determinism by the notion of liberty under its diverse forms, and to seek in a comprehensive determinism the only possible or desirable liberty. ”

“ In many passages of his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann's language is that of the determinist, in the face of which his attempt to find a basis for blame must be futile. It is a contradiction in his philosophy to hold, on the one hand, the uniform development of all physical and moral powers, on the other, to deny that they act according to uniform law. Because a man, who has been systematically trained, is able to resist temptations, he is not, on that account, free and responsible. ”

“ But if the human understanding does not produce its objects, and can only receive them from without, it must stand within the bounds of natural causality, and the objects would be only a result of the stimulation of its sensory mode of existence, which indeed must correspond to the human organization, but can lay no claim to universality. On the other hand, a consciousness that produces the objects from itself is absolute identity ”

“ There is no simple state of consciousness, every state being the resultant of an immense amount of action and reaction between us and the external world. Nor are the diverse states of consciousness and ideas endowed with a detached force; their action is that of the whole of consciousness, of which they are but the forms and actual manifestations.
There is another proof of the existence of will. Our presentations we refer to the external world; our volitions, however, we attribute to ourselves. ”

“ The pleasure of felt harmony with the society about us consists mainly in the tendency it has to increase the volume and freedom of all our mental activities. But if we win respect without reason we can put but small reliance on its permanence. The moral code is the whole sum of our experience, accumulated and sifted through the ages, of what constitutes a good reason why our fellow-men should be satisfied or dissatisfied with us. ”

“ On the one hand we see the possibility, be it real or merely theoretical possibility, that men may live as consistent egoists with untroubled inner satisfaction. On the other hand we see the exquisite absurdity of admitting that any one's selfishness could be to him a matter of conscience, a duty. All moral precepts as such must be able to move the conscience. The conscience is a feeling of a particular kind; as hope, fear, love, etc., are distinct feelings, so is conscience a distinct feeling which must have its own conditions. ”

“ Logic is called by some the science of the laws of correct thinking. Kant regarded it as a completed science; algebraic logicians, however, view it as the meagre beginning of a science. Philosophical logicians reject the claims of the other school; for them the algebra of logic is no logic at all. But the algebra of logic aims to be logic in the full sense of the term; it claims to pursue the same ends as the older logic on safer and more exact lines. ”

“ From the necessities of society, then, arose in the seventeenth century a scientific system which furnished universally valid principles for the guidance of life and the conduct of society. This system of natural religion and of natural law transformed the ideas of Europe; morality and art were influenced by its standpoint. According to this system, there lie in the nature of man conceptions, uniform relations, which have always as result the same fundamental ideas of social life, order, moral laws, rules of beauty, belief in and reverence for the Deity. ”

“ Finally, the most important element of music, that which no empirical theory can explain, is the musical thought. The most expressive timbres are meaningless without a unifying idea. This faculty of thinking in sounds is the result of a long cultivation of the æsthetical sense. The musical mind has grown from the language of sensation to that of abstraction. "Every musical thought is, at the same time, an imitation of the external world or at least an expression of feeling; every imitation of the external world or every expression of feeling is, at the same time, a musical thought." ”

“ He pointed out that the ancient philosophers had regarded the human soul as the one object best worth knowing and admiring. He conceived the ideal of becoming a man well rounded and complete; of living a life full and entire. Machiavelli, by his revival of the study of Roman politics, created a new conception of humanity, and exerted an important influence upon Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as upon Hobbes and Spinoza. He was the first to bring the Roman conception of imperialism into relation with the new conditions of the modern peoples. ”