Harold Henry Joachim

“ It is natural to think of him primarily as the incomparable teacher who, throughout his long career, first as tutor and then as professor, devoted himself, with unflinching energy and with remarkable success, to one of the most difficult tasks in the world the task of communicating to others his own high sense of the seriousness of philosophy, of fostering in them his own single-hearted devotion to the truth. ”

“ And if we reflect upon the distinctive form of unity thus exhibited by each department of being—upon the dominant character pervading the differences within it and their cohesion—we may formulate certain 'Axioms', condensing once more into isolated judgements truth for which the evidence is overwhelming. Such 'truths' are stable, not because they, as judgements, hang together of themselves, but because they are but the concentrated expression of a whole of knowledge. ”

“ And it seems at least possible to become a critic, a theologian, or a metaphysician without losing the immediate vision of beauty, the emotional faith in God, the whole-hearted absorption in the truth.
In the sense of the distinction thus imperfectly sketched, the relation between mediate and immediate experience is not a logical dependence. We start, in a sense, from what is immediately experienced; and again, in a sense, it is our aim to understand this Immediate, to give a reasoned account of it. What is immediately experienced perplexes us and sets us thinking ”

“ The original feeling of distrust is not the same as that which issues from, is justified by, the mediation; and we may continue to feel instinctive distrust of A, even if we know that B, not A, was the culprit. In short, our feeling that A is the thief is no more the logical consequent, than it was the logical ground, of the knowledge of his guilt.
So, again, the immediate experiences of the lover of beauty, of the whole-hearted seeker after truth or worshipper of the divine, are not premisses from which there logically follow the conclusions of the critic, the philosopher, or the theologian. ”

“ The science as a whole falls short, indeed, of absolute self-containedness. It is not a body of demonstrated truth completely self-evident; for complete self-evidence demands, as its inseparable complement, perfect mediation. If a science were a plurality of elements, each precisely and purely conceived, each intelligibly necessitating each and all, and necessitated by each and by all, then (but only then) the mediation would be perfect, and the whole thus constituted would eo ipso be immediately intelligible, transparent, or self-evident. ”

“ That all reasoning is based on the immediate intellectual apprehension of self-evident truths is the doctrine not only of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, but also of the Regulae of Descartes. According to Aristotle, the man of science, as the result of certain preliminary investigations with whose nature and method we are not here concerned, is enabled to formulate various προβλήματα. Each of these προβλήματα is a judgement, true but as yet unproved, asserting the connexion of a property (D) with its appropriate subject (A) . ”

“ We do not know that A is a thief because we distrust him. We might, indeed, be tempted to view the Immediate as 'grounded upon' the Mediate. For the proof of A's guilt has converted our feeling into a reasoned distrust; the movement of mediation has ended in the grounding of the Immediate. ”

“ If we speak of a 'true' instinct, a 'sound' or 'healthy' feeling of distrust, a 'true' sense of beauty or of the divine, our use of such epithets is proleptic. The 'true' instinct is one which may be converted into a reasoned knowledge. ”

“ But to deny that truth is constituted by conformity to an external standard, is neither to suggest nor to support a distinction between truths which are, and truths which are not, self-evident; and it is this distinction that is in question and must, it seems, be surrendered.
Doubtless nothing could be intelligible, and there would be no sane reasoning, unless there were certain conditiones sine quibus non of Being and of Truth to which any and every fact and connexion of facts, and any and every reasoning, are bound to conform. ”

“ For it now appears that God is presupposed as that without which neither I nor any other finite existent could be at all, so that it is only within, and by virtue of, God's creative and sustaining power that 'my self-consciousness involves my existence'. ”

“ The distinction between Immediacy and Mediation is often applied so as to mark primarily, though not only, a difference of level in our experience. We see the sun 'as distant about 200 paces from the earth'; and this impression is 'immediate' by contrast with the knowledge of the sun's real distance which we may derive from astronomy. We 'feel that A is the thief ”

“ Anything like an adequate discussion would carry us far beyond the limits of a single lecture. I shall have to ignore many problems that I would gladly investigate, and to take for granted much that I am ready and anxious to discuss. ”

“ These simple or indivisible intervals (the judgements A-B, B-C, C-D) are the primary, self-evident, and yet; necessary truths, the immediate premisses, which the proof that A must be D presupposes as its logical foundations.
Such self-evident and yet necessary truths correspond to the 'simple propositions' or 'simple ideas' which, according to Descartes, are the intuitively apprehended data of all our knowledge. ”

“ Many of his younger colleagues, teachers and writers on philosophical subjects, both here and at other Universities, owe him an incalculable debt of gratitude. For his knowledge—the knowledge of a master of the subject—was always at the service of any fellow-worker who consulted him. ”

“ For a Professor's work, interpreted as Cook Wilson interpreted it, is more than enough to absorb a man's whole strength and energy. He won for himself the love and reverence of many generations of pupils ”

“ Or, to take a better example—for there may be 4 without the addition of 2 and 2, and the cohesion of this x and y is thus imperfect—the equality of the two sides of a triangle immediately and yet necessarily implies, and is implied by, the equality of the subtended angles. ”