Ralph Barton Perry

“ Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of these impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. ”

“ Nature plays the part of an indulgent parent who permits all sorts of personal liberties.
"The view of a fine country, a succession of agreeable prospects, a free air, a good appetite, and the health I gain by walking; the freedom of inns, and the distance from everything that can make me recollect the dependence of my situation, conspire to free my soul, and give boldness to my thoughts, throwing me, in a manner, into the immensity of things, where I combine, choose, and appropriate them to my fancy, without restraint or fear. I dispose of all nature as I please." ”

“ Beyond its empirical generality, his knowledge is universal only in the sense that space and time are universal. His consciousness contains its representative creations, and expresses them unspoiled by any transforming thought. His poetic consciousness is like the very stage to which he likens all the world: men and women meet there, and things happen there. The stage itself creates no unity save the occasion and the place. Shakespeare's consciousness is universal because it is a fair field with no favors. ”

“ The one of these is the mysticism of Schopenhauer, the religious sequel to a universalistic voluntarism. Schopenhauer's ethics, his very philosophy, is religion. For the good and the true are alike attainable only through identification with the Absolute Will. This consummation of life, transcending practical and theoretical differences, engulfing and effacing all qualities and all values, is like the Nirvâna of the Orient—a positive ideal only for one who has appraised the apparent world at its real value. ”

“ Is there an underlying law, like the law of gravitation, fundamentally and permanently governing life, in spite of its apparent direction by ideal and aspiration? Or is there an underlying power, like purpose, fundamentally and permanently governing the planetary system and all celestial worlds, in spite of the apparent control of blind and irresistible forces? This is a practical question because nothing could be more pertinent to our choice of ideals. Nothing could make more difference to life than a belief in the life or lifelessness of its environment. ”

“ Were I to be taken out of myself so completely as to forget myself, I should inevitably lose that sense of sympathy from which arises the peculiar exultation of religious faith, a heightened experience of the same type with the freedom and spontaneity that I experience in the presence of those with whom I feel most in accord. The further graces and powers of religion readily submit to a similar description. My sense of positive sympathy expresses itself in an attitude of well-wishing; living in an atmosphere of kindness I instinctively endeavor to propagate it. ”

“ For the inspiration with which it may be pursued this ideal has nowhere been more eloquently set forth than in the pages of Walter Pater, who styles himself "the new Cyrenaic."
"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? ”

“ The abstract religion provided for the agnostic faithful by Herbert Spencer does not, it is true, afford any nourishment to the religious nature. He would have men look for a deep spring of life in the negative idea of mystery, the apotheosis of ignorance, while religious faith to live at all must lay hold upon reality. But there does spring from naturalism a positive religion, whose fundamental motives are those of service, wonder, and renunciation: service of humanity in the present, wonder at the natural truth, and renunciation of a universe keyed to vibrate with human ideals. ”

“ The nature of things which one seeks to know better is the good of things, the absolute being which is the goal of all thinking is the very good itself. Plato does not use the term good in any merely utilitarian sense. Indeed it is very significant that for Plato there is no cleavage between theoretical and practical interests. To be morally good is to know the good, to set one's heart on the true object of affection; and to be theoretically sound is to understand perfection. The good itself is the end of every aim, that in which all interests converge. ”

“ He may from the cynical point of view actually do so, but if he be religious he thinks it is reality, and is satisfied only in so far as he thinks so. He regards the man who has said in his heart that there is no God as the fool, and not because he may have to suffer for it, but because he is cognitively blind to the real nature of things. Piety, on the other hand, he regards as the standard experience, the most veracious life. Hence, it is not an accident that religion has had its creeds and its controversies, its wars with science and its appeals to philosophy. ”

“ Philosophy as the truth of synthesis and reconciliation, of comprehensiveness and coördination, must be a living unity. It is a thinking of entire experience, and can be sufficient only through being all-sufficient. The heart of every philosophy is a harmonizing insight, an intellectual prospect within which all human interests and studies compose themselves. Such knowledge cannot be delegated to isolated co-laborers, but will be altogether missed if not loved and sought in its indivisible unity. There is no modest home-keeping philosophy ”

“ The justification of faith is in the promise [424] of reality. For what, after all, would be the meaning of a faith which declares that all things, good, bad, and indifferent, are everlastingly and necessarily what they are—even if it were concluded on philosophical grounds to call that ultimate necessity good. Faith has interests; faith is faith in goodness or beauty. Then what more just and potent cause of despair than the thought that the ideal must be held accountable for error, ugliness, and evil, or for the indifferent necessities of nature? ”

“ One's proficiency here requires one to stand off from society, and to obtain a perspective that shall be as little distorted as possible. The reflection of the philosopher of science requires a similar quality of perspective. All knowledges, together with the knowing of them, must be his object yonder, standing apart in its wholeness and symmetry. Philosophy is the least dogmatic, the most empirical, of all disciplines, since it is the only investigation that can permit itself to be forgetful of nothing. ”

“ But neither religion nor any other human interest consists in essentials. Such a practical conviction as that which has been defined inevitably flowers into a marvelous complexity, and taps for its nourishment every spontaneity of human nature. If it be said that only the practical conviction is essential, this is not the same as to say that all else is superfluous. There may be no single utterance that my religion could not have spared, and yet were I to be altogether dumb my religion would, indeed, be as nothing. ”

“ Even though evil and contradiction belong to the essence of things, move in the secret heart of a spiritual universe, the reality is not these in their severalty, but that life within which they fall, the story within which they "earn a place." And if absolute idealism has defined a new perfection, it has at the same time defined a new imperfection. The perfection is rich in contrast, and thus inclusive of both the lights and shades of experience ”

“ For soon as thy philosophy [91] issuing from a godlike intellect has begun with loud voice, to proclaim the nature of things, the terrors of the mind are dispelled, the walls of the world part asunder, I see things in operation throughout the whole void: the divinity of the gods is revealed and their tranquil abodes which neither winds do shake nor clouds drench with rains nor snow congealed by sharp frost harms with hoary fall: an ever cloudless ether o'ercanopies them, and they laugh with light shed largely round. ”

“ That which is brought home to him is the illusoriness and hollowness of things when taken in the spirit of active endeavor. The only profound and abiding good is nothingness. While nature and society conspire to mock him, Nirvana invites him to its peace. The religious course of his life consists in the use of such means as can win him this end. From the stand-point of the universe he has the sympathy only of that wisdom whose essence is self-destruction. ”

“ As is Walt Whitman, so are many poets greater and less. Some who have seen the world-view, exhibit the same particularism in their lyric moods; although, generally speaking, a poet who once has comprehended the world, will see the parts of it in the light of that wisdom. But Walt Whitman is peculiarly representative of the poetry that can be true, without being wise in the manner that we shall come shortly to understand as the manner of philosophy. He is as desultory in his poet raptures as is the common man when he lives in his immediate experiences. ”