Richard Falckenberg

“ Study Aristotle, but do not become his slave; instead of yielding yourselves captive to his views, use your own eyes; do not believe that the mind remains unproductive unless it allies itself with the understanding of another; copy nature, not copies merely! He equals Bacon in his high estimation of sensuous experience in contrast to the often illusory conclusions of the reason, and of the value of induction; but he does not conceal from himself the fact that observation is merely the first step in the process of cognition, leaving the chief rôle for the understanding. ”

“ But how is finite man to grasp the infinite universe? Experience, the basis of all knowledge, gropes about the outer surface of things and illumines particulars only, without the ability either to penetrate to their inner nature or to comprehend the whole. We know only what we produce. Thus God knows the world which he has made, but to us is vouchsafed merely an insight into mediate or second causes, causae secundae. Here, however, a rich field still lies open before philosophy—only let her attack her problem with observation and experiment rather than with words. ”

“ The universe and all its parts possess souls; there is naught without sensation; consciousness, it is true, is lacking in the lower creatures, but they do not lack life, feeling, and desire, for it is impossible for the animate to come from the inanimate. Everything loves and hates, desires and avoids. Plants are motionless animals, and their roots, mouths. Corporeal motion springs from an obscure, unconscious impulse of self-preservation; the heavenly bodies circle about the sun as the center of sympathy ”

“ Submission to the divine ruler and benefactor is the first duty of the rational soul. From obedience proceeds every virtue, from over-subtlety and conceit, which is the product of fancied knowledge, comes every sin. Montaigne, like all who know men, has a sharp eye for human frailty. He depicts the universal weakness of human nature and the corruption of his time with great vivacity and not without a certain pleasure in the obscene; and besides folly and passion, complains above all of the fact that so few understand the art of enjoyment, of which he, a true man of the world, was master. ”

“ Anyone who does not aim at the harmony of theology and philosophy, is neither a Christian nor a philosopher. One and the same God is the primal source of both rational and revealed truth. Philosophy is the basis of theology, theology the criterion and complement of philosophy. The one starts with effects evident to the senses and leads to the suprasensible, to the First Cause; the other follows the reverse course. To philosophy belongs all that Adam knew or could know before the fall; had there been no sin, there would have been no other than philosophical knowledge. ”

“ At the sight of a tin vessel glistening in the sun, he conceived, as by inspiration, the idea that as the sunlight reveals itself on the dark vessel so all light needs darkness and all good evil in order to appear and to become knowable. Everything becomes perceptible through its opposite alone: gentleness through sternness, love through anger, affirmation through negation. ”

“ Now, as no one is so weak as to be incapable of inflicting on his fellows that worst of evils, death, and thus the strongest is unsafe, reason, in the interest of everyone, enjoins a search after peace and the establishment of an ordered community. The conditions of peace are the "laws of nature," which relate both to politics and to morals but which do not attain their full binding authority until they become positive laws, injunctions of the sovereign power. Peace is attainable only when each man, in return for the protection vouchsafed to him, gives up his natural right to all. ”

“ But neither the loftiness of the end by which he is inspired, nor the low condition of moral views in his time, justifies his treatment of the laws as mere means to political ends, and his unscrupulous subordination of morality to calculating prudence. Machiavelli's general view of the world and of life is by no means a comforting one. Men are simple, governed by their passions and by insatiable desires, dissatisfied with what they have, and inclined to evil. They do good only of necessity; it is hunger which makes them industrious and laws that render them good. ”

“ German Mysticism. In a period which has given birth to a skeptical philosophy, one never looks in vain for the complementary phenomenon of mysticism. The stone offered by doubt in place of bread is incapable of satisfying the impulse after knowledge, and when the intellect grows weary and despairing, the heart starts out in the quest after truth. Then its path leads inward, the mind turns in upon itself, seeks to learn the truth by inner experience and life, by inward feeling and possession, and waits in quietude for divine illumination. ”

“ The opinion of Aristotle and Grotius that the state originates in the social impulse is false; for man is essentially not social, but selfish, and nothing but regard for his own interests bids him seek the protection of the state; the civil commonwealth is an artificial product of fear and prudence. The highest good is self-preservation; all other goods, as friendship, riches, wisdom, knowledge, and, above all, power, are valuable only as instruments of the former. The precondition of well-being, for which each man strives by nature, is security for life and health. ”

“ Size, shape, number, motion, and law are the only and the sufficient principles of explanation. For magnitudes alone are knowable; wherever it is impossible to measure and count, to determine force mathematically, there rigorous, exact science ceases. Nature a system of regularly moved particles of mass; all that takes place mechanical movement, viz., the combination, separation, dislocation, oscillation of bodies and corpuscles; mathematics the organon of natural science! ”

“ The human reason is feeble and blind in all things, knowledge is deceptive, especially the philosophy of the day, which clings to tradition, which fills the memory with learned note-stuff, but leaves the understanding void and, instead of things, interprets interpretations only. ”

“ On this first certain truth of my own existence there follow three others: my nature consists in the three functions of power, knowledge, and volition; I am finite and limited, might, wisdom, and love are in man constantly intermingled with their opposites, weakness, foolishness, and hate; my power, knowledge, and volition do not extend beyond the present. The being of God follows from the idea of God in us, which can have been derived from no other than an infinite source. ”

“ To the three worlds, which stand in relations of sympathetic interaction, there correspond in man the body, which nourishes itself on the elements, the spirit, whose imagination receives its food, sense and thoughts, from the spirits of the stars, and, finally, the immortal soul, which finds its nourishment in faith in Christ. Hence natural philosophy, astronomy, and theology are the pillars of anthropology, and ultimately of medicine. This fantastic physic of Paracelsus found many adherents both in theory and in practice. ”

“ God is not the cause of sin, but man, who turns the divine power to good or evil. He who denies himself to live God is a Christian, whether he knows and confesses the Gospel or not. Faith does not consist in assent, but in inner transformation. The historical element in Christianity and its ceremonial observances are only the external form and garb (its "figure") , have merely a symbolic significance as media of communication, as forms of revelation for the eternal truth, proclaimed but not founded by Christ; the Bible is merely the shadow of the living Word of God. ”

“ The development then proceeds in such a way that in each genus that is perfected which is posited therein, and does not cease until, at the last day, all that is possible in nature and history shall have fulfilled itself. But the one indwelling life of nature lives in all the manifold forms; the same laws rule in the human body as in the universe; that which works secretly in the former lies open to the view in the latter, and the world gives the clew to the knowledge of man. Natural becoming is brought about by the chemical separation and coming together of substances ”

“ God is triune only as the Creator of the world, and in relation to it; in himself he is absolute unity and infinity, to which nothing disparate stands opposed, which is just as much all things as not all things, and which, as the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed in words ”

“ Philosophy for Paracelsus is knowledge of nature, in which observation and thought must co-operate; speculation apart from experience and worship of the paper-wisdom of the ancients lead to no result. The world is a living whole, which, like man, the microcosm, in whom the whole content of the macrocosm is concentrated as in an extract, runs its life course. Originally all things were promiscuously intermingled in a unity, the God-created prima materia, as though inclosed in a germ, whence the manifold, with its various forms and colors, proceeded by separation. ”

“ This natural instinct is both an impulse toward truth and a capacity for good or impulse to self-preservation. The latter extends not only to the individual but to all things with which the individual is connected, to the species, nay, to all the rest of the world, and its final goal is eternal happiness: all natural capacities are directed toward the highest good or toward God. The sense for the divine may indeed be lulled to sleep or led astray by our free will, but not eradicated. To be rational and to be religious are inseparable ”

“ Without evil there would be no life, no movement, no distinctions, no revelation; all would be unqualified, uniform nothingness. And as in nature nothing exists in which good and evil do not reside, so in God, besides power or the good, a contrary exists, without which he would remain unknown to himself. The theogonic process is twofold: self-knowledge on the part of God, and his revelation outward, as eternal nature, in seven moments.
At the beginning of the first development God is will without object, eternal quietude and rest, unqualified groundlessness without determinate volition. ”

“ Philosophy is formally defined by Hobbes as knowledge of effects from causes and causes from effects by means of legitimate rational inference. This implies the equal validity of the deductive and inductive methods,—while Bacon had proclaimed the latter the most important instrument of knowledge,—as well as the exclusion of theology based on revelation from the domain of science. Philosophy is objectively defined as the theory of body and motion: all that exists is body ”

“ Beside the quaternary the tern also exercises its power—the world divides into the stages of eternity, imperishability, and the temporal world of sense, or truth, probability, and confusion. The divine trinity is reflected everywhere: in the world as creator, created, and love; in the mind as creative force, concept, and will. The triunity of God is very variously explained—as the subject, object, and act of cognition; as creative spirit, wisdom, and goodness; as being, power, and deed; and, preferably, as unity, equality, and the combination of the two. ”

“ He does not say that no moral distinctions whatever exist before the foundation of the state, but only that the state first supplies a fixed criterion of the good. Moral ideas have a certain currency before this, but they lack power to enforce themselves. Further, when he ascribes the origin of the state to self-interest, this does not mean that reason, conscience, generosity, and love for our fellows are entirely wanting in the state of nature, but only that they are not general enough, and, as against the passions, not strong enough to furnish a foundation for the edifice of the state. ”

“ The universe is boundless in time, as in space; development never ceases, for the fullness of forms which slumber in the womb of matter is inexhaustible. The Absolute is the primal unity, exalted above all antitheses, from which all created being is unfolded and in which it remains included. All is one, all is out of God and in God. In the living unity of the universe, also, the two sides, the spiritual (world-soul) , and the corporeal (universal matter) , are distinguishable, but not separate. ”

“ The term arbitrary, applied to both in common, was questionable, however: as revelation is a divine decree, so historical institutions are the products of human enactment, the state, the result of a contract, dogmas, inventions of the priesthood, the results of development, artificial constructions! It took long ages for man to free himself from the idea of the artificial and conventional in his view of history. Hegel was the first to gather the fruit whose seeds had been sown by Leibnitz, Lessing, Herder, and the historical school of law. ”

“ If he corrupts the state by evil manners, and, degenerating into the tyrant, despises religion and the laws, he may, as a public enemy, be deprived by anyone of his authority and his life. It is lawful to arrest tyranny in any way, and those have always been highly esteemed who, from devotion to the public welfare, have sought to kill the tyrant. ”

“ It would be impossible for so small a part of the universe as man to produce from himself the idea of a being incomparably greater than the whole universe. I attain a knowledge of God's nature from my own by thinking away from the latter, in which, as in everything finite, being and non-being are intermingled, every limitation and negation, by raising to infinity my positive fundamental powers, posse, cognoscere, and velle, or potentia, sapientia, and amor, and by transferring them to him, who is pure affirmation, ens entirely without non-ens. ”

“ Every advance in inquiry makes our ignorance the more evident; the doubter alone is free. But though certainty is denied us in regard to truth, it is not withheld in regard to duty. In fact, a twofold rule of practical life is set up for us: nature, or life in accordance with nature and founded on self-knowledge, and supernatural revelation, the Gospel (to be understood only by the aid of divine grace) . ”