French philosophy

“ At the same time a more serious and far-reaching criticism was levelled at the very principles on which the conception of human life was then dependent. A new philosophy, based on scientific research, had been gradually gaining ground and penetrating the French mind. ”

“ On the contrary, works of philosophy and religion that bring their authors high repute and esteem are published every day, which seem to have made a starting-point of the theories of the French philosophers. ”

“ French philosophy took its rise in the seventeenth century, but the philosophers of that age—Descartes, Bayle and others—assumed the soul of man to be the starting point in all investigations of physical science. The eighteenth century philosophers went a step further and rejected all idea of God and the soul. ”

“ At a former epoch, now more than twenty years ago, when I attempted, in French, to set forth to a friendly audience the principles of the Philosophy of Life, so far as I at that time comprehended it, I thought that it was indispensable to make this pure idea of an exalted longing the primary position from which the whole view of life must be developed. ”

“ Through the habit, perfection and sway of polished intercourse they stamped on the French intellect a classic form, which, combined with recent scientific acquisitions, produced the philosophy of the 18th century, the ill-repute of tradition, the ambition of recasting all human institutions according to the sole dictates of reason, the appliance of mathematical methods to politics and morals, the catechism of the rights of man, and other dogmas of anarchical and despotic character in the 'Contrat Social.'--Once this chimera is born they welcome it as a drawing-room fancy ”

“ Philosophism, French, a philosophy such as the philosophers of France gave instances of, founded on the notion and cultivated in the belief that scientific knowledge is the sovereign remedy for the ills of life, summed up in two articles—first, that “a lie cannot be believed” ”

“ The principle of the English movement was common sense, the universal moral consciousness in man, with the powerful weapon of rational criticism, maintaining the existence of an ideal and moral element in men, and holding by the more general principles of religion. French naturalism, on the other hand, was a philosophy of the esprit, that essentially French lightheartedness which laughed away everything of an ideal sort with scorn and wit. ”

“ It is rather cherished as the outward and visible sign of that doctrine of the equality of all men which remains the most generally gratifying of the gifts of French 18th-century philosophy to the world. ”

“ Formal philosophy is called Logic. Material philosophy, however, which has to do with determinate objects and the laws to which they are subject, is again two-fold; for these laws are either laws of nature or of freedom. The science of the former is Physics, that of the latter, Ethics; ”

“ These are facts: this is the education of the world. If you examine the philosophy of France and Germany, and other parts of the earth, you will find them to be on a par with the religious world: they are going to ameliorate the condition of mankind and to perform wonders, according to their professions. If you attempt to reason with them about their philosophy, like the Paddy's flea, when you attempt to put your finger on them they are not there. ”

“ The doctrine is as deep and pure as it is simple and true. It is eminently characteristic of a philosophy which, by virtue of its attribute of reality, subordinates all scientific conceptions to the social point of view, as the sole point from which they can be co-ordinated into a whole. ”

“ The logical bent of the French mind, its love of rule, the elaborateness of its conventions in literature, its ceremonial observances dating from by-gone times, the custom of giving account of everything, of letting no nuance pass unchallenged or uncommented, have given it a power of expression and definiteness which holds together as a complete code of written and unwritten laws, and makes a perfect instrument of its kind. ”

“ The student who would build his knowledge on solid foundations, and proceed by just degrees to the pinnacles of truth, is directed by the great philosopher of France to begin by doubting of his own existence. ”

“ But while the philosophy, and above all the graceful stoicism, of the great master were admired and copied in France, the exact shape in which he had put down his thoughts, in the exquisite negligence of a series of essays, was too delicate to tempt an imitator. ”

“ They incessantly boasted of the greatness of General Influence of the Philosophers. philosophy, and the obsolete character of Christianity. They believed that successive developments of human nature, without the aid of influences foreign to itself, would gradually raise society to a state of perfection. ”

“ In order to deal effectually with the history of philosophy, in order to derive any benefit from it as students, and in order to confer any benefit on it as historians, we must, first of all, be philosophers ourselves. ”

“ In short, all studies ought to find hope of advancement and promise of assistance in this restoration of philosophic discipline which We have proposed. The arts were wont to draw from philosophy, as from a wise mistress, sound judgment and right method, and from it, also, their spirit, as from the common fount of life. ”

“ Has the eye an action of words, or the ear of colours, or either of the impressions of taste, smell, or feeling? Which of them is the common sense? or if none, must we not suppose some superintending faculty to which all the other impressions are subject, and which alone can give him an idea of his own senses or their organs? Another instance of the utter want of logical and consecutive reasoning which characterizes the French philosophers, might be given in their singular proof of the selfishness of the human mind from the incompatibility of a state of desire and a state of indifference. ”

“ The construction and disposition of the universe, the arrangement and functions of the human body, the doctrines of property, of rights and of the state—all these materials belong as truly to philosophy as to their appropriate sciences. That which is given in the world of experience, that which is real, is the content likewise of philosophy. ”

“ And I call ethica, that which, broadly taken, contains the scientia monastica, oeconomica and civilis. And I call that the scientia rationalis, broadly taken, which includes every mode of proceeding from the known to the unknown. From which it is evident that logic is a part of philosophy.”
And finally it may be shown that
“if anything is within the scope of philosophy it must be that without which philosophy cannot reach any knowledge. ”

“ How shall we set about the acquisition of a philosophical as distinguished from a common consciousness? Here, too, I shall merely offer a few hints, for I think that by this time you ought to have formed for yourselves a pretty distinct conception of what philosophy is in its means and in its ends.
3. To obtain a distinct idea of philosophy let us ask, first of all, What is its converse? If we can get hold of the opposite or counter idea, this will help us to grasp the conception we are in quest of. The converse of philosophy is opinion. ”

“ A philosopher of this sort was destined to have great influence at the commencement of the French Revolution, while men acted from a sense of right and a virtuous desire to found the changes they brought about on reason, justice, and the good of mankind. ”

“ See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution, and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how the dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday, gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual harmonies! ”

“ What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." ”

“ French refined and systematic intelligence, the most exact in seizing on the subordination of ideas, the most ready in separating ideas from matter, the most fond of clear and tangible ideas, find in him its nourishment and its echo. ”

“ If a Parisian philosopher, animated by the love of that wisdom which is deducible by philosophic methods from the study of mankind, had emerged from his abode, on a certain summer evening, in quest of the solution of that great riddle, Why is this thus? ”

“ The Kritik and the Wissenschaftslehre belonged to the revolutionary epoch of the “Rights of Man,” and produced as great a revolution in thought as the French Revolution did in fact. Instead of the old belief that God made the world for man, philosophers began to fall into the pleasing dream, I am everything, and everything is I—and even I am God. ”

“ It is not the repetition of a faint echo from Germany or France that constitutes the substance of what is contained in the immortal works of the British philosophers whom we have named, who created for us a National Philosophy, with certain invaluable characteristics peculiarly its own. ”

“ The French philosophers—at least their political philosophers—seem all of one mind upon the subject, and contend, with great plausibility, that opinions which have stood the test of time for a given number of years, had better be left undisturbed. ”

“ But we have now won the philosophical right, and have become subject to the practical obligation, not only thus to follow out our theoretical interests, but also to show how the philosophy set forth in our earlier lectures stands related to the more immediate problems of life. ”

“ How is the conversion of common sense into philosophy to be brought about? We answer, by accepting completely and faithfully the facts and expressions of common sense as given in their primitive obscurity, and then by construing them without violence, without addition, and without diminution into clearer and more intelligible forms. ”

“ And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as simple philosophy of the spirit—of the subject, and never of nature, or of the object—has developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought; whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and concrete Thinking—of historical Thinking. ”

“ Instead of recognizing, as in the Cours de Philosophic Positive, an essentially sound view of philosophy, with a few capital errors, it is in their general character that we deem the subsequent speculations false and misleading, while in the midst of this wrong general tendency, we find a crowd of valuable thoughts, and suggestions of thought, in detail. ”

“ All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas.—Cliffe Leslie, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, 1879, 149. The history of philosophy must be rational and philosophic. It must be philosophy itself, with all its elements, in all their relations, and under all their laws represented in striking characters by the hands of time and of history, in the manifested progress of the human mind.—Sir William Hamilton, Edin. ”

“ But after the Renaissance and the Reformation had proclaimed the autonomy of the individual spirit and the ultimate authority of the individual conscience in the realm of moral right and wrong, then came naturally an appeal from the rules and conventions of society to the unwritten Law of Nature; hence the prominence it assumed in the writings of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who prepared the way for the French Revolution. ”

“ The sense in France for the power of conduct has not greatly deepened, I think, since. The sense for the power of intellect and knowledge has not been adequate either. The sense for beauty has not been adequate. ”

“ As the original determinations of our theoretical knowledge are intuitions, so the original determinations of our will are principles and conceptions. The critick of the practical reason must, therefore, start from moral principles, and only after these are firmly fixed, may we inquire concerning the relation in which the practical reason stands to the sensory. ”

“ Such are the steps by which we vindicate the title of philosophy to the rank of a real and practical discipline of humanity. To sum up: we commenced by noticing, what cannot fail to present itself to the observation of every one, the inert and unreal character of our modern philosophy—metaphysical philosophy as it is called—and we suspected, indeed we felt assured, that this character arose from our adopting, in philosophy, the method of the physical sciences. ”

“ In my own mind such a philosophy harmonizes best with a radical pluralism, with novelty and indeterminism, moralism and theism, and with the ‘humanism’ lately sprung upon us by the Oxford and the Chicago schools. ”

“ We find the principle by means of the universal doubt, and it is this method of procedure that distinguishes the foregoing discussion of the basis of morals from many of those that have previously been concerned with this problem. To point out that the average man, or the reputed saint, or the inspired prophet, or the great poet, or the reader himself, whenever he is enthusiastic has or has had a given ideal, is not to justify this ideal. ”

“ Not that the classic writers and philosophers have permitted the subject to sink into oblivion,—on the contrary, they have treated it at considerable length, as all classic scholars well know,—but while, on the one hand, as I remarked above, there is a difference between the popular ideas and those of the learned, there is also here a great difference of opinion between the various schools of philosophy. ”