Meta

“ But for metaphysics a principle, if it is to stand at all, must stand absolutely by itself. While wide enough to cover the facts, it must be able to be thought without jarring internally. It is this, to repeat it once more, on which everything turns. ”

“ And if metaphysics is to stand, it must, I think, take account of all sides of our being. I do not mean that every one of our desires must be met by a promise of particular satisfaction; for that would be absurd and utterly impossible. ”

“ Metaphysics must re-think each new fact brought to light, each new generalisation established by science. It must think them in their relation to the whole, and attempt to understand them by setting them in their place in the complete system of knowledge and reality. ”

“ Or again, has the Creator, in making our souls, stamped upon them a system of principles which is in preëstablished harmony with the real order, so that our metaphysical theory, if true, will teach us that our ideas of order must correspond to an order present in the facts beyond us? ”

“ This amorphous mass of primitive perplexity is overlaid with successive strata of metaphysical interpretation, and these deposits will go on with growing precision and refinement until a completely congruous account of all the facts is reached. But though it is well to be reminded of the foundations on which we must build, and of the primary data our solutions must satisfy, the truth surely lies ahead of us and not behind us. ”

“ But by the principle of Occam's razor, if the class of appearances will fulfil the purposes for the sake of which the thing was invented by the prehistoric metaphysicians to whom common sense is due, economy demands that we should identify the thing with the class of its appearances. ”

“ It is not strange that her latest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and we shall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems corresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of idea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating concretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and the last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising concretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits of nature. ”

“ And as a rule it will always be found that those who, previous to the application of our cognition to actuality, are pleased first to decide the point whether it is thus applicable at all or not, judge this point in such a way as to assume readymade a crowd of propositions concerning the nature of objective actuality, concerning the nature of the cognitive spirit, and concerning a possible relation of interaction between the two; while, nevertheless, it is only Metaphysic that can in the first instance demonstrate these propositions. ”

“ Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find, suited to different times and places, could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. ”

“ Even students of speculative science may confess the existence of a wish that, amid themes so ennobling and kindred with the most suitable objects of imaginative emotion, the metaphysician had given occasional vent, through the mass of subtle distinctions and profound principles, and the accumulation of passages extracted from his stores of unequalled reading, to the living copious eloquence of which such themes are susceptible, and in which the literature of philosophy supplies so many illustrious examples. ”

“ We now come to the phenomenon for which I have ventured to coin the term ‘metanalysis,’ by which I mean that words or word-groups are by a new generation analyzed differently from the analysis of a former age. Each child has to find out for himself, in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word ends and the next one begins, or what belongs to the kernel and what to the ending of a word, etc. ”

“ The highest stretch of improvement a single word is capable of, is a high metaphor,——for which, in my opinion, the idea is generally the worse, and not the better;——but be that as it may,—when the mind has done that with it—there is an end,—the mind and the idea are at rest,—until a second idea enters;——and so on.
Now the use of the Auxiliaries is, at once to set the soul a-going 298 by herself upon the materials as they are brought her; and by the versability of this great engine, round which they are twisted, to open new tracts of enquiry, and make every idea engender millions. ”

“ And in this scale (as we have seen) the lower, as its defects are made good, passes beyond itself into the higher. The end, or the absolute individuality, is also the principle. Present from the first it supplies the test of its inferior stages, and, as these are included in fuller wholes, the principle grows in reality. Metaphysics in short can assign a meaning to perfection and progress. ”

“ It should be observed that the word representation as applied to purely intellectual ideas must be taken in a purely metaphorical sense, unless we eliminate from its meaning all that relates to the sensible order. ”

“ We all engage in reveries and fantasies of a homely, everyday type, concerned with our desires or resentments, but the fantasy of the metaphysician busies itself with conceptions, abstractions, distinctions, hypotheses, postulates, and logical inferences. ”

“ Now, metaphysical psychologists, though inquiring as boldly from their point of view into the genesis of mind, have contrariwise, with rarest exceptions, escaped and continued to escape this form of social obloquy. ”

“ Im Ganzen, Guten, Treuen resolut zu leben, —
and the good and the true are to be sought for in the ideal; in the ideal, not only as vaguely rendered in the visions of poetry or the solemnities of religion, but far more as framed into organic epics of the mind, and turned upon action with all the force of systems, by metaphysical invention. ”

“ Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes. ”

“ According to it the subject creates its own world of thought, free in action and feeling, not indeed everywhere,—in the sphere of sense-experience the evidence of the concrete is too great,—but at least in the sphere of metaphysical truth. ”

“ We seem driven, then, to reject the view that the ordered world of experience can be the expression of a plurality of ultimately distinct and heterogeneous principles. Because the world as known, or again as providing for the coherent realisation of practical purposes, is an orderly system, and on any other supposition coherent knowledge and consistent action are alike impossible, the world must for Metaphysics be regarded as the complete embodiment and expression of a single ultimate principle. ”

“ Creating Ideal Surroundings. Changing Your Own Fate. Building Your Own Ideal World. "The Ideal Made Real" is a large book of over two hundred and sixty pages, and contains the very cream of all that is known on applied metaphysics. ”

“ This is, of course, a one-sided, and therefore, from the standpoint of Metaphysics itself, an imperfect expression of the nature of our attitude as intelligences towards the world of our experience. Our moral, religious, and artistic, no less than our logical, ideals represent typical forms of our general interest as intelligent beings in bringing harmony and order into the apparently discordant material of experience. ”

“ In the invention of his theory the metaphysician gives his measure, and permits us to value his imaginative power. But the hypothesis, which [253] in science is always provisional and revocable, is here the supreme reality, the fixed position, the inconcussum quid.
The choice of the principle depends on several causes: The chief of these is the creator's individuality. Every metaphysician has a point of view, a personal way of contemplating and interpreting the totality of things, a belief that tends to recruit adherents. ”

“ Such glaringly artificial views can only come from fantastic metaphysics or from the ambiguity of the word 'idea,' which, standing sometimes for mental state and sometimes for thing known, leads men to ascribe to the thing, not only the unity which belongs to the mental state, but even the simplicity which is thought to reside in the Soul. ”

“ That such a connection must exist is proved by metaphysical argument in answer to the question, "How did anything ever come into existence at all?" And the whole creation, ourselves included, stands as evidence to this great truth. ”

“ If we could construct an impersonal metaphysic, independent of the accidents of our knowledge and ignorance, the privileged position of the actual data would probably disappear, and they would probably appear as a rather haphazard selection from a mass of objects more or less like them. ”

“ The view last approved—namely, that all metaphysical truth consists only in the forms which must be assumed by a world that depends upon the principle of the Good—can avail only as a consideration to fix the limits of Metaphysic, by whose instrumentality we assign to the totality of the principles treated of, their correct position in our total view of the world. ”

“ Without entering into the metaphysics of the subject, we know how common it is to use words glibly and with apparent propriety, and to accept them confidently when used by others, without ever having had any distinct conception of the things denoted by them. ”

“ But we delude ourselves with a verbal fiction. What is the meaning of the word real? This is the question which underlies every metaphysical inquiry; and the neglect of it is the remaining cause of the chronic antagonisms of metaphysicians. In the interpretation put on the word real, the discussions of philosophy retain one element of the vulgar conception of things, while they reject all its other elements ”

“ But, among the ablest thinkers of the present time, there seems to be now a pretty general recognition of the necessity for the replacement of the abstract definitions of metaphysics—so far, at least, as they relate to the external world—by psychological expressions of the modes in which the human ego is affected by its changes. ”

“ The characteristics of the ontology of our critical rationalists can now easily be summed up. The Real for the metaphysical Realist, in case he attempts to be thoroughgoing, has to be, if anything, the Independent Individual, for, since it is beyond all our ideal determinations, it has to be in itself absolutely determinate. ”

“ But here, as in metaphysical discussions at large, where our express object is to make a final analysis, and to disentangle facts from hypotheses, it behooves us to recognize the truth that this popular conception, habitually adopted into psychological and metaphysical discussions, is not simply gratuitous, but absolutely at variance with experience. ”

“ There seems little doubt that an ancient metaphysical system, grown to be an habitus of the mind through long acceptance, gives the substantive word a prime status, and this fact has importance when we come to compare the noun with the adjective in power to convince by making real. ”

“ Now, such differences in kind can only be interpreted metaphysically as radical differences in the determining aims and interests of the experiencing subjects constituting the physical order, and we have already seen that it is precisely the character of these dominant unique interests which forms the individuality of the individual. ”

“ The chief obstacle, therefore, to our improvement in the moral or metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms. ”

“ With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is error) , but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards ; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them. ”

“ “You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration. ”

“ There is certainly an aspect of a large part of the world which, as an experience-character must be called independence, and in order to distinguish between this empirical character and the metaphysical meaning, I shall use the two words ‘independent’ and ‘transcendent.’ The transcendence-character is a metaphysical character, the independence-character is a strictly empirical one. We instinctively regard our fellows as transcendent objects. ”

“ But 128we must most carefully observe that the line of demarcation between the different individual experiences which constitute the reality of that world need not in the least coincide everywhere with the line which we, for purposes of our own, draw between different things.
§ 4. The Problem of Substance and Quality.—More important, in the history of metaphysical theory, has been the other aspect of the problem of the unity of things. What we call one thing is said, in spite of its unity, to have many qualities. ”

“ It is thus necessary to examine all things according to their essence, to infer from every species such true and well established propositions as may assist us in the solution of metaphysical problems. ”

“ It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual. ”