Philosophical Magazine

“ But, by way of parenthesis, there is no reason to boast in a general way of the sincere aim at truth and the pure mind for the ideal, alleged to prevail in the modern literature of our times, especially in philosophical literature. ”

“ From moral considerations, the intellect may be readily induced to submit to scientific restrictions, the propriety of which would remain for a long time matter of debate, were philosophical discussions the only means of indicating it. ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”

“ 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." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. ”

“ This preface retorts a little of that contempt which the "philosophical world" has bestowed with heaped measure upon those who have believed their senses, and have drawn natural, even if hasty, inferences. ”

“ The world is ruled by ideas, by abstract thought. Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them. We recognize this clearly in studying any past period. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Results in philosophy must needs lead to new problems. With this definition in mind of what it is to be, how shall we next undertake to describe that more special constitution of the world which our concept of Being involves? ”

“ Imagine an absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two such worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad,—good or bad positively, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopher's private interests? ”

“ This effect of civilization in reducing all our sensations to those of comfort is a somewhat alarming circumstance in the point of view we are now taking. It is necessary, for many a reason, to resist the universal application of the “Positive Philosophy,” even if we adopt and adore it as an instrument of explication. The “Positive Philosophy” commands us to forbear all speculation into the inexplicable. ”

“ And we see philosophical politicians with a turn for swimming with the stream, and philosophical divines with the same turn, seeking to give a sort of grand stamp of generality and solemnity to this antipathy of the Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress in the future. ”

“ Under this conception, the oppositions of thought which play so important a part in philosophy,—Being and Thought, Mind and Nature, Soul and Body, Freedom and Law, Natural Inclination and Moral Effort, Mechanism and Teleology,—are reconciled. ”

“ Those current abstractions, which make up all the morality and all the philosophy of most people, have been brought under suspicion. Mind and matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honour and interest, virtue and vice—all these words, which seemed once to express elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words which, thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. It is thus not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that homely and popular wisdom by which common life is guided. ”

“ If considered as a mere receptacle for Latin and Greek, Mathematics and Metaphysics, Science and Literature, we may, without moral turpitude or virtue, abstractly considered, follow our own inclinations; but the Understanding will all the time be growing either stronger or weaker, wiser or more foolish, whether we study them or whether we let them alone. This action of the Understanding cannot go on without influencing the Affections. ”

“ My answer to the question "Why do we philosophize?" is as follows. We philosophize for the same reason that we move and speak and laugh and eat and love. In other words, we philosophize because man is a philosophical animal. We breathe because we cannot help breathing and we philosophize because we cannot help philosophizing. We may be as sceptical as we please. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As to moral philosophy, they have the same disputes among them as we have here. They examine what are properly good, both for the body and the mind; and whether any outward thing can be called truly good, or if that term belong only to the endowments of the soul. ”

“ What our estimate of the world, of life and of our civilization will be must depend, of course, upon our values, upon our standards, upon our ideal, upon what we really prize. Hence, in order to understand our philosopher and his iconoclasm, we must understand his fundamental proposition, his basal thought, his ideal, the standard with which he approaches things. ”

“ To reconcile the permission of such events, to our ideas of infinite power and goodness, however difficult, is a natural attempt in the human mind, and has exercised the ingenuity of philosophers in all ages ”

“ There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that of our reason. ”

“ Special studies carried on without regard for the encyclopædic principles which determine the relative value of knowledge, and its bearing on human life, will be condemned by all men of right feeling and good sense. ”

“ While some over-zealous Divines do reprobate natural Philosophy as a carnal Knowledge, and a too much minding worldly Things, the Men of the World, and Business, on the other side, esteem it merely as an idle Matter of Fancy, and as that which disables us from taking right Measures in human Affairs. ”

“ And notwithstanding that these philosophers were at perfect liberty to publish their strange maxims, fearless of danger or persecution, they deemed it necessary to call to their aid the most elegant of phrases, the most pleasing eloquence, in order to impress their own ideas firmly in their minds. ”

“ We are told that whole philosophies, whole systems of ethics, spring up in this way, being the embodiment of a “kind of thought” which is “subservient” to impulse, and “aims” at providing a “quasi-rational” ground for the indulgence of impulse. ”

“ Without attempting in this place to justify my opinion, or even to define the kind of justification which it admits of, I merely declare my conviction, that the general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform, and the test by which they should be tried, is that of conduciveness to the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings ”

“ When the adherents of the Positive Philosophy proceed to define matter as merely "a permanent possibility of sensations,"21 faith in the reliability of our knowledge of the realities about us, as true for those realities, is thoroughly undermined. ”

“ The opposition between a philosophy guided by scientific method and a philosophy dominated by religious and ethical ideas may be illustrated by two notions which are very prevalent in the works of philosophers, namely the notion of the universe, and the notion of good and evil. A philosopher is expected to tell us something about the nature of the universe as a whole, and to give grounds for either optimism or pessimism. ”

“ If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the absolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The characteristic sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system that by it bottom-certitude had been attained. “Other philosophies are collections of opinions, mostly false; my philosophy gives standing-ground forever,”—who does not recognize in this the key-note of every system worthy of the name? ”

“ He felt, how arbitrary was the law of human opinion; how little resorted to were the principles of human nature; how difficult to eradicate those principles impressed on the character without any operation of the reason, received in the first era of existence, expanding with the years, and associating with all the feelings, the passions, and the habits of life. ”

“ I wish only to maintain that the motives and interests which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and the problems with which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be regarded as touching any of the questions that, to my mind, constitute genuine philosophy. ”

“ Without Knowledge of the Human Nature. “Varied, according to character, are the demands made by heart and mind,” assures us a representative of modern philosophy, “corresponding to them is the image of the world to which the individual turns by inner necessity. ”

“ Now, the imperative mood is the characteristic of art, as distinguished from science. Whatever speaks in rules, or precepts, not in assertions respecting matters of fact, is art: and ethics, or morality, is properly a portion of the art corresponding to the sciences of human nature and society. ”

“ And that each of these principles (has boundless powers ... everything which you perceive by your mind or which you pass over for lack of thought) [23] is formed by nature to become [each of the principles] as in the human soul every art is to be learned. ”

“ I have introduced the term Cosmic Suggestion. There are few thinkers who would attempt to deny that the same factors, processes and influences are observable in the formation of all classes of opinion, whether they are called religious, moral, political or artistic. It is, unfortunately, equally evident that reason, except in the case of scientific opinion, usually plays the smaller and emotion and desire the greater part in their formation. We say that this is unfortunate because emotion never brings us nearer the truth. ”

“ But we can hardly hope from this precedent that the wealthy and literary classes of our own time will be equally willing to accept Positive philosophy; the avowed purpose of which is to discipline our intellectual powers, in order to reorganize our modes of life. ”

“ But human nature, when placed in a conspicuous point of view, gives us every argument for appeasing the mind, and, to make this the more distinct, the laws and conditions of life should be explained in our discourse. ”

“ I will admit it, to a certain degree; and but to a certain degree; for though we cannot totally change our nature, we may in a great measure correct it, by reflection and philosophy; and some philosophy is a very necessary companion in this world, where, even to the most fortunate, the chances are greatly against happiness. ”

“ The objective mind, it will therefore be seen, is potentially selective, that is to say, the measure of its quality is its capacity to select at will intellectual nourishment from the whole range of humanity and nature, free from the oppression of its psychic environment. ”

“ A philosophy, less systematic, by conforming itself to facts, carries through common sense to better results. By distinguishing between the passive phenomenon of desire and the power of freely determining self, it restores the true activity that characterizes human personality. ”

“ Its final action is therefore far from superseding the philosopher, who has to systematise man’s advancing experience of the universe in the light of an idealised [139] common sense, or the common sense in the ideal man, which the philosopher tries to approach more nearly. ”

“ Invoked in the first instance as a vehicle for the knowledge of universals, the higher principle presently is made the indispensable vehicle of all thinking whatever, for, it is contended, "a universal element is present in every thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike [Pg 475] actus purus and awe-inspiring principles and despise the reverential mood, content themselves with saying that we are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the face of an universal ”

“ The philosophic spirit is, in our view, the most practical of moods, since it is the creative, liberal, and progressive attitude and the source of the most profoundly right judgments even in practical affairs. ”

“ All modern philosophising is political or official, bound down to be a mere phantasmagoria of learning by our modern governments, churches, universities, moralities and cowardices: it lives by sighing “if only....” ”

“ This negative character of the universal judgments holds true of them, as we have said, just in so far as you sunder the external and the internal meanings, and just in so far as you view the Real as the Beyond, and as merely the Beyond. If you turn your attention once more to the realm of the ideas viewed as internal meanings, you see, indeed, that they are constantly becoming enriched, in their inner life, by all this process. ”