Absolute (philosophy)

“ Any one of us, as individual, believes in many finite facts that are needed to give his life any meaning, and that lie, as such facts, beyond the range of his private experience. Now comes philosophy, and says: The world as a whole has meaning; the Absolute sees all valid ideas fulfilled. ”

“ Yet more, only from exact science can you get the best concrete examples of that unity of conception, that mastery of complex details, that exhaustive perfection of insight, that we must attribute in an infinitely complete form to our all-embracing Ideal Thought, now that we have got it before us as our Ideal. That all facts and relations of facts should appear in one moment of insight to the all-knowing thought is our postulate, and, as we have shown, it is no mere postulate, but a necessary and absolute principle of philosophy. ”

“ And to sum up, let us overcome all our difficulties by declaring that all the many Beyonds, which single significant judgments seem vaguely and separately to postulate, are present as fully realized intended objects to the unity of an all-inclusive, absolutely clear, universal, and conscious thought, of which all judgments, true or false, are but fragments, the whole being at once Absolute Truth and Absolute Knowledge. ”

“ The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct from the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical with as much of it as our thought covers. ”

“ To set the doctrine of the absolute in its proper framework, so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude all alternative possibilities of higher thought—as it seems to do for many students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintance with philosophy—I will contrast it with a system which, abstractly considered, seems at first to have much in common with absolutism, but which, when taken concretely and temperamentally, really stands at the opposite pole. ”

“ In other words, it must be a principle which has its whole being in itself, which does not for its completeness refer us to anything beyond itself. It must be something fully comprehended in itself, without reference to anything outside it. That is to say, it must be what we call self-determined or absolute. Now any absolute principle must necessarily be one. Suppose that it were two. Suppose you attempt to explain the world by two principles, X and Y, each of which is ultimate, neither being derived from the other. ”

“ But abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me, therefore, to become more technical. The great claim of the philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. ”

“ The almost unanimous voice of philosophy, in pronouncing that the absolute is both one and simple, must be accepted as the voice of reason also, so far as reason has any voice in the matter. But this absolute unity, as indifferent and containing no attributes, can neither be distinguished from the multiplicity of finite beings by any characteristic feature, nor be identified with them in their multiplicity. ”

“ Through this enlarged conception the Absolute is for the first time essentially concrete, that is self-determination, and thereby essential unity, whose particular antitheses, as parts of a process, appear to consciousness as the different determinations of one and the same God. For the necessity of giving essential definition to the absolute significance is just that which at this stage it is felt to be of first importance to satisfy. ”

“ Therefore we subjoin:—And this pursuit is conducted under the direction of the universal faculty in man; in other words, is conducted under the direction of necessary thinking. Man's faculty of necessary thought is properly called his Reason. So that the definition expressed shortly is this: Philosophy is the pursuit of absolute truth conducted under the direction of reason. But the definition under this compendious form expresses a mere vague truism unless you keep in mind what we mean by absolute truth, and also what we mean by reason. ”

“ This relation to the Absolute, and the question it involves as to the fittingness or unfittingness of man over against the same presents, therefore, also an aspect, which applies to the individual himself, his own behaviour and action. ”

“ And their warnings are particularly directed to the problems of the Absolute and the Relative, which perplex all students of philosophy, and which cause so many to think and act contrary to what is generally known as "common sense." And we caution all students to be sure to grasp the Divine Paradox of the Absolute and Relative, lest they become entangled in the mire of the Half-Truth. ”

“ The idea of the absolute is in us internally like that of being. These absolutes are nothing else than the attributes of God, and it may be said they are just as much the source of ideas as God is in himself the principle of beings. ”

“ It is not mine to-night to declare the glory of the Divine Being, but simply to scrutinise the definition of the Absolute. The heart of my whole argument, here as in my book, has been the insistence that all these seemingly so transcendent and imprudent speculations about the Absolute are, as a fact, the mere effort to express, as coherently as may be, the commonplace implications of our very human ignorance itself. ”

“ If we use the word 'content' here, we see that the absolute and the world have an identical content. The absolute is nothing but the knowledge of those objects; the objects are nothing but what the absolute knows. ”

“ But absoluteness of end involves absoluteness of means, since means and end are inseparable—so far as human knowledge goes—and cannot be conceived of apart. Hence the qualities in conduct which the utilitarian finds essential to the attaining of the object that represents "duty" to him are just as absolute in his view as in the view of the intuitive moralist, who admits nothing objective in his notion of "duty." ”

“ To have been derived from something else, is as good as an objection, it sets the value of a thing in question. All superior values are of the first rank, all the highest concepts—that of Being, of the Absolute, of Goodness, of Truth, and of Perfection ”

“ If you adopt, as absolute, a criterion of right which is so only relatively, your results will not be absolutely right. Those who trust to their senses become, as it were, slaves to objective existences. Those alone who are guided by their intuitions find the true standard. ”

“ And therefore all finite aspiration must somehow be realised in the structure of the Absolute whole, though not necessarily in the way in which we, as beings of limited knowledge and goodness, actually wish it to be realised. The Absolute whole is thus, as nothing else can be, the concrete individual reality in which our ideals have actual existence. As all our ideals themselves are but so many expressions of our place in the system and our relation to the rest of it, so the system itself is their concrete harmonious embodiment. ”

“ My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of the absolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performs a most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, from the intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational. The ideally perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the parts also are perfect—if we can depend on logic for anything, we can depend on it for that definition. The absolute is defined as the ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, are admittedly imperfect. ”

“ It is by participating in the Divine reason that our own reason possesses something of the Absolute. Every judgment of reason envelopes a necessary truth, and every necessary truth supposes the necessary Existence.
Thus, from every direction,—from metaphysics, aesthetics, and morality above all, we rise to the same Principle, the common centre, and ultimate foundation of all truth, all beauty, all good. ”

“ If, then, your conscious ideas are naught, your Absolute is naught in precisely the same sense, and in precisely the same degree as the ideas and as the finite facts are naught. On the other hand, if your Absolute is real, then, unless it has a distinguishing positive content of its own, unless it is more than mere finality and peace, the finite world of conscious strivings after it, is precisely as real as itself, since your Absolute borrows all its Being from its contrast with those strivings. ”

“ Again, when we call the Absolute the principle of all existence, we have the notion merely of a first cause. When, however, we call it the essence of things, and then prove from it that all things are but modes of this first cause, it is evident that we are begging the question. We first make the Absolute the essence of all things, and then prove that all things are but this essence. ”

“ The theory of the Absolute, in particular, has had to be an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The One and All, first in the order of being and of knowing, logically necessary itself, and uniting all lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity, how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner rigidity? ”

“ If we may not say without qualification that the Absolute is good, and certainly must not say that it is in the proper sense “ethical,” still less may we say that the Absolute is “morally indifferent.” ”

“ Still otherwise put, our whole argument for the Absolute implies that just because every thought of an object involves a beyond, as well as its own inclusion in the unity of the experience which embodies the beyond, therefore every thought is a moment in a world of fact which, in its wholeness, transcends mere thinking. Or, again, thought in itself is a mere abstraction from and yet in the whole of experience. But all this means that there must be, above every must, that which includes, indeed, the necessity expressed by the must, but transcends such necessity. ”

“ And reason not only has been, but now is, such a source of insight. And this is the case whenever you try to apply the "rule of reason" to any problem of your life, and hereby gain a confidence that, by being as reasonable and fair as you can, you are learning to conform your life to the view which, as you suppose, an all-wise God takes of its meaning. My philosophy simply tries to tell you why you have a right to hold that an all-wise being is real. ”

“ Yes, it would be to know what the whole individual Being called the World is; and who the Individual of Individuals, namely the Absolute, or God himself, is. Just such final determinateness, just such precision, definiteness, finality of meaning, constitutes that limit of your own internal meaning which our theory will hereafter seek to characterize. ”

“ The notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being depends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has objects, not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its definition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be self-sufficing. ”

“ And the answer to the question would lead us to observe that these facts, in so far as they have true Being at all, are neither wholly independent, nor wholly immediate, nor merely valid, but are what they are by virtue of their place in a self-determined system of facts, whose totality is simply our idealistic Absolute. ”

“ Is not every moral theory dependent in truth on a theory of things? Is it possible for us to make for ourselves our ideal, and only afterwards to go to the real world and to see if our ideal is realized? ”

“ The Absolute is a self-conscious individual, and the only ultimately real individual, because the only ultimately and absolutely whole individual. As such the Absolute is unique, embodies one Will, and realises this will in the unity of its one life. ”

“ We apply, indeed, formally, our must to the Absolute, in so far as the Absolute is viewed as the object of our conception; that is, precisely, not yet as the Absolute for itself, but as the Absolute defined from our finite point of view. But the Absolute finds fact in its wholeness, where we find only mediation, or where we appeal from our experience to “experience other than ours,” and so see necessity and not immediacy. Therefore, it is indeed true that every conception of the Absolute is, when you take it barely as thought, inadequate to its object. ”

“ That which is absolute is free from admixture (as absolute alcohol) and in the highest and fullest sense free from imperfection or limitation; as, absolute holiness and love are attributes of God alone. In philosophical language, absolute signifies free from all necessary, or even from all possible relations, not dependent or limited, unrelated and unconditioned; truth immediately known, as intuitive truth, is absolute; God, as self-existent and free from all limitation or dependence, is called the absolute Being, or simply the Absolute. ”

“ You are this; for all these ideas, upon analysis, prove to possess an essential positive meaning, such as the Absolute Life inevitably fulfils. Moreover, whatever you do and intend as your act in a moral world really accomplishes what it morally ought to accomplish. So far, then, your life is real, and not illusory. ”

“ Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes this difference, that facts exist. We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. “A world” of fact!—that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points. ”