Agent (philosophy)

“ He is thus distinct from the reason in the will, and capable of making the universal itself a particular and in that way a semblance. The good is thus reduced to the level of a mere “may happen” for the agent, who can therefore resolve itself to somewhat opposite to the good, can be wicked. ”

“ The free agent, thus understood, is one who can neither feel himself accountable, nor be rendered accountable, to or by others. It is only the necessary agent (the person whose volitions are determined by motives, and, in case of conflict, by the strongest desire or the strongest apprehension) that can be held really accountable, or can feel himself to be so. ”

“ But at the same time the world ought to allow the good action, the essential thing, to be carried out in it; it ought to grant the good agent the satisfaction of his particular interest, and refuse it to the wicked ”

“ Our practical and technical habits, where the agent is other than his materials and aims, lead us to draw the same distinctions in the realm of total Nature: they are aspects useful in ordine ad hominem which we, without due modification, apply in ordine ad Universum. ”

“ Now, for the attainment of this inward certainty and irrefragable science of life and truth, pure thought, though it does not form the only road, is, nevertheless, in every case a necessary agent, whose co-operation is indispensable. ”

“ And because, as they say, all like things being applyed to their like, are made of the same natures; and every patient, and thing that receives into it self the act of any agent, is endowed with the nature of that agent, and made con-naturall. ”

“ This is the theory of the importance of the individual, raised, so to speak, to its very highest potence. We not only attribute the most important and far-reaching of all changes to a single agent, but declare that that agent cannot have been human, and indeed cannot have been less than the first cause of all changes. ”

“ They will say that, in order that an action may be really either right or wrong, it is absolutely essential that the agent should have been really able to act differently, able in some sense quite other than that of merely being able, if he had chosen. ”

“ Every agent, he says, intends to express his own similitude (the interior idea) on the effect he produces, and the more perfect is the agent, the better and stronger will be the similitude between him and his effect. ”

“ The agent also must be in a certain condition when he does them; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character. ”

“ Now by an agent I mean any thing that acts or has a power to operate, that is, to produce effects; by a free agent I mean one that is not hindered from acting; by a moral and accountable agent I mean one that acts from will, and is influenced by motives; by reward and punishment I mean what every one does; by praise and blame I mean our approbation or disapprobation of any agent that is conscious of our sentiments towards him, or that is capable of reflecting on his own conduct, and of being affected by what others think of it. ”

“ That being so, he that, owing to an unrefined understanding, beholdeth his own self as solely the agent, he, dull in mind, beholdeth not. He that hath no feeling of egoism, whose mind is not sullied, he, even killing all these people, killeth not, nor is fettered (by action) .300—Knowledge, the object of knowledge, and the knower, form the three-fold impulse of action. Instrument, action, and the agent, form the three-fold complement of action.301 Knowledge, action, and agent, are declared in the enumeration of qualities to be three-fold, according to the difference of qualities. ”

“ In the first place, it is incredible to suppose that man, as an intelligent, rational, free agent, capable of character, should have no provision in his mental make-up, no faculty of knowledge, furnishing a principle of guidance for meeting the responsibilities of life. ”

“ How does it happen that the act appears frequently to be that which we judge, while in truth it is always the will of the agent on which a judgment is really pronounced. The answer is, or at least part of the answer is, that it is only by and through the act that we can know the mind or will of the agent. We can read no heart but our own, and even our own we read but imperfectly. The spirit of man lies enshrouded in secrecy till it leaps forth into action. ”

“ The intention of the agent is defined by the foreseen consequences of his conduct; his end is defined by that part of the foreseen consequences which he actually desires; and the end defines the motive, that is, the feeling, which actually determines conduct. The pleasantest end is adopted because the foretaste of the pleasure is itself pleasurable. The intellect and the emotions are in reality related as form and substance, and cannot be divided. ”

“ There is no field of human activity, responsibility, or reason, in which rational beings object to an agent because he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting; no department of human reason in which sane men reject an agent because he has had experience, making him exceptionally competent and fit. ”

“ I lay it down as a general maxim, that the characteristic of a good action consists in the conformity between the motive, and the duty of the agent. If there were but one man upon earth, his duty would contain no other precepts than those dictated by self-love. ”

“ For according to this system it is not the affections and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-every-thing, which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does. ”

“ It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in our knowledge is in no whit explained by making it the deed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who is out of time. The agency of phenomenal thought coming and going in time is just as easy to understand. ”

“ For that agent is following his greatest happiness, and this, in the eyes of utilitarians, in one form or another, is the highest, or to speak more accurately, the only motive by which human nature can be actuated. ”

“ Introduction.—The last resort a man has recourse to, in the conduct of himself, is his understanding; for though we distinguish the faculties of the mind, and give the supreme command to the will, as to an agent, yet the truth is, the man, who is the agent, determines himself to this or that voluntary action, upon some precedent knowledge, or appearance of knowledge, in the understanding. ”

“ An intelligent agent is one who understands, who distinguishes between subject and object, who knows things in their relations, who can unite the terms of a relation in thought, and judge of their congruity or incongruity, all of which are conscious operations. ”

“ VI. My sixth and last argument to prove man a necessary agent is; if man was not a necessary agent determined by pleasure and pain, he would have no notion of morality, or motive to practise it; the distinction between morality and immorality, virtue and vice, would be lost; and man would not be a moral agent. ”

“ He sees the effects of a power, but he can only guess at its cause, and if he is to speak of it, he can only do so by speaking of it as an agent, or as something like a human agent, and, if in some respects not quite human, in others more than human or superhuman. ”

“ Each of these may be characterized as good or bad; and those who do not estimate a mode of life by its effects on happiness, estimate it by the implied goodness or badness in the agent, in his motive, or in his deeds. We have perfection in the agent set up as a test by which conduct is to be judged. ”

“ The result is a growing understanding of what is done, a choice of it for its own sake, a fixity and steadiness of purpose. Right acts and feelings become, through habit, easier and more pleasant, and the doing of them a “second nature.” The agent acquires the power of doing them freely, willingly, more and more “of himself.” ”

“ The values of most objects are at first fixed for us by instinct or they are suggested by the ethos and mores of our groups—family, society, national religions, and "reign under the appearance of habitual self-suggested tendencies." The self is constituted accordingly. Collisions with other selves, conflicts between group valuations and standards and individual impulses or desires, failure of old standards as applied to new situations, bring about a more conscious definition of purposes. The agent identifies himself with these purposes, and values objects with reference to them. ”

“ An agent over which he has and can have no control whatever imposes a term to his existence; nor does it seem possible for human intelligence to avert the threatened doom. To point out the necessity for this conclusion is my object in this chapter. ”

“ He who acts and is capable of doing the right and the wrong, and who consequently is held to obey the moral law, is called a moral agent. In order that an agent may be held to obey a law, he must know it and understand it. ”

“ Indeed, so far as I can see, there is no characteristic whatever which always distinguishes every whole which has greater intrinsic value from every whole which has less, except the fundamental one that it would always be the duty of every agent to prefer the better to the worse, if he had to choose between a pair of actions, of which they would be the sole effects. ”

“ But that which exists in the best possible condition stands in no need of acting or agency; for it already possesses that for the sake of which action is undertaken. Now action always includes two elements — that for the sake of which and what is for the sake thereof — the end and the means: there is either some one end, which the agent may attain, as in the case of man ”

“ An objectively right action is "one such that, if it be done, the total value of the universe will be at least as great as if any other possible alternative had been done by the agent"; whereas "it is subjectively right for the agent to do what he judges to be most probably objectively right on his information"-whether he judges correctly or not. ”

“ As we can only travel from the known to the unknown, we are obliged to commence at whichever end we are best acquainted with. If the agent is more familiar to us than its effects, we watch for, or contrive, instances of the agent, under such varieties of circumstances as are open to us, and observe the result. If, on the contrary, the conditions on which a phenomenon depends are obscure, but the phenomenon itself familiar, we must commence our inquiry from the effect. ”

“ But it was inconsistent with these attributes, and repulsive to his feelings of reverence, to conceive them as agents. The idea of agency is derived from human experience: we, as agents, act with a view to supply some want, to fulfil some obligation, to acquire some pleasure, to accomplish some object desired but not yet attained — in short, to fill up one or other of the many gaps in our imperfect happiness: the gods already have all that agents strive to get, and more than agents ever do get; their condition is one not of agency, but of tranquil, self-sustaining, fruition. ”

“ As the agent is the representative of the principal in all matters which come within the scope of his prescribed jurisdiction so is the ego the agent of the Thinker who is a spiritual intelligence. Accordingly, from an ethical viewpoint the Thinker is responsible for the acts of the agent and can in no wise escape the penalties accruing as a result of the agent's violations. ”

“ This passage seems to be the complement of what had just been asserted, that the agent is ever more influential than the subject, and the originating cause than the matter; for the intellect, in activity, may be said to create, to identify with itself that is, the knowledge which it acquires concerning external things through abstract reasoning. ”

“ We perceive clearly the nature of the agent, and we see this agent still at work upon the earth, though in a limited manner: the only difficulty is as to the different physical circumstances on which depended the magnitude of the phenomenon and the manner of its application. ”

“ A late learned author has given us this definition of a single person, “That it is an intelligent agent, having the distinctive characters of I, thou, and he, and not divided or distinguished into more intelligent agents, capable of the same characters.” [Waterland’s second Defence,] and thereupon he thus argues in another place, “Our ideas of person are plainly taken from our conceptions of human persons, and from them transferred to other subjects, though they do not strictly answer in every circumstance. ”

“ It is this—that He has provided for fallen human nature an agent, or rather a legal representative; this being the only possible plan whereby one could stand in the place of another, transfering not only his acts but his very person as though it were himself. ”

“ The operative power of a being is in proportion to its own actual perfection: the higher an agent is on the scale of reality, or in other words the more perfect its grade of being, the higher and more perfect will be the effects achieved by the exercise of its operative powers. ”

“ Of great importance for the outline of the sociological picture is the question whether and in what degree the lordship of a numerous body is exercised directly or through agents. The “agent” is a very peculiar phenomenon, emerging in every highly developed form of intercourse. ”

“ Not that the agent himself contributes nothing to the formation of his character, but that at first he needs guidance. The point is not so much that the process cannot be safely left to Nature, but that it cannot be entrusted to merely intellectual instruction. ”