Classical order

“ The poet's line, "Order is heaven's first law," is so eternally true, so axiomatic, that it has become a truism; and its wisdom is as obvious in religion and scholarship as in astronomy or mathematics. ”

“ In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very centre of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law. ”

“ The particular order may be described as consisting of truths for some, but not for other, not for all, intelligences. The universal order may be described as consisting of truth for all intelligences. ”

“ Again, order is but a system of relations of co-ordination and subordination between really distinct things. But there is real order in the universe. And therefore there are real relations in the universe. ”

“ Nearly every subject dealt with is arranged in abnormal order: definitions and rules and principles being put first, instead of being disclosed, as they are in the order of nature, through the study of cases. ”

“ The main point in the system of order and law is its absolute universality. Exceptions, if real, must pro tanto imply a deficiency in the chain of connexion, and might, to a sceptical disposition, offer a ground of doubt. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ Men have been obliged when arranging in books their schemes of education and systems of knowledge, to choose some order or other. And from inquiring what is the best order, have fallen into the belief that there is an order which truly represents the facts—have persevered in seeking such an order ”

“ Hence, as in the logical order the formal conclusion is distinct from the premises in which it is virtually implied, so also in the real order is the formal existence of any being to be distinguished from the real principles of the essence in which it is virtually implied. ”

“ Classicism stands for what you might call the established order, against which romanticism is a revolt. Paradoxical though it be to say so, both the established order, and the revolt against it, are good things. The established order, which was never really any thing more or less than the dominance in literature of rules and standards derived through criticism from the acknowledged best models, especially the ancient, tended at last to cramp and stifle the life which it should, of course, only serve to shape and conform. ”

“ Order is correctly said to be heaven's first law, as, without it, there could be nothing but confusion. In all deliberative bodies, to avoid confusion and economize time, there must be some rules of order. ”

“ The general principle of right arrangement in sentences, which we have traced in its application to the leading divisions of them, equally determines the proper order of their minor divisions. In every sentence of any complexity the complement to the subject contains several clauses, and that to the predicate several others ”

“ Yet there need be no doubt that there is such an order, one in which every dogma is exactly where it ought to be. This order, it may also be safely affirmed, can only be one of advance from the simpler to the more complex. An order in which each dogma has before it only its natural antecedents, and after it only its natural consequents, must be one of con tinuously increasing complexity. ”

“ On the other hand, the feature of the Jus Gentium which was presented to the apprehension of a Roman by the word Equity, was exactly the first and most vividly realised characteristic of the hypothetical state of nature. Nature implied symmetrical order, first in the physical world, and next in the moral, and the earliest notion of order doubtless involved straight lines, even surfaces, and measured distances. ”

“ As order then, a fixed order, we may say, subject to deviations real or apparent, must be admitted to exist in the whole nature of things, that which we call disorder or evil, as it seems to us, does not in any way alter the fact of the general constitution of things having a nature or fixed order. Nobody will conclude from the existence of disorder that order is not the rule, for the existence of order both physical and moral is proved by daily experience and all past experience. ”

“ It is remarkable, too, that those who have urged this objection have never felt that before employing it they were bound to satisfy themselves and to prove to others that order is a mere surface or superficial thing—outside of matter, superimposed on it. If order be something inherently and intrinsically in matter—be of its very essence—belong to what is ultimate in it; if matter and its form be inseparable,—then the author of its order must have been also the author of itself ”

“ Order is Heaven's first law; and this confest, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence That such are happier, shocks all common sense. ”

“ Tell me some other prominent feature in creation.”
“One of the most remarkable, William, is order.”
“Point out to me, papa, where and in what that quality is most observable.”
“Everywhere and in everything, my dear boy; whether we cast our eyes up to the heavens above us, or penetrate into the bowels of the earth, the principle of order is everywhere—everything is governed by fixed laws, which cannot be disobeyed: we have order in the seasons, in the tides, in the movement of the heavenly bodies, in the instinct of animals, in the duration of life assigned to each ”

“ From what is supreme all things that are beneath proceed by discrete degrees in successive order; they terminate in the lowest, last or ultimate, and there reside in simultaneous order, by virtue of which firsts are in lasts, and supreme things are in their ultimates in fulness and in power. ”

“ The recognition of Law, being the recognition of uniformity of relations among phenomena, it follows that the order in which different groups of phenomena are reduced to 129law, must depend on the frequency and distinctness with which the uniform relations they severally present, are experienced. At any given stage of progress, those uniformities will be most recognized with which men’s minds have been oftenest and most strongly impressed. ”

“ But in things of unequal rank, order is a governing principle. Thus our tendency is, to view the principal subject before we descend to its accessories or ornaments, and the superior before the inferior or dependent. We are equally averse to enter into a minute consideration of constituent parts, till the thing be first surveyed as a whole. In passing from a part to the whole, and from an accessory to its principal, the connection is the same as in the opposite direction. But a sense of order aids the transition in the latter case, and a sense of disorder obstructs it in the former. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Often, too, a system, of which the principle is the universal, is put on a level with another of which the principle is a particular, and with theories which deny the existence of philosophy altogether. Such systems are said to be only different views of philosophy. ”

“ That all order proceeds from first principles to last, and that the last become the first of some following order, also that all things of the middle order are the last of a prior and the first of a following order, and that thus ends proceed continually through causes into effects, may be sufficiently confirmed and illustrated to the eye of reason from what is known and visible in the world ”

“ The purpose of the State is, as we have already shown in our last lecture, no other than that of the Human Race itself:—to order all its relations according to the Laws of Reason. It is only after the Age of Reason as Knowledge shall have been traversed, and we shall have arrived at the Age of Reason as Art, that the State can reflect upon this purpose with clear consciousness. Till then it constantly promotes this purpose, but without its own knowledge or free premeditated design; ”

“ God, great principle of all minor principles, God, who is Himself without a principle, could not conceive Himself, if, in order to do it, He required to know His own principle. ”

“ We should never have thought of affirming that all phenomena take place according to general laws, if we had not first arrived, in the case of a great multitude of phenomena, at some knowledge of the laws themselves; which could be done no otherwise than by induction. In what sense, then, can a principle, which is so far from being our earliest induction, be regarded as our warrant for all the others? ”

“ In the man of practical wisdom this process has reached its perfect result, and the code of right rules is apprehended as a system with a single principle and so as something wholly rational or reasonable. ”

“ We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together. ”

“ Any charge of contradictory teaching, therefore, based on this simple fact, would obviously be wholly invalid; the classification of principles as septenary or quaternary depending wholly on the stand-point from which they are regarded, as said. It is purely a matter of choice which classification we adopt. ”

“ The different systems which the history of philosophy presents are therefore not irreconcilable with unity. We may either say, that it is one philosophy at different [Pg 23] degrees of maturity: or that the particular principle, which is the groundwork of each system, is but a branch of one and the same universe of thought. In philosophy the latest birth of time is the result of all the systems that have preceded it, and must include their principles; and so, if, on other grounds, it deserve the title of philosophy, will be the fullest, most comprehensive, and most adequate system of all. ”

“ A common term or class-name was known to mediæval logicians under the title of a Universal; and it was on the question 'What is a Universal 7' that they split into the three schools of Realists, Nominalists, and Conceptualists. Here are the answers of the three schools to this question in their most exaggerated form—
§ 49. Universals, said the Realists, are substances having an independent existence in nature.
§ 50. Universals, said the Nominalists, are a mere matter of words, the members of what we call a class having nothing in common but the name. ”

“ In the abstract or at large, apart from the needs of a particular situation in which choice has to be made, there is no such thing as degrees or order of value. ”

“ Thus the explanation of the many isolated facts consists in their reduction to the one law, and the explanation of the many laws consists in their reduction to the one more general law. As knowledge advances, the phenomena of the universe come to be explained by fewer and fewer, and wider and wider, general principles. Obviously the ultimate goal would be the explanation of all things by one principle. I do not mean to say that scientific men have this end consciously in view. ”

“ When the principles of Essence are taken as essential principles of thought they become predicates of a pre-supposed subject, which, because they are essential, is 'Everything,' The propositions thus arising have been stated as universal Laws of Thought. ”

“ Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics. ”

“ In short, after what manner the progression of the divine orders takes place from the one principle of all things, and how in the generations of the gods, the orders between the one, and all-perfect number, are filled up, we shall be unable to evince. ”

“ And what’s the use of any rule at all, if the right thing’s underneath? Do you have to teach a rule to a tree to make it grow—or to a ball to make it fall? If we build up from a right basis, the rest—the right rule—must follow by mathematical law. ”

“ If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. ”

“ In the first two modes they are also resolved into laws more certain, in other words, more universally true than themselves; they are, in fact, proved not to be themselves laws of nature, the character of which is to be universally true, but results of laws of nature, which may be only true conditionally, and for the most part. ”

“ For, as in every process there is some principle, which is the measure of other things, there must be in law some principle or standard which is the Eternal Law, or certain rule of Divine Wisdom, governing all the operations and motions of creatures. ”