Condition (philosophy)

“ Still it must be observed that the collection of created beings, whatever be their perfection, are necessarily subject to the condition of dependence on another being; a condition from which the infinite being above is essentially exempt. ”

“ That is surely a very shallow philosophy, which presumes man's condition to be the effect of circumstances. Every day we see mind mastering circumstances, changing circumstances, modifying circumstances almost at its pleasure, thus showing itself to be, of the two, the superior and the cause, not the inferior and the effect. Put a man of ability and principle in what circumstances you will, and, with Divine aid, he will carve his way through them to excellence and to dignity ”

“ To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge. ”

“ But the infinite variety of circumstance which is formed in this externality by the light of the essence shining in it,—all this infinite material, with its regulations,—is not the object of philosophy.... To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: for what is is reason. ”

“ As the person and the condition are distinct in man, because he is a finite being, the condition cannot be founded on the person, nor the person on the condition. Admitting the second case, the person would have to change ”

“ Instead of arguing that a cause must therefore exist which is beyond Nature, but whose character our own experience enables us in some measure, and analogically, to learn, these philosophers start with the assumption that no such cause is possible, and then proceed to draw the consequence that the condition of Nature must once have been totally different from what it actually is, enabling her forces to produce results which no experience of any sort indicates as possible. ”

“ But when we speak of a man's habitual condition, we mean his constant and absolute completeness of mind or body, in some particular point—as for instance, his perception of virtue, or of some art, or else some science or other. ”

“ Any condition, therefore, which is essential to a state of society, becomes more and more an inseparable part of every person's conception of the state of things which he is born into, and which is the destiny of a human being. ”

“ What you say is our condition, in one respect, is not in any wise of a sort with what we find, by experience, is our condition in another. Our whole present interest is secured to our hands, without any solicitude of ours ”

“ Our going into new scenes and conditions, is just as natural as our coming into the world. 4. Our condition may naturally be a social one. 5. The advantages of it may naturally be bestowed, according to some fixed law, in proportion to one’s degrees in virtue. ”

“ The condition of existence being what it is, a fallen condition, a state in which a proclivity to sin is the universal rule, how merciful is the appointment of a discipline which should directly minister blessing to the mass of mankind in several ways! ”

“ A condition, properly speaking is that which is not only connected with the privilege that follows upon the performance thereof, but it must be performed by a subject acting independently on him who made the conditional overture, or promise. ”

“ Every word which was originally intended to connote mere existence, seems, after a time, to enlarge its connotation to separate existence, or existence freed from the condition of belonging to a substance; which condition being precisely what constitutes an attribute, attributes are gradually shut out; and along with them feelings, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred have no other name than that of the attribute which is grounded on them. ”

“ The scientific philosopher affirms that the condition of the world at any given moment is the direct result of its condition in the preceding moment, and the direct cause of its condition in the subsequent moment. ”

“ This rule runs through all human nature. The universal is the logical condition of the generic, the special, and the particular. So the love of God, the universal object of the human spirit, is the logical condition of all manly life. ”

“ The judgment pronounced is thus not only made possible through the central feeling which corresponds to the life as totality, but is determined by it. An acute sense for that which benefits the individual life whose single members are the moments, is a condition of the continuance and development of the life; it is a higher sort of instinct of self-preservation, and need not be confined to the continuance of physical life, but may also refer to the ideal needs. ”

“ To try to discover the conditions of the unconditioned, to find a possibility for absolute necessity, and to construct this last in order to be able to comprehend it, is what we undertake when we endeavour to make nature an existence comprehensible to us, i.e. a merely natural existence, and to bring the mechanism of the principle of mechanism into the light of day. For if everything which can be said to arise and be present in a way comprehensible to us, must arise and be present in a conditioned way, we remain, so long as we continue to comprehend, in a chain of conditioned conditions. ”

“ In viewing this chain of reasoning, it is undoubtedly true that we must think all existences to be grounded in the principle of all existence, and likewise all that is possible, and all that is necessary. ”

“ His condition, and the privations whereby he holds his tenure of existence, are eloquent to a mind reflecting on the few real wants of mankind, and the advantages derivable from abstinent and temperate habits. ”

“ For it is manifest that, so long as they remain two, we have no unconditioned, but a pair of conditioned existences. If the something of which I am conscious is a separate reality, having qualities and modes of action of its own, and thereby determining, or contributing to determine, the form which my consciousness of it shall take, my consciousness is thereby conditioned, or partly dependent on something beyond itself. ”

“ And thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought. ”

“ Let me ask now: is this consciousness of a principle actually a contemplation? If we look at its form we cannot but answer yes, since it is the immediate expression of freedom which lifts itself above causality by its mere being; but if we look at the substance, we might fall into doubt. For a principle is an activity that extends beyond each of its possible causalities. ”

“ Things seemingly the most insignificant imaginable, are perpetually observed to be necessary conditions to other things of the greatest importance; so that any one thing whatever, may for aught we know to the contrary, be a necessary condition to any other. ”

“ And, as we have already seen, and in the present lecture shall further illustrate, the relation of partial and total meaning is, at the same time, the relation of any finite will to the expression of the complete intent of that same will. Without contradiction, therefore, you are unable to assert the real Being of any world, unless you conceive that world as the expressed will whose partial momentary embodiment you even now observe, whenever you get any rational idea before your mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For that which of necessity impels us to transcend the limits of experience and of all phenomena is the unconditioned, which reason absolutely requires in things as they are in themselves, in order to complete the series of conditions. ”

“ Crude and false as that philosophy may seem to us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical consistency. Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a tiny being or soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the living being, it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system of rules which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly complete and harmonious whole. ”

“ The end is the object of a Notion, so far as the latter is looked on as the cause of the former” (the object) ; “and the causality of a Notion in respect to its object is adaptation to end.” To the ideal belongs “the Idea of reason, which makes the aims of humanity, as far as they cannot be sensuously conceived, the principle of judgment of a form through which these aims reveal themselves as their effect in the phenomenon. The ideal we may expect to find revealed only in human form.” ”

“ Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand, that one which awakens the active impulses, or satisfies other æsthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more rational conception, and will deservedly prevail. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Such principles hold good under present conditions, but other conditions might be imagined under which they would be invalid; they hold good only as corollaries from the laws of nature under existing conditions. ”

“ For the fact that a certain condition of soul precedes, and that another condition succeed, each act of the same soul, in proportion as this act is full and deliberate, does not prevent the corresponding, complimentary fact that such acts take the preceding condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding condition into a further expression of themselves. ”

“ In so far as we have attained the Life according to Reason, in the first way, namely, in conception, and as a picture of a Life removed from our own, in so far will this conception lovingly welcome and dwell upon itself in delighted complacency;—for, in that case, we shall at least have entered so far into the sphere of the Life of Reason, as to possess a worthy and adequate image of it. ”

“ Let us now proceed to determine the second fundamental form of the manifestation of life—the individual form—by applying the same principle.
I. The contemplation of the one and universal power exists in the individuals as such. The totality of the power, or nature, is contemplated through them as the focus of knowledge; and by each of them, of course, in the same manner, for in regard to the contents of that contemplation they are not individual, but are the one and universal life itself. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Yet we hold that whatever the mind cognizes at all, it cognizes in the concrete, as an individual object. And therefore we deny that the ideas of the necessary, the universal, of necessary cause, and the like, which the author calls intuitions, and treats as first principles, necessary assumptions, abstract ideas, etc., are abstractions, mental conceptions, or generalizations ”

“ Common sense first asserts that, when my will gets expressed, I individually am active. Common sense also, in the second place, asserts that when my will gets inwardly expressed in my choice, I individually am free. Now into the endless discussions as to the causal relations of this or that aspect of the human will we have declined in this discussion to go. We have declined, because we have said that all causation, whatever it is, is but a special instance of Being, and never can explain any of the ultimate problems about Being. ”

“ It is only in so far as any state of things is, for some sentient being, the realisation of a subjective interest previously manifested in an earlier stage of experience, that that state of things forms the real culmination of a process which is distinguished from all other processes, and stamped with an individuality of its own, by the fact that it does culminate in precisely this result. ”

“ If, on the other hand, to explain these facts, it be assumed that the conditions belong to the ego, and the materials to the non-ego, it results that the non-ego is unconditioned. But unconditioned existence is inconceivable. ”

“ Now, since such a limitation is altogether unconditioned, the Being, which enters into our consciousness, is represented also as an unconditioned Being, which no withdrawal of that freedom can possibly cancel, since it is not conditioned by it. ”

“ All objective sensibility is founded on the intuition of extension; all the pure intellectual order in what relates to indeterminate ideas, is founded on the idea of being. We have seen that from the idea of being proceed the ideas of identity, distinction, unity, number, duration, time, simplicity, composition, the finite, the infinite, the necessary, the contingent, the mutable, the immutable, substance, accident, cause, and effect. ”

“ And so our theory of Being is not founded upon any prior doctrine of causation. Cause and effect, laws mechanical or laws psychological, fate or freedom, in so far as any of these have Being, are from our point of view subject to the prior conditions of the very concept of Being itself. If nothing can be except what embodies a meaning, we are not first required to explain how anything whatever comes into Being, or how anything whatever is caused. For the cause of Being would itself have Being, and could itself exist, if our analysis is correct, only as the actual expression of a meaning. ”