Critical point

“ We need a fair and square and explicit abandonment of such questions as that of the soul, the transcendental ego, the fusion of ideas or particles of mind stuff, etc., by the practical man; and a fair and square determination on the part of the philosophers to keep such questions out of psychology and treat them only in their widest possible connections, amongst the objects of an ultimate critical review of all the elements of the world. ”

“ So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. ”

“ The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions,—have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. ”

“ But your hypotheses about particular problems must be judged by themselves. Your body of central truth is subject only to the test just mentioned. And you call this truth “absolute” merely because you conceive that it bears this test. Whether it does so is a question of fact, not of authority. And every man must, in such a matter, look for himself before judging about what is offered to him.
As to the principal special features of this discussion, they are: (1) The definition and comparison of what I have called the Four Historical Concepts of Being. ”

“ They arrived,—though failing, as has been said, to give adequate practical satisfaction to the claims of man's moral side,—at the idea of a comprehensive adjustment of the claims of both the sides in man, the moral as well as the intellectual, of a full estimate of both, and of a reconciliation of both; an idea which is philosophically of the greatest value, and the best of lessons for us moderns. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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? ”

“ Hence our principle, as we ourselves have expressed it in all its rigour,—it and nothing else,—is our meaning, against which it is, and always will be, impossible to bring forward any essential objection. ”

“ In these four sciences of Logic, Morals, Criticism, and Politics, is comprehended almost every thing, which it can any way import us to be acquainted with, or which can tend either to the improvement or ornament of the human mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To bring about this great result one fundamental change is necessary, and only one: the highest political power must, by some means or other, be vested in philosophers.” The next point to be determined is, What is, or ought to be, implied by the term philosopher, and what are the characteristics of the true philosophic disposition? ”

“ And the same reason ought to determine us to make a choice even among the senses, and to give the precedence, not to the noblest, or most useful, but to the simplest, and that whose objects are least in danger of being mistaken for other things. ”

“ But the moral causes of opinions, though with most persons the most powerful of all, are but remote causes; they do not act directly, but by means of the intellectual causes; to which they bear the same relation that the circumstances called, in the theory of medicine, predisposing causes, bear to exciting causes. ”

“ In all our knowledge of general principles, what actually happens is that first of all we realise some particular application of the principle, and then we realise that the particularity is irrelevant, and that there is a generality which may equally truly be affirmed. ”

“ But here the philosopher begins to be recalcitrant. You are not lowering my pretensions, he says, but attacking the power of man to attain truth upon any terms. All that is given to us in experience is the effect of underlying causes; if the causes vary the effects would vary; and, unless, therefore, you can get back to the cause, your knowledge must remain empirical and radically uncertain. ”

“ Our First Principle interprets it as the reason of humanity organizing and instituting its needs and ideals in its onward stumbling to and fro between its own true character and its passing caricature. ”

“ Taking, as our limits necessarily oblige us to take, a broad survey of the principle, and the results of the principle disclosed by experience, we cheerfully pronounce both to be positively and undeniably good. ”

“ By a consciously self-realising principle is meant a principle that is determined to action by the conception of its own perfection, or by the idea of giving reality to possibilities which are involved in it and of which it is conscious as so involved; or, more precisely, a principle which at each stage of its existence is conscious of a more perfect form of existence as possible for itself, and is moved to action by that consciousness. ”

“ They begin with the universal proposition, that every effect must have a cause, as a self-evident truth, and then proceed, not to examine and discover how the world is made, but to demonstrate how it must have been constructed. ”

“ But, after all, he thinks matters out, and reasons. The idea he conceives of the forces which govern the world is, in its principle, rational and scientific and, in this respect, it conforms to that which we have ourselves conceived of them. ”

“ Having established the worth of the principles of consciousness, of evidence, and of contradiction, in relation to the dignity of fundamental, we will now examine the intrinsic value of the different criteria. ”

“ What is common-sense but the power of seeing the fundamentals of any practical question, and of disengaging them from the accidental and transient features that may overlie these fundamentals—the power, to use a familiar expression, of getting down to bed rock? ”

“ To understand, we have analyzed the intellectual world into two classes, good and evil; and to discover the members of each class, we fix their qualities, not by the hypothetick, but the practical mode of reasoning. ”

“ But is it not true that oftentimes the logic of events—the movements of history—reveal to us our fundamental principles, outline for us our policy of action, and even write out for us our program of procedure as correctly and even more irrevocably than philosophical formulation could do? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our very theory insists that your internal meanings, your ideas viewed as internally significant, your selections and expressions, are typical instances of facts, and of precisely the facts of whose unity the world consists. ”

“ Whether moral and social phenomena are really exceptions to the general certainty and uniformity of the course of nature; and how far the methods, by which so many of the laws of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevocably acquired and universally assented to, can be made instrumental to the formation of a similar body of received doctrine in moral and political science. ”

“ The sensible horizon of subjective vision can, by no mediation, be exalted into the real horizon of truth, wherein the genuine first principles that bound human capability are exclusively to be found. ”

“ If we were to explore the motives that intervene in an infinite number of actions, which are right to outward appearance; we should perceive, they were derived from indirect principles, and performed to answer perverse purposes. ”

“ So we will not ask the supporters of the present system to sing of such subjects: we will merely beg of them to think. For thought is surely the best and truest standard by which we may distinguish the right from wrong. That action and system are the best which can best stand the scrutiny of thought. ”

“ Process (2) , which may be called a reconciliation of reason with itself, because it is the appropriation by reason as a personal principle in the individual of the work which reason, acting through the media of other persons, has already achieved in the establishment of conventional morality, is the condition of the third stage in which the moral progress of the individual consists; viz. the growth of a personal interest in the realisation of an idea of what should be, in doing what is believed to contribute to the absolutely desirable, or to human perfection, because it is believed to do so. ”

“ The full ground of right, as the essential elements of the problem have made clearly apparent, must be regarded as twofold, embracing, first, the proximate or immediate ground, and secondly, the ultimate ground. ”

“ Now in this extremely elementary consideration, namely, in the consideration that unless ideas first voluntarily bind themselves to a given task, and so, by their internal purpose, already commit themselves to a certain selection of its object, they are neither true nor false, — in this consideration, I say, there may be hidden consequences that we shall later find momentous for the whole theory of Being and of truth. ”

“ Moreover, our features are constantly varying; and if our moral and intellectual faculties are to be inferred from these changes, how are we to establish or follow up any fixed principle, amid such a labyrinth of confusion? ”

“ In the first place we have the actual condition of the world generally, which is assumed as involved in individual action and its specific character. Secondly, we have the particularity of condition, the determination of which introduces difference and tension within the substantive unity, which is the motive-spring of the action, in other words the situation. ”

“ Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public trusts are charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive in the minds of these people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must be addressed. ”

“ To elucidate the matter, let us take the most familiar case in which the indirect judgments of Reason correct the direct judgments of Common Sense. The direct judgment of Common Sense is that the Sun moves round the Earth. ”

“ The abstractness of our momentary knowledge, the vastness of our momentary ignorance of all concrete facts, no theory of knowledge recognizes more sincerely than does our own. But that all differences rest upon an underlying unity, — this is the very thesis which, in our present series of discussions, we are trying to make more concrete. ”

“ The remarks of the faculty are founded principally on theory, backed up by an occasional case which might very often be referred to some other cause with equal justice. But who does not know that practice often belies theory, or that theory is frequently at fault? ”

“ Epigrammatic moral maxims, scraps of biography, nodules of a sort of political economy, bits of history, rules of etiquette, and a great variety of other subjects, are commingled without plan, symmetry, or progress of thought. ”

“ At bottom the process is one of conception, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse. ”

“ There is one truth of which I am profoundly convinced,—nations live by absolute ideas, not by approximate and partial conceptions; therefore, men are needed who define principles, or at least test them in the fire of controversy. ”

“ So, if that’s the background, if that’s the moral proposition, if that’s the reason for believing that in the very daily texture of what we do, we can be making yet another difference, and that among the most important differences of all. What are the problems we do need to think about? ”

“ All particular convictions, all definite principles, all clear-cut formulas and fixed ideas, are but prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind. The absolute in detail is absurd and contradictory. ”

“ The supreme principles and the original forms of their activity never admit of being ‘explained,’ ‘constructed,’ or ‘deduced.’ Our cognition, in the most favorable case, masters only the interior order of that manifold which depends upon these principles. But how the principles themselves have power to ‘be’ or to ‘act,’ is an unanswerable, idle inquiry. ”

“ This view conceives the mind to be directed toward individual things, rather than toward general ideas, toward distinct situations of fact rather than toward some significance in human affairs that these situations may share. ”