Dualism (philosophy)

“ Just because this natural dualism with which we set out is a blunder, just because in fact the world is not rent in twain by our arbitrary distinction of object and subject, but is in deepest truth one united world, a single thought ”

“ The art of distinction distinguishes the infinite infinitely with the consciousness that in reality everything is interrelated without distinction and is one.
This truth, and thus absolute truth, is ignored by laymen and professional authorities alike. The thousand year dualism between body and soul has been especially instrumental in preventing the understanding of the universal interrelation. The whole history of philosophy is but a wrestling with the dualism between matter and mind. ”

“ At the best it goes no further than to admit or assert that besides the one there is also the other. It establishes a see-saw, and is proud of it. This is Dualism. Its maxim is, Don't forget that there is an Other. ”

“ A universal duality is thus the principle of every explanation of nature; it is the first principle of a philosophic theory of nature, to end in all nature with polarity and dualism. On the other hand, the final cause of all our contemplation of nature is to know that absolute unity which comprehends the whole, and which suffers only one side of itself to be known in nature. Nature is, as it were, the instrument of this absolute unity, through which it eternally executes and actualizes that which is prefigured in the absolute understanding. ”

“ Nor can you find any possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinion is more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moral sense. Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral dualism. ”

“ We are all aware that this strange contrast of matter and thought, of the extended and the inextended, has ever constituted a fundamental dualism in human experience. Philosophy in every one of its aspects is mainly the result of an effort to imagine or to recognize the connection which necessarily must obtain between the ideal and the real. ”

“ Monism, literally understood, is absurd—for it ignores, what cannot be ignored, the many: and Dualism, which is offered sometimes as a competitive scheme, is not much better; unless we understand the Dualism to be no fixed bisection, but an ever-appearing and ever-superseded antithesis which is the witness to the power and the freedom of the One,—which is not alone, but One and All, One in All, and All in One. ”

“ The reproach of dualism, and of a failure to establish a final subjugation of evil by good and of disorder by the triumph and domination of order, made against the orthodox doctrine, is shown by these arguments, in connection with other well-known principles of Catholic theology and philosophy, to be groundless. There is no dualism in God, for his creative act, and all that he does for bringing it to its ultimate term, proceeds from love diffusive of the good of being in a wise and benevolent order. ”

“ Now, the materialist allows these two classes to run together; so does the idealist. The one says that everything is matter; the other, that everything is mind. It would be foolish to maintain that nothing can be said for either doctrine, for men of ability have embraced each. But one may at least say that both seem to be refuted by our common experience of the world, an experience which, so far as it is permitted to testify at all, lifts up its voice in favor of Dualism. ”

“ The second view is not the mere negation of this dualism. That there is a dualism is a fact which it acknowledges. [2] All life and reality is manifested in dualism—in antithesis: but the life and the reality is one. Mind—Geist—actualised and [Pg 368] intelligent experience—is the one ultimate and essential reality. [3] In the face of its unity, mere matter is only a half-truth, and mere thought is only another. The reality, the unity, and the truth, is matter as formed, nature as reflected in mind. ”

“ When a thing is to be weakened it must first have been strengthened; to that from which there is to be taken there must first have been given. This dualism will be seen to extend into other regions besides the physical world, and it is needless to refer to it at greater length at present. ”

“ If the dualism is to be abandoned, must we instead define Being as an absolute and simple unity? Must we say, the phrase “to be real” means something that cannot be asserted of any object whatever, so long as this object is defined through ideas that refer to it, or so long as the ideas themselves, with their endless search for the Other, trouble our consciousness, emphasize differences, and by their very striving after something beyond, keep our knowledge from its true goal? ”

“ The real point that Der Menschliche Weltbegriff tries to answer is whether or not the systematic study or examination of our experience necessarily leads to dualism, say the dualism represented by the antithetical schemes of Idealism and Materialism. ”

“ That the human mind can rest only in some kind of Monism, that Dualism must be regarded as a natural but a passing phase of thought, based on a hasty interpretation of certain aspects of man’s moral experience, would seem to follow from what has been urged previously from the a priori side of the question.141 Indeed, it may be doubted whether [Pg 197] there are any thinkers who seriously maintain the Dualistic view as a philosophic doctrine. ”

“ Have we ever sufficiently reflected how that "all things are double, one against the other," in this mysteriously governed world, that everything has its counterpart? the world appears to be split into halves, which yet cleave to each other, as a man is haunted by his shadow. "An inevitable dualism bisects Nature, so that each thing is half, and suggests another thing to make it whole." ”

“ It is only the philosophical system of Dualism which holds differently, when it separates the absolutely inseparable, and when it believes to be thinking very profoundly after its thinking has utterly vanished into smoke. ”

“ Dualism, or Manichæism, the doctrine that there are two opposite and independently existing principles which go to constitute every concrete thing throughout the universe, such as a principle of good and a principle of evil, light and darkness, life and death, spirit and matter, ideal and real, yea and nay, God and Devil, Christ and Antichrist, Ormuzd and Ahriman. ”

“ It is an illustration of the dualism in which so many minds tend to live, divided between two worlds, two standards, two wholly different modes of thought—the one applied to religion even in its intellectual aspect, the other applied to all the rest of existence. ”

“ In Ethics and Theology.—In the domain of morals, dualism postulates the separate existence of Good and Evil, as principles of existence. In theology the appearance of dualism is sporadic and has not the fundamental, determining importance which it has in metaphysics. ”

“ Thus defined, idealism is opposed to ordinary common-sense dualism, which regards knowledge or experience as the result of the more or less accidental relation between two separate and independent entities—the mind and its ideas on one side, the thing with its attributes on the other—that serve to limit and condition each other from without. ”

“ The explanation of this may perhaps be found in the fascination which the dualistic theory—the antagonism of co-equal good and evil principles—offers to those who regard the existence of evil as incompatible with the supremacy of an all-wise and beneficent God. When to Dualism is added the doctrine of transmigration as a means of reward and retribution, the sufferings of man seem to be fully accounted for ”

“ But a fuller consideration of the point at issue might possibly indicate a way out of the dilemma of free will and determinism into a morally satisfying form of dualism within the soul of man himself. ”

“ You are aware that the world, as Dualism conceives it, is not acceptable to the philosophical Idealist. You are aware that I myself am an Idealist. You will see, then, that this whole conception of the external world as something divided from the verifying consciousness must appear to me an essentially unstable conception. ”

“ It can besides be shown in many ways that independent existence cannot be reconciled with the principle of dualism by any means. It would make no difference, whether we imagine two beings of similar or of different properties. ”

“ Thus, the social world consists of beings at once imitable and imitative or responsive. The external physical world consists of supposed beings that are defined (1) as external to us precisely as we are already known to be external to one another; but (2) it consists of imitable beings that are unresponsive and that do not imitate. Hence, dualism gets its view of external realities that are not minds. ”

“ Commonly men feel this when they insist that all portrayal of life, or of reality in general, must be dualistic. Dualism, be it the theologian's or the moralist's or the metaphysician's, the statesman's or the scientist's, never is and never can be anything but so much poetry; richly and deeply significant always, and always alive with what is real, but always poetry, never prose. Can a reality, that is real only if, to the forms of experience, it is always a tertium quid, can such a reality ever be present to any other than a poet's consciousness? Reality is not knowable face to face ”

“ But Common Sense also may have its æsthetic demands, and among them may be a craving for unity. The spectacle of an ultimate and inexplicable dualism in the nature of things may be as unsatisfying as the obligation to calculate with heterogeneous terms. ”

“ The unity is considered as a duality, by the dualistic opinions of men; while on the other hand the belief in unity, destroys the conviction of dualism and plurality from the minds of men.
31. There is no duality or secondary being in the soul, which may be regarded as the supreme soul, because there is but one soul only, which is unchangeable and unperishable at all times and every where. ”

“ The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God has put asunder.”
My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in [Pg 37] myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. ”

“ Upton, Hibbert Lectures, chap. 2—“In the very making of souls of his own essence and substance, and in the vacating of his own causality in order that men may be free, God already dies in order that they may live. God withdraws himself from our wills, so as to make possible free choice and even possible opposition to himself. Individualism [pg 386] admits dualism but not complete division. Our dualism holds still to underground connections of life between man and man, man and nature, man and God. ”

“ Every form of epistemological dualism must involve the understanding in contradictions. The entire nature of the spirit, the whole field of its productions, forms a unity. As the understanding asserts that the objects of the sensibility do not exist in themselves, so must it also say: All of my products and objects must correspond to my nature and my laws ”

“ Now dualism is not only the reversal of truth, it is also the destroyer of righteousness.
Sacramentalism is the anthithesis of dualism. The sanctity of matter as the potential of spirit and its dwelling-place on earth; the humanizing of spirit through its condescension to man through the making of his body and all created things its earthly tabernacle, give, when carried out into logical development, a meaning to life, a glory to the world, an elucidation of otherwise unsolvable mysteries, and an impulse toward noble living no other system can afford. ”

“ The issue between the two theories under this head may here be left with the remark that it is a curious comment on the logic of dualism that setting out to vindicate the reality of an objective standard of truth it should end in the most subjective of all the way a thing appears to the individual. ”

“ It is a self-destructive dualism, a confessedly one-sided monism, agnostic as to the fundamental problem. To the second problem there are two main answers, that of Associationism which denies to the mind any a priori existence and asserts that sensation is the only source of knowledge, and that which admits the existence of both transcendental and empirical knowledge. ”

“ Hence the modern mind is, so to speak, bisected by a painful dualism, which weakens its power, lowers its character, and destroys the unity and efficiency of intellectual life. We meet every day men who, on one side, assert supernatural faith, revelation, grace, authority, and, on the other, pure naturalism, which excludes every thing supernatural or divine. On the one side of their intelligence, nothing but God and grace, and on the other, nothing but man and nature. ”

“ I cannot understand the healthy mind—which has once analysed, and after analysis rejected, the theologic implications of these words—readopting dualism or pluralism. I, of course, recognise the possible domination of a weak mind, or of a strained physique, by the head of a great Church, by a half-insane fakir, by an Ignatius Loyola, by a Mahdi, by a Joseph Smith, and I further recognise that whilst a mind is not free from dualism or pluralism there are very wide possibilities for conjectural imaginings. ”

“ But if even the absolute has to have a pluralistic vision, why should we ourselves hesitate to be pluralists on our own sole account? Why should we envelop our many with the 'one' that brings so much poison in its train?
The line of least resistance, then, as it seems to me, both in theology and in philosophy, is to accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once. ”