Elaboration

“ Leonardo only could have implied that the love practiced by people is not of the proper and unobjectionable kind, one should so love as to hold back the affect and to subject it to mental elaboration, and only after it has stood the test of the intellect should free play be given to it. ”

“ If the first remark called forth is one of admiration for the extraordinary dexterity, we may be pretty sure that the draughtsman has been betrayed into the commonly besetting sin of over-elaboration, and whatever success has been attained in the effect rendered it would have been probably better if produced with less effort. ”

“ Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. ”

“ I assent to the veracity of sense, and I believe that the very perception or sensible image is the external object, and on no account whatever will I consent 'to disclaim this principle.' Your philosophy—your more rational opinions— representation—your reasonings which, you say, necessitate me to depart from my primary instincts—all these I give, without reservation, to the winds. ”

“ Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify. ”

“ Of course common-sense, after all, must be trusted on such themes to draw the line not only between opinions and theories, but even in the statement and interpretation of facts, as they come from romancers, sentimentalists, idealists, and philanthropists, or from literal, practical, matter-of-fact persons, speaking from experience. ”

“ Our preference, however, for the objects of sense, for the pen, and the sun, as typical instances of objects of ideas, arises from the fact that in case of just these objects, it is especially easy, by observing, from without, the acts of the person who has these ideas, to form confident and, for common-sense purposes, relatively exact notions of the selection to which the internal meaning of the ideas has bound the maker of any given judgment about objects. ”

“ For, as I must repeat, our so-called external experience, that is, our experience taken as other than our meanings, and viewed as what confirms or refutes them here or there, never does more, in any question concerning the truth, than to decide our ideal issues, and to decide them in particular instances, whose character and meaning for us are determined solely by what ideas of our own are in question. ”

“ But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth? By observation—so men say—and by experience. But by whose experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. ”

“ Connected with the distinction just made between ‘object’ in the sense of the qualities actually before the mind and ‘object’ in the sense of the whole thing which possesses the qualities actually before the mind, is another distinction of the utmost importance for a correct analysis of the constituents necessary to a valuable whole. ”

“ And now, finally, after surveying all these so various types of beings, we have to recall the comment often already made in these lectures, and to assert that not only these different kinds of realities, but also the concrete experiences whereby we come to observe, and the ideas whereby we ourselves define, describe, and in general undertake to know these very objects, are themselves also in their own measure real, and are as truly real as are the various finite objects of common sense that we know. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To form a truth, two factors are needed—a fact and an abstraction. ”

“ It is in the writings of these illustrious characters that we find originality of thought, justice of sentiment, and force of reasoning, occasionally elevating our conceptions, convincing our judgments, and softening our feelings. Many more examples might be adduced of those who prefer the exercise of composition to that of conversation, and who, in silently meditating upon some rational subject, and in recording the spontaneous flow of ideas and reflections, have felt a silent satisfaction, and an enlargement of mind, never found among the restraints, or the gaieties of society. ”

“ To begin, you surely know how to distinguish the really actual, that which is the true fact of your present experience and life, or that which you actually live and experience, from the non-actual, the merely imagined. ”

“ While we analyse, we have to remember that the most correct analysis of features or characteristics may easily fail to give us a true idea of the face or the character which we analyse. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the expressions, “We and what is before us,” “We and the objects,” “We and the World,” we have a correct classification of all thinkable reality differentiated into 94 persons and things, but with the understanding that all persons are in reality one Person. ”

“ Thus we may say that a word embodies a vague idea when its effects are appropriate to an individual, but are the same for various similar individuals, while a word embodies a general idea when its effects are different from those appropriate to individuals. ”

“ To lay aside received opinions and notions; 2. To restrain themselves, till the proper season, from generalization, they might, by the proper and genuine exertion of their minds, fall into our way of interpretation without the aid of any art. For interpretation is the true and natural act of the mind, when all obstacles are removed: certainly, however, every thing will be more ready and better fixed by our precepts. ”

“ How comes it, then, to interpret its world of facts as such that another Self could find these same facts, or some aspect of them, to be also its own facts? The power to make this abstraction, however much social intercourse is needed to give it definition, must have its logical roots in the consciousness of the Individual. ”

“ The clear conception outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward to his object,—this, this is eloquence ”

“ By definition, reason and experience were antithetical, so that the concern of reason was not the fruitful expansion and guidance of the course of experience, but a realm of considerations too sublime to touch, or be touched by, experience. ”

“ Abstract from all the content that directly or indirectly you first learned from others, and were thus first taught to apply to yourself, and you will abstract from all the ideas concerning yourself that you can now express in language, from all ideas of dignity, of worth, of truth, of duty, as applied to your person, yes, from all ideas of any explicit personal characteristic or possession of your own. ”

“ For the kind of interpretation itself, it must be allowed, of all others, the fittest to throw light upon a difficult and obscure subject, and, above all, to convey an exact idea of the scope and order of any work. ”

“ Those Things that relate to Science, and Discipline, such as the Ideas of the Mind, Virtues, Vices, Manners, and the like, are illustrated by being explained; but no one will say, that by being explained they are imitated. ”

“ If considered as a mere receptacle for Latin and Greek, Mathematics and Metaphysics, Science and Literature, we may, without moral turpitude or virtue, abstractly considered, follow our own inclinations; but the Understanding will all the time be growing either stronger or weaker, wiser or more foolish, whether we study them or whether we let them alone. This action of the Understanding cannot go on without influencing the Affections. ”

“ By thus first distinguishing sharply between the conscious internal meaning of an idea and its apparently external meaning, we get before us an important way of stating the problem of knowledge or, in other words, the problem of the whole relation between Idea and Being. ”

“ For these systems or masses of experience are the substance of Logic and Methodology, which are their skeletons abstracted from them. They are the basis of all effective comparison and criticism; agreement or disagreement with them is the test of truth or error. ”

“ Well assured that their speech is intelligible, and the most natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, without a moment's heed of the universal astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend their plainest argument ”

“ Every concrete act of knowledge, in our conscious life, includes, then, a more or less deliberate abstraction from the background of recognized reality which we conceive as the world, for the sake of a clearer attention to certain special objects of our present acknowledgment. ”

“ When you write informal or literary analysis, on the other hand, since here the object is illumination rather than exhaustion, almost suggestiveness rather than completeness, choose the significant vital divisions and let the rest go. ”

“ I mean by this that the conceiving or theorizing faculty—the mind's middle department—functions exclusively for the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. [2] It is a transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different world,—the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose whatsoever. ”

“ We have no reason to doubt that the main subjects of thought, the leading conceptions which enter into an act of judgment, and of which the expressions form the members of an assertion, are present to all human minds, in an essentially accordant manner, as standing in certain relations, belonging in certain classes, invested with certain general qualities. ”

“ In the present question, the links of experience sequent upon an idea, which mediate between it and a reality, form and for the pragmatist indeed ARE, the CONCRETE relation of truth that may obtain between the idea and that reality. They, he says, are all that we mean when we speak of the idea 'pointing' to the reality, 'fitting' it, 'corresponding' with it, or 'agreeing' with it,—they or other similar mediating trains of verification. ”

“ And other philosophers have suggested that what we mean by "real" is—"connected in some way with a purpose—helping or hindering, or the object of a purpose." But if we look into their meaning, we find they mean—connected with a real purpose. ”

“ In other words, we shall find that while, for our purposes, we, the critics, must first sharply distinguish the apparently external purpose that, as it were, from without, we assign to the idea, from the internal meaning of the idea, as present to a passing conscious instant, still, this our assignment of the external purpose, this our assertion that the idea knows or resembles, or imitates, or corresponds to, fact wholly beyond itself, must in the end be justified, if at all, by appeal to the truth, i.e. ”

“ The doctrines of Uniformity and Determinism are supposed to be based upon experience. But experience includes experience of the actions of human beings; and some of them certainly appear to be of a capricious and undetermined character. ”

“ And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not by rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art. ”

“ My thesis is essentially this, that you cannot rationally conceive what human experience is, and means, except by regarding it as the fragment of an experience that is infinitely richer than ours, and that possesses a world-embracing unity and completeness of constitution. My argument for this thesis has been dependent on an assertion about the sense in which any opinion whatever can be either true or false, and upon a doctrine regarding that insight to which we appeal whenever we make any significant assertion. ”

“ On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. ”

“ To the very last, there are the various ‘points of view’ which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains a bare externality and datum to the other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Idealists, we have seen, must assert that whatever is experienced, is necessarily so. And this doctrine they commonly express by saying that 'the object of experience is inconceivable apart from the subject.' I have hitherto been concerned with pointing out what meaning this assertion must have, if it is to be an important truth. ”

“ The place of reflective reasoning process which characterises the logical judgment is filled by a peculiar thrill which accompanies a feeling of congruence or incongruence, according as the ideal is satisfied or otherwise. ”