Elements (philosophy)

“ Yet more, only from exact science can you get the best concrete examples of that unity of conception, that mastery of complex details, that exhaustive perfection of insight, that we must attribute in an infinitely complete form to our all-embracing Ideal Thought, now that we have got it before us as our Ideal. That all facts and relations of facts should appear in one moment of insight to the all-knowing thought is our postulate, and, as we have shown, it is no mere postulate, but a necessary and absolute principle of philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our logic which has for its object the truth of the universe, is the science of the understanding of the universe, a science of universal understanding or conception of the world. It teaches that the interrelation of all things is truth and life, is the genuine, right, good, and beautiful. All the sublime moving the heart of man, all the sweet stirring his breast, is the universal nature or the universe. ”

“ The Absolute Philosophy, or the thought knowing itself as all truth, and reproducing the whole natural and intellectual universe from itself, having the system of philosophy for its development—a closed circle of circles. ”

“ My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward reality of a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible for the human mind's contemplation. ”

“ The combination of the two elements, the subjective or ideal, and the objective or observed, is necessary, in order to give us any insight into the laws of nature. But different persons, according to their mental habits and constitution, may be inclined to dwell by preference upon the one or the other of these two elements. ”

“ While usually an idea means any thought, here it means the synthetic form of the special faculty of the reason, just as the categories are the form of the understanding, and space and time the form of sense-perception. The synthetic forms of the Reason are the three Ideas, viz., God, the soul, and the totality of the universe. ”

“ All that remains for us, in that impossibility which nature has imposed on us of attaining a more intimate knowledge of the essence and constitution either of mind or of matter, is to attend to the phenomena which they present, analysing whatever is complex, and tracing the order of every sequence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is, indeed, a sense, in which, according to our view, any rational idea in the whole universe seeks and in its complete development finds, as the expression of its ultimate meaning, the whole of the universe. ”

“ In order to differentiate logically we must know that everything is everything, that the universe or absolute is its own cause and the final cause of all things, which embraces all distinctions, even that of causality and that between matter and mind. ”

“ Here we have in its lowest terms the material for the ontological question, the first and the last problem of philosophy. God and the world, at first dimly conceived and scarcely differentiated, gradually separate and take shape in the mind as distinct entities. ”

“ Now I declare, without fear of having the word turned in my mouth by any sophist, that the world embracing the thought, or the universe, is the absolute which includes everything, while the world and the thought of it, each by itself, are but classifications or relative things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Common-sense, and psychologists of almost every school, have agreed that whenever an object of thought contains many elements, the thought itself must be made up of just as many ideas, one idea for each element, all fused together in appearance, but really separate. ”

“ Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders: every object which falls in his way elucidates some principle, affords some instruction, and impresses him with a sense of harmony and order. ”

“ But whence have we these categories which here appear as definitions? We find them doubtless in ourselves, in scientific culture. The existence of the understanding, the will, extension, is therefore not developed from infinite substance, but it is directly expressed in these determinations, and that quite naturally; for of a truth there exists the One into which everything enters, in order to be absorbed therein, but out of which nothing comes. ”

“ When we view the essence as existing, we call it thing. In the relation of a thing to its properties we have a repetition of the relation of form and content. The properties show us the thing in respect of its form, but it is thing in respect of its content. ”

“ The art of thought, my son, for which we are striving, is not pure and abstract, but connected with practice, a practical theory, a theoretical practice. It is not a separate and isolated thing, not a "thing in itself," but is connected with all things; it has a universal interrelation. Hence our logic, as we have repeatedly stated, is a philosophy, world wisdom, and metaphysics. ”

“ Of Ethology, Or The Science Of The Formation Of Character.
§ 1. The laws of mind as characterized in the preceding chapter, compose the universal or abstract portion of the philosophy of human nature; and all the truths of common experience, constituting a practical knowledge of mankind, must, to the extent to which they are truths, be results or consequences of these. ”

“ Modern thought began with an endeavor to find a true and rational doctrine about the real outer universe, and to state this doctrine in clear and even mathematical form. The rediscovery of the importance of the inner life led, however, during the eighteenth century, to a skeptical scrutiny of the powers of the human reason itself, and the magnificent systems of earlier thinkers appeared, when examined in the light of such scrutiny, dogmatic and uncertain. ”

“ If we refer to phenomena of sense perception as forces of matter in general, then this generalized matter is nothing but an abstract conception. But if we mean by the term sense perception the various concrete substances, then the general element which embraces the differences of things and pervades and controls them is force producing concrete effects. And whether we say matter or force, the mental which science is studying, not with its hands, but with its brain, the so-called essence, nature, cause, ideal, superior or spiritual, is the generality comprising the special things. ”

“ We know that earth, water, fire and air, in their various compositions subserve us, and we also know that these elements are devoid of reflection, reason, or design; from whence we may easily infer, that a wise, understanding, and designing being has ordained them to be thus subservient. ”

“ And if we admit, with the ancient philosophers, that every such substance is resolvable into one or more of the elements, and that all the elements are but different modifications of one common matter, how wonderful a thing must Form be, since it imparts such varied appearances and qualities to one common substratum? ”

“ And the proof, that the Sensitive and Rational Parts of Human Creatures, may make Perceptions, or rather Conceptions, without Forrein Objects, is, That many men in this world have had Conceptions, both amongst the Rational and Sensitive, which Man names Visions, or Imaginations ”

“ All this active construction from sense-impressions expresses certain fundamental interests that our human spirit takes in reality. We want to have a world of a particular character; and so, from sense-impressions, we are constantly trying to build up such a world. We are prejudiced in favor of regularity, necessity, and simplicity in the world; and so we continually manipulate the data of sense for the sake of building up a notion of a regular, necessary, and simple universe. ”

“ Upon the basis of the general theory of human knowledge thus broadly sketched, we shall next pass to a study of the questions offered to our scrutiny by Nature, when viewed in its relation to Man. Here our main purpose shall be to apply our general idealistic doctrine, concerning what is meant by Reality in general, to the problem as to the sense in which Nature and Man are real. ”

“ And since this general nature of our intellect is the same of which every other thing partakes, it follows that nature in general, or the universe, or the cosmos, all of which is the same thing, are an indispensable object in the special study of the nature of the human mind. ”

“ Nay, thou beholdest in our verses here Elements many, common to many worlds, Albeit thou must confess each verse, each word From one another differs both in sense And ring of sound—so much the elements Can bring about by change of order alone. But those which are the primal germs of things Have power to work more combinations still, Whence divers things can be produced in turn. ”

“ The construction and disposition of the universe, the arrangement and functions of the human body, the doctrines of property, of rights and of the state—all these materials belong as truly to philosophy as to their appropriate sciences. That which is given in the world of experience, that which is real, is the content likewise of philosophy. ”

“ All abstract ideas, all general truths, all knowledge of necessary laws, all acceptance of doctrines, begin in like fashion, through an active process coming from within. Change the fashions of our mental activity, and nobody can tell how radically you would change our whole conception of the universe. ”

“ What I am really pleading for, as you will see in the sequel, is a form of philosophic reflection that leads to a very definite and positive theory of the universe itself, the theory, namely, which I have just suggested, a theory not at all mystical in its methods, nor yet, in its results, really opposed to the postulates of science, or to the deeper meaning at the heart of common sense. ”

“ Formal logic similarly dissects the spirit into its parts, makes distinctions between conceptions, ideas, judgments, conclusions, divides these into subdivisions, classifies conceptions according to species, separates abstract and concrete thought, knows many varieties of judgments, registers three, four, or more modes of conclusion. But at the same time this formal logic recoils from touching on the question as to how the universal spirit is related to the universe, what role it plays in the general existence, whether it is part and parcel of nature or transcendental. ”

“ The concrete content, God, life, or whatever particular form it has, is indeed the content and object of natural consciousness; but the difficulty lies in bringing what is contained in the concrete into concrete thought in accordance with its different determinations, and in laying hold of the unity. It pertains to the standpoint of the understanding to divide and to distinguish, and to maintain the finite thought-determinations in their opposition; but Philosophy demands that these different thoughts should be brought together. ”

“ Reality, we have seen, is to be thought of as a systematic whole forming a single individual experience, which is composed of elements or constituents which are in their turn individual experiences. In each of these constituents the nature of the whole system manifests itself in a special way. Each of them contributes its own peculiar content to the whole system, and as the suppression or change of any one of them would alter the character of the whole, so it is the nature of the whole which determines the character of each of its constituents. ”

“ By what title is it that every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed of some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of our impressions of sense,—what we call the facts of nature,—or it has left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands ”

“ If we use the word 'content' here, we see that the absolute and the world have an identical content. The absolute is nothing but the knowledge of those objects; the objects are nothing but what the absolute knows. ”

“ In other words, looked at from one point of view, such a consciousness regards the wide expanse of reality according to that association of cause and effect, object and means, and all other categories of the mode of reflection which deals with finite conditions and the objective world generally, that is, the limited categories of science or the understanding. ”

“ These principles, based on the data of experience,—that is, on sensations the existence of which we know from consciousness, assure us that the objectiveness of sensations, or the reality of the external world, is a truth. ”

“ Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly{3} speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature. ”