Endive

“ If any one will but take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity. ”

“ What from a psychological point of view appeared to us as the evanescence, the infinite delicacy, the natural instability, of your selfhood, is now to be viewed, in the light of your ideal, as the essential uniqueness of just your significant experience of selfhood. For just what as mere content is so fleeting, is in the light of the one and unique goal a process tending and striving thither. ”

“ We agree that the end is not a ‘thing-in-itself,’ is not Heaven knows what or where, but is the end for us as men, τἀνθρώπινον ἀγαθόν; and therefore we refuse to find it in that element of the mind which is least distinctively human, and shared with us by the beasts that perish. ”

“ And Emotions, p. 266, ‘The intellect can determine the fitness of means to secure an end; but the end itself must, in the last resort, be some feeling, something desirable or undesirable, some pleasure to be sought, some pain to be avoided, some impulse to be followed out.’ To carry confusion further than this, would not be easy. The identification of the final with the efficient cause is an object which more than one philosophy has striven to attain. ”

“ This term for ends in general is as old as the days of Anaxagoras. Let us now attend to these two conceptions, intelligence or thought considered as the beginning, and the good considered as the end. And let us suppose an illustrative case drawn from human nature: it may, perhaps, assist us in forming some imperfect conception of the divine intelligence and its ends. Let us suppose that a savage has the thought of some good, or some end. Now he must think of this as a particular good or particular end; no man can think of good in general or end in general. ”

“ Now, what, then, is that world which is to exist absolutely, and which, therefore, is the absolute expression of the final end, and after the realization of which the final end will have been altogether achieved and made visible? Evidently that world which exists for its own sake, and not for the sake of another world. ”

“ But, besides this evidence, that rests mainly on internal consciousness of the nature of our volitions, we have other evidence to guide us. It has been shown in the previous pages how our thoughts, and desires, and emotions are all dependent on the generic purposes of the mind. Whatever is the chief end of life is the object which excites the strongest interest and calls forth the deepest emotions. Therefore, when a mind has chosen to act right as the chief end, all its tastes, desires, and emotions become conformed to this purpose. ”

“ A personal mind manifests all manner of error, and thus proves the material theory incorrect. Who hath found finite life or love sufficient to meet the demands of human want and woe, — stilling the desires, satisfying the aspirations? Infinite Mind cannot be in a finite form, or it would lose its infinite character as inexhaustible Love, eternal Life, omnipotent Truth. ”

“ For perceive me, fair and gentle lord, as this base body of ours being altogether thing material is also thing corruptible, so is it also a thing finite, and as it is a thing finite so are its sensations, be they of pleasure or pain, finite also—therefore soon must end. ”

“ If the heart deceives us, if the voice of duty leads us astray, the disorder is at the very core of our being; our nature is ill constructed. If our nature is ill constructed, what warrants to us our reason? ”

“ Therefore we regard our craving with complacence, we feel the great aching of the Want, and we say, with conviction, “I know I exist, I know I am I, because I feel the divine discontent which is personal to me, and eternal, and present always in me.” ”

“ But when we have asserted, as we have now done, that every moment of every finite consciousness has some unique character, and when we have asserted, as we have also done, that in our rational life our momentary will and its finite expression belong to this very unique aspect of our finite life, we have indeed found, in our finite will, an aspect which no causation could ever by any possibility explain. ”

“ I was disappointed,—was vexed at my inability to awaken him to a sense of what all mankind, more or less, in some form, have acknowledged, namely, a future state of existence. I now urged that all human beings were sensible of relations not subject to the senses, and therefore possessed sensibilities distinct from the body. ”

“ But as this negativity, instead of being external to Being, is its own dialectic, the truth of the latter, viz. Essence, will be Being as retired within itself,—immanent Being. That reflection, or light thrown into itself, constitutes the distinction between Essence and immediate Being, and is the peculiar characteristic of Essence itself. ”

“ Of the discomfort and disorder of our mode of life I cannot easily give you a notion, for you know nothing of the sort, and, until now, neither did I. The absence of decent regularity in our habits, and the slovenliness of our whole existence, is peculiarly trying to me, who have a morbid love of order, system, and regularity, and a positive delight in the decencies and elegancies of civilized life. ”

“ In books of strict morality and close reasoning, such as I am engaged in—the neglect is inexcusable; and Heaven is witness, how the world has revenged itself upon me for leaving so many openings to equivocal strictures—and for depending so much as I have done, all along, upon the cleanliness of my readers imaginations. ”

“ Our reaction in presence of the world can become definite and rational, and in accordance with the Ought, only when we acknowledge, not merely data other than those now consciously present, but lives, selves, other than our own finite selfhood. ”

“ When we realize that the expression "final cause" means simply that which is purposed, or accepted as an end, objections to it fall away. That, in desire and will, in all their higher manifestations, at least, there is consciousness of an end, there can be no question. ”

“ Notwithstanding therefore in common language, our passions, and the effects of them, are usefully distinguished from our reason, I have here ventured to shew, that all the disorders of human nature, are in effect the disorders of human reason, and that all the perfection or imperfection of our passions is the perfection or imperfection of our reason. ”

“ Thus instructed, in what condition do we find ourselves when we arrive at the age of maturity? Why, just in that divided state of mind, before described, in which the understanding is enlightened while the will is depraved; a state of opposition between the mind and the heart, between our convictions and our inclinations. This we all feel to be, in a greater or less degree, the case. ”

“ It should be noted that proximate and intermediate ends, in so far as they are sought for the sake of some ulterior end, are not ends at all but rather means; only in so far as they present some good desirable for its own sake, are they properly ends, or final causes. ”

“ I employ this word “tendency” as synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires; it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis, the root of 3the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are satisfied or opposed. ”

“ When this will be known in truth, that the inner man shall stand, immovable, and that the outer man shall and must be moved,—the inner man has a why and wherefore of his moving, which is nothing but an 'it must and shall be' ordered by the Eternal Will. ”

“ When ends are regarded as literally ends to action rather than as directive stimuli to present choice they are frozen and isolated. It makes no difference whether the "end" is "natural" good like health or a "moral" good like honesty. ”

“ From both an a priori point of view of the law of self-conservation, and also from a brief survey of certain forms in comparative and human psychology, we incline toward accepting pure pain as the original consciousness. This is soon differentiated into pain of excess and pain of lack with the evolution of pure pleasure. Will exists throughout as sequent of feeling. ”

“ Those I call Internal which are inflicted on the Soul, while it is yet in the Body; such are Anxiety, Penitence, Fears, and a thousand pangs and stings of Conscience. Those are Posthumous; which are inflicted upon the same Soul, but then when it is freed and separate from the Body. ”

“ What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. ”

“ Where the end is in the first instance only ideal, as in laying out a place of operations, the steps are purely imaginary. In both of these cases the discovery of the means may form a new sort of end, of an entirely peculiar nature, an end, namely, which we intensely desire before we have attained it, but of the nature of which, even whilst most strongly craving it, we have no distinct imagination whatever. ”

“ Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness. ”

“ I should have no objection to this method, but that I think it must smell too strong of the lamp,—and be render'd still more operose, by forcing you to have an eye to the rest of his Non-naturals.—Why the most natural actions of a man's life should be called his Non-naturals,—is another question. ”

“ For on this account, perhaps, -- nay, not perhaps, but certainly, -- does every mind judge natures in any way alive to excel those that are not alive, the sentient to excel the non-sentient, the rational the irrational. ”

“ In early life, perhaps from causes already referred to, her mind had been disturbed, and apparently doubts raised, though never fixed, by sceptical writers and so-called philosophical reasoners,—more common in good society then than now, and more bold and insidious, notwithstanding our complaints of present degeneracy. ”

“ Yes, before life ever appeared, matter had developed abstract qualities, the benign had separated itself from the malignant, and, under the influence of the benign, Life first peeped out.
“We date everything from that first budding of matter into what we call life. ”

“ You will find out for yourself what are the appropriate qualities or courses of conduct, of which the excess, mean and defect are expressed by the words given above. Fear, for example, is the feeling of which excess is Cowardice and defect is Rashness, while the mean is Courage. Similarly as regards one's own opinion of one's powers, excess is Conceit and defect is Diffidence, while the mean is Modesty. ”

“ It would indeed be strange and lamentable if the divorce between feeling and conviction—to adopt a popular classification—was not simply incidental to change, but was also an inexpugnable part of fundamental aspects of human life. ”

“ The consequences are already marked within the structure of the soul. So to speak, they are physiological. The thing effected by our in difference or by our indulgence is not the book of final judgment, but the present fabric of the soul. ”

“ Since the function of reason is thus restricted, and its competency to supply an end for, or principle of, action is denied, we must seek this end either in the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany both sensory and motor presentations,—perceptions, that is to say, and actions,—or in the more complex, or apparently more complex, emotions of the mind. ”

“ In perception does the outward reality actually appear, extended as it really is, without any unextended medium interposed, exactly as the internal reality of a pain or a pleasure appears without a medium, when I am conscious of being pained or pleased? ”

“ As he stands related to brute creatures, however, one new factor is introduced, which is that of sentiency, on the opposite side of the relationship, as well as on the side of the human actor, and we find in the conduct incident to this a single quality which we recognize as of absolute existence—inhering in the very nature of the act to which it pertains. ”

“ Hence, — and here, indeed, is the conclusion of the whole matter, — the very effort hypothetically to assert that the whole world of experience is a world of fragmentary and finite experience is an effort involving a contradiction. ”

“ On the contrary, the higher, over-individual ends, as they are sometimes called, — politics, industry, science, literature, art — imply a differentiation among men that in spite of its significance would defy classification. ”

“ Let us now consider some of the more distant worlds, and examine their claims to be regarded as possible homes for beings in any degree resembling ourselves. There are many of these worlds with regard to which we may at once decide in the negative. ”

“ I have been obliged to acknowledge that my fallen nature got the better of me. In making that humiliating confession, I get the better of my fallen nature. The moral balance is restored; the spiritual atmosphere feels clear once more. ”

“ Hence my conscientious position, in the denial of matter, rests on the fact that matter usurps the authority of God, Spirit; and the nature and character of matter, the antipode of Spirit, include all that denies and defies Spirit, in quantity or quality. ”

“ We create a sick body with the thoughts we entertain, the models whereof are disease and death. We create sensualism and sin, bad heredity of the physical and moral, by the images or ideals of mortal thought, and not from the models of the immortal, that which is pure, perfect, and enduring. ”