Entity

“ We find here a most instructive illustration of the tendency, so universal in human thinking, to personify our abstractions. Words such as nature, justice, virtue, law, are used by us to represent some independent entity or being. ”

“ The features of any object that we contemplate may with intelligent judgment be divided into two classes, according as they are inherently essential, or else merely contributory, to the existence of that object as an individual entity. ”

“ The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in the psychic life are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with no need of reference to any more simple or substantial agent than the present Thought or 'section' of the stream. ”

“ The nature or essence of any individual would seem to imply in its very concept a transcendental relation of specific identity with all other actual and possible individual embodiments of this essence. ”

“ By what rational title—even granting for the sake of argument that they are the genuine postulates of categorical and of conditional syllogizing—can this Subject and this Object, these correlate factors in the Self, rank as Ideas with the Idea of their conditioning Whole—the Self, that in its still unaltered identity fulfills, in Practical Reason, the high rôle of Person? ”

“ I may here, in passing, and for the sake of illustration merely, express the fundamental principle of morality in the following formula: “So act that thou mayest look upon the dictate of thy will as an eternal law to thyself.”
The ultimate vocation of every finite, rational being is thus absolute unity, constant identity, perfect harmony with himself. ”

“ First, then, we must consider that all men are endowed with the same sort of intellect, an intellect capable of some insight at least into the nature of things; that therefore they abstract the same transcendental notions and the same widest concepts from their experience: transcendental concepts of being, unity, truth, goodness; generic concepts of substance, matter, spirit, cause, of accident, quantity, multitude, number, identity, similarity, distinction, diversity, etc. ”

“ And the unutterable,—feeling or sensation,—far from being the highest truth, is the most unimportant and untrue. If I say 'The individual,' 'This individual,' 'here,' 'now,' all these are universal terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a 'this,' and if it be sensible, is here and now. ”

“ Or again that, since an object necessarily implies a subject, and since the whole world must be an object, we must conceive it to belong to some subject or subjects, in the same sense in which whatever is the object of our experience belongs to us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As applied to individuals, the word Essence, we found, has no meaning, except in connection with the exploded tenets of the Realists; and what the schoolmen chose to call the essence of an individual, was simply the essence of the class to which that individual was most familiarly referred. ”

“ Yes, it would be to know what the whole individual Being called the World is; and who the Individual of Individuals, namely the Absolute, or God himself, is. Just such final determinateness, just such precision, definiteness, finality of meaning, constitutes that limit of your own internal meaning which our theory will hereafter seek to characterize. ”

“ It is just because all meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment, of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world. ”

“ Honored Name knows the generalities and the particulars; the generalities being the soul of every living thing for all the creations; and the particulars being every species by itself, or even every being by itself, for they all are the work of His hands; only the knowledge of the particular for every one in general, both for righteousness and for evil we know, and forever... ”

“ The direct experiences of the soul, as joy, grief, hope, fear, are purely subjective; the outward causes of these experiences, as prosperity, bereavement, disappointment, are objective. That which has independent existence or authority apart from our experience or thought is said to have objective existence or authority ”

“ Our whole argument in our transition to the Fourth Conception of Being illustrated how it is of the very nature of our human experience of our Internal Meaning to point beyond what is presented, for the sake of defining the very fulfilment which our presented meanings demand, and without which they have neither truth nor Being. ”

“ Is it not indeed plain that, as we ourselves have often heretofore said, when we talk of Being, we are indeed seeking for what, if present, would satisfy or tend to satisfy our conscious needs and meanings? Let us take this very character as the sole basis of our definition of what it is to be. Let us first say that whenever we talk of Being we mean a definitely Possible Fact of experience, viewed just as something possible for us. ”

“ The Image of God was not seated in the features of your face but in the lineaments of your soul. In the knowledge of your powers, inclinations, and principles, the knowledge of yourself chiefly consisteth. ”

“ Now an object, such as Socrates, or this world, or as yourself, is called an individual, as we before said, when one conceives that for a particular and determinate purpose no other object could be substituted for this one. ”

“ There is one idea that has often suggested itself to my mind in contemplating the condition and progress of these people, which may, perhaps seem strange in such a connection. It is the nobility of human nature, in itself considered. ”

“ When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. ”

“ And verily when we see writ in our Souls in such legible Characters the Name, or rather the Nature and Idea, of God, why should we be so slow and backward from making the like reasonable inference, Assuredly, he whose Character is signed upon our Souls has been here, and has thus marked us, that we and all may know to whom we belong, That it is he that has made us, and not we our selves ”

“ Every act is preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms the habit, the habit determines the character, and character determines the life, the destiny,—a most significant, a most tremendous truth: thought on the one hand, life, destiny, on the other. ”

“ Now let us attempt to conceive of a being that shall represent all the diversities of mind, affections, and dispositions, that fleck this heterogeneous mass of humanity, and then to conceive of a Form that shall be in such perfect affinity with it as to indicate them all. ”

“ And sometimes we may know some one or more of those powers or properties,—as, for example, the desires and affections of the soul,—and be ignorant of the essence, and make it the object of investigation. ”

“ And hence, being imbued with the opinion that all existence is particular, they made it their aim to determine, or at least to announce, what particular kind or character of existence the mind, or ego, had. ”

“ Without Knowledge of the Human Nature. “Varied, according to character, are the demands made by heart and mind,” assures us a representative of modern philosophy, “corresponding to them is the image of the world to which the individual turns by inner necessity. ”

“ Whoever denies this conception covertly, so we affirm, asserts it whenever, expressly or by implication, he talks of Being at all. For to talk of Being is to speak of fact that is either present to a consciousness or else is nothing. And from that one aspect of our definition which is involved in the thesis that whatever is, is consciously known, all the foregoing view of the unity of Being inevitably follows. ”

“ Now it is this selective character of every rational conscious process, a character as manifest to consciousness as it is ultimately significant for the constitution of all Being, — it is this character, I say, which to my mind is responsible above all for the Individuality which we have already characterized as belonging to the whole of Being, and which we shall now find as equally characistic of every region of finite Being. ”

“ If we are to attribute to man the possession of a governing attribute not possessed by other parts of the animal creation, where are we to draw the boundary line, and say "here the ego— the will—the reason—emerges"? ”

“ 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. ”

“ These duties are present to conscience, which itself arises from a doubling of consciousness. “We have the empirical person with his experience of the past, and we have the ideal person—that is to say, that which we wish to be,” [12] our ideal character. ”

“ Wherefore, then, the longing of which you speak?
“‘The objects we see around us are one and all the property of individuals. If a thing does not belong to me, not a particle of it may be enjoyed by me. ”

“ It remains to note that such phrases as 'Being and Nothing are the same,' or 'The unity of Being and Nothing'—like all other such unities, that of subject and object, and others—give rise to reasonable objection. ”

“ If you ask what manner of partial Being, from the point of view of our Fourth Conception, such abstractly conceived but concretely excluded facts possess, I answer, precisely the fragmentary sort of Being which the consciousness of a specific purpose, that is the consciousness of a particular attentive selection, consciously assigns to them. ”

“ We would call it a spiritual body, an individual intelligence, an agent endowed with life, with a degree of independence, or inherent will, with the powers of motion, of thought, and with the attributes of moral, intellectual, and sympathetic affections and emotions. ”

“ Can anything be more simple, more evidently or indisputably natural and right, than such connection of the two powers? That you should desire to know what you ought; what is worthy of your nature, and helpful to your life: to know that;—nothing less,—nothing more ”

“ In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations of the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason. We may speak of understanding as 'human,' with its often discordant generalisations; but there can be no merely 'human' Reason. ”

“ But when we speak of a man's habitual condition, we mean his constant and absolute completeness of mind or body, in some particular point—as for instance, his perception of virtue, or of some art, or else some science or other. ”

“ Good dispositions in the domains of will, sentiment, judgment, imagination, perseverance, duty, accuracy, self-control, the faculty of thinking logically and distinguishing the true from the false, the faculty of combining æsthetic thoughts and sensations, all constitute human values which are much superior to the faculty of rapid assimilation or receptivity, and a good memory for words and phrases. ”

“ In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences, we shall treat of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things which occur, I will not say, in the living body only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme and spiritual things, that one would swear that the physical world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world ”

“ By will and character is meant that which, in speaking of men, we should express, not only by these words, but also by the words temper, taste, dispositions, practical principles: that whole frame of mind, from whence we act in one manner rather than another. ”

“ And where we act, as we say, with a motive, where we have in our minds a reason, an aim, an object beyond the act, which the act subserves, there these motives, these thoughts of ends or objects to be realized, are of very different kinds. ”

“ If it be remembered that every attribute is grounded on some fact or phenomenon, either of outward sense or of inward consciousness, and that to possess an attribute is another phrase for being the cause of, or forming part of, the fact or phenomenon upon which the attribute is grounded; we may add one more step to complete the analysis. ”

“ And we may also derive some suspicious circumstances from nature; for all these questions, whether it is a man or a woman, whether he is of this state or that one, of what ancestors a man is descended, who are his relations, what is his age, what is his disposition, what bodily strength, or figure, or constitution he has, which are all portions of a man's nature, have much influence in leading men to form conjectures. ”