First philosophy

“ Let us begin, then, with a definition, which, though it conveys very little in-formation, is quite unexceptionable—is, indeed, what the whole world is willing to assent to—and let us say that philosophy is the pursuit of truth. This is the first, and simplest, and vaguest conception and definition of philosophy which we can form. ”

“ In that method of philosophy which takes its rise in no dead and abstract thinking, but rather in life itself and the living thought, reality, together with the immediate feeling of whatever is thus real and actual in the inward perception, as well as in external experience, and also in the revelation from above, forms the first beginning out of which all is developed. ”

“ Therefore the first step in defining “philosophy” is the indication of these problems and doubts, which is also the first step in the actual study of philosophy. There are some among the traditional problems of philosophy that do not seem to me to lend themselves to intellectual treatment, because they transcend our cognitive powers ”

“ In the last stage of civilization, poetry, religion, and philosophy will be one, and there are glimpses of this truth in the first. ”

“ The first and most necessary topic in philosophy is that of the use of moral theorems, such as, "We ought not to lie;" the second is that of demonstrations, such as, "What is the origin of our obligation not to lie;" the third gives strength and articulation to the other two, such as, "What is the origin of this is a demonstration." For what is demonstration? What is consequence? What contradiction? What truth? What falsehood? The third topic, then, is necessary on the account of the second, and the second on the account of the first. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, then, with respect to the ultimate questions of philosophy, those ancient thinkers were, in fact, as well advanced, or rather as little advanced, as ourselves—a fact of no small importance for our theory of understanding. ”

“ But we have now won the philosophical right, and have become subject to the practical obligation, not only thus to follow out our theoretical interests, but also to show how the philosophy set forth in our earlier lectures stands related to the more immediate problems of life. ”

“ Such are the steps by which we vindicate the title of philosophy to the rank of a real and practical discipline of humanity. To sum up: we commenced by noticing, what cannot fail to present itself to the observation of every one, the inert and unreal character of our modern philosophy—metaphysical philosophy as it is called—and we suspected, indeed we felt assured, that this character arose from our adopting, in philosophy, the method of the physical sciences. ”

“ Undoubtedly, every philosopher must begin the construction of his philosophy by the analysis of thought, either as presented him in consciousness or as represented in language, or both together. This is a mental necessity. ”

“ This branch of learning, too, makes the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false, of discovering correspondences and proportions, so as to hunt out for similarity in things dissimilar; and conducts us to the discovery of length without breadth, and superficial extent without thickness, and an indivisible point, and transports to intellectual objects from those of sense.
The studies of philosophy, therefore, and philosophy itself, are aids in treating of the truth. ”

“ The author’s meaning is, that it is only by a process of philosophical reasoning that you can decide whether philosophy is possible, valid, or useful. You must philosophize in order to decide whether you ought or ought not to philosophize. ”

“ The reference to the mental faculties was certainly the earliest method of bringing order into human knowledge, for the distinction of the Platonic philosophy between dialectics, physics, and ethics pointed to the threefold character of the mind, to reason, perception, and desire ”

“ What you wish to know further, through this introductory lecture, is, how this natural tendency to reflect critically upon life leads men to frame elaborate systems of philosophy, why it is that these systems have been so numerous and so varied in the past, and whether or no it seems to be true, as many hold, that the outcome of all this long and arduous labor of the philosophers has so far been nothing but doubtful speculation and hopeless variety of opinion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Admit a principle of life in the human body, and we open a door for the restoration of the old Epicurean or atheistical philosophy, which supposed the world to be governed by a principle called nature, and which was believed to be inherent in every kind of matter. ”

“ Let us then run over, if you choose, the opinions of the philosophers, to which they give boastful utterance, respecting the gods; that we may discover philosophy itself, through its conceit making an idol of matter; although we are able to show, as we proceed, that even while deifying certain demons, it has a dream of the truth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The more obvious and easily traceable influences which have operated to incite and direct the philosophical development of the nineteenth century are, of course, dependent upon the teachings and writings of philosophers, and the schools of philosophy which they have founded. ”

“ The notion is that philosophy is concerned with topics of the mind, and that natural science takes care of topics concerning matter. The whole conception of philosophy as concerned with the discipline of the speculative Reason, to which nothing is alien, has vanished. ”

“ We shall teach the special sciences and their history in the true philosophical spirit of searching for clarity and, by doing this, we shall develop the philosophical mind of future generations. This is all we can do, but it will be a great step in the mental progress of our race. ”

“ Not in the vast field of logic, of empirical psychology, in questions concerning the essence of bodies and their forces, in matters of mere history of philosophy; but in questions of views of the world and life, in metaphysics and ethics, it does. These, the highest questions, bearing on the direction and pursuit of human life, matters that most occupy the human mind, are at the same time subjects of revelation ”

“ And I call ethica, that which, broadly taken, contains the scientia monastica, oeconomica and civilis. And I call that the scientia rationalis, broadly taken, which includes every mode of proceeding from the known to the unknown. From which it is evident that logic is a part of philosophy.”
And finally it may be shown that
“if anything is within the scope of philosophy it must be that without which philosophy cannot reach any knowledge. ”

“ When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy—for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas. ”

“ The six headings under which the disciplines of philosophy are commonly classified are: metaphysics, which deals with such abstract subjects as cosmology, theology, and the nature of being; logic, which deals with the laws governing rational thinking, or, as it has been called, "the doctrine of fallacies"; ethics, which is the science of morality, individual responsibility, and character--concerned chiefly with an effort to determine the nature of good; psychology, which is devoted to investigation and classification of those forms of phenomena referable to a mental origin ”

“ The philosophers of modern times, while they may not adopt the principles of the ancient philosophy, still recognize their power, their forms of thought, and their activities, and their great influence on the intellectual development of the world. ”

“ Thus, in attending to the fact which philosophy brings along with her, we find that consciousness and philosophy become identified,—that philosophy is a systematic or studied consciousness, and that consciousness is an unsystematic or unstudied philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We, therefore, tore philosophy away from the analogy of physics, and in direct violation of their procedure we made her contemplate a fact which she herself created, and contributed to her object, a fact which she did not find there—the fact, namely, that an act of philosophizing was taking place. But the consideration of this fact or act brought us to perceive the identity between consciousness and philosophy, and then the perception of this identity led us at once to note the truly practical character 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. ”

“ It is ours to show this normative function of philosophy, this power to reign as the unifying discipline in the entire realm of our possible knowledge; to show it by showing that the very nature of philosophy—its elemental concepts and its directing ideals, its methods taken in their systematic succession—is such as must result in a view of universal reality that will supply the principle at once giving rise to all the sciences and connecting them all into one harmonious whole. ”

“ To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge. ”

“ If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life. And that philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. ”

“ Philosophical tradition, logic, and epistemology alike had all conspired to make as great a puzzle as possible of the nature of mental life, of life itself, and of all the fundamental principles, so much so that as a result anything resembling or suggesting philosophy going beyond the ordinary traditions has got into poor repute in our colleges and universities and among those of practical intelligence. ”

“ The History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to discover by its own Strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac. ”

“ If our philosophy concerning the mind be so lame with regard to the origin of our notions of the clearest, most simple, and most familiar objects of thought and the powers from which they are derived, can we expect that it should be more perfect in the account it gives of the origin of our opinions and belief? ”

“ INTRODUCTION The subject matter of the history of philosophy consists of the efforts which individual thinkers have made to explain or perchance to solve the ultimate problems of knowledge and of being. Modern philosophy—i. e. the philosophy of the last three centuries—has been specially concerned with four great problems. ”

“ Cleanthes we are told recognised six parts of philosophy, namely, dialectic, rhetoric, ethic, politic, physic, and theology, but these are obviously the result of subdivision of the primary ones. Of the three departments we may say that logic deals with the form and expression of knowledge, physic with the matter of knowledge, and ethic with the use of knowledge. The division may also be justified in this way. Philosophy must study either nature (including the divine nature) or man ”