Form

“ We shall examine presently what it is that individuates reality, and what it is that renders it capable of existing actually in the form of “things” or of “persons”—the forms in which it actually presents itself in our experience. ”

“ Therefore, I now desire in the course of these lectures to set aside the terms of a technology which I could not avoid at the outset, and by the recital of my labors and my researches, my disappointments and my discoveries, to show you the painful birth of a science, whose possession entitles me to the honor of addressing you to-day.
Definition of Form.
Form is the garb of substance. It is the expressive symbol of a mysterious truth. It is the trademark of a hidden virtue. It is the actuality of the being. In a word, form is the plastic art of the Ideal. ”

“ Taking the factors just named as the direct factor, and contrasting them with the less directly associated elements as the indirect factor, I should say that the former decidedly outweighs the latter in what we call beauty of form. Every beautiful form will, I think, be found to owe its charm in the main either to the specially pleasurable character of its elements (ocular or tactual) , or to the presence of a large number of distinct aspects of variety and unity. ”

“ I believe in the human form; let me find something, some method, by which that form may achieve the utmost beauty. ”

“ Form should be a synonym for coherence. No idea, whether great or small, can find utterance without form, but that form will be inherent to the idea, and there will be as many forms as there are adequately expressed ideas. ”

“ For, as we define a concrete name by enumerating the attributes which it connotes, and as the attributes connoted by a concrete name form the entire signification of the corresponding abstract one, the same enumeration will serve for the definition of both. Thus, if the definition of a human being be this, “a being, corporeal, animated, rational, and shaped so and so,” the definition of humanity will be, corporeity and animal life, combined with rationality, and with such and such a shape. ”

“ Everything that exists must exist in some form. And the forms of all things will be found to correspond to their essential nature, or to the kind of life that determines and moulds their forms. The form always corresponds to the essence. ”

“ Rather is its importance to be sought in the fact that the form is the expression of instincts and impulses deep-rooted in the nature of humanity, which, while affecting the whole course of literature, at times evince themselves most clearly and articulately here ”

“ The abstract form of the advance is, in Being, an other and transition into an other; in Essence showing or reflection in the opposite; in Notion, the distinction of individual from universality, which continues itself as such into, and is as an identity with, what is distinguished from it. ”

“ Thus, the Vital Principle is, as it were, a hand, for as a hand is the instrument of instruments, so the mind is the form of forms, and sensation the form of things sensually perceived. ”

“ The tight link between word and idea shows up in such comparisons of human languages. The well-known distinction between form and substance that constituted the basis 30 years ago for broad criticism that has collapsed at present shows up here its childishness. Form and substance blend together to such a degree that in many instances the substance dissolves if the form changes. ”

“ I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before. 'A dream of form in days of thought:'—who is it who says that? ”

“ Variations in form, size, color, and arrangement of parts have much less to do, and the uses, purposes, and functions of things and of their parts much more to do, with distinctness of character and meaning than we should be likely to think. ”

“ The art of Composition, or the ability to express our thoughts in an orderly and natural form, is the last branch of education to which, as recommended by Nature, we shall here allude. The perfection of this art appears to depend on three circumstances. ”

“ To descend from spirits and intellectual forms to sensible and material forms, we read the first form that was created was light, which hath a relation and correspondence in nature and corporal things to knowledge in spirits and incorporal things. ”

“ In his philosophy, form plays the most important part. Form is the significant feature of both objective existence and subjective thought. Matter and energy only denote reality, but form characterizes quality. Science traces form, and the nature of all things, the human character included, is constituted by form. ”

“ We have given the history of the different forms which they successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality and their necessity are manifest. ”

“ Words, moreover, as we have already said, form the pegs upon which we can hang up, for ready reference, the products of abstraction and generalization, or, to modify the analogy, they form the bodies of which these products are the rational soul. ”

“ Its shining or reflection in it is the suspension and translation of it to immediacy, which, whilst as reflection-on-self it is matter or subsistence, is also form, reflection-on-something-else, a subsistence which sets itself aside. To show or shine is the characteristic by which essence is distinguished from being,—by which it is essence ”

“ The object of the sensuous instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is named Life in the widest acceptation; a conception that expresses all material existence and all that is immediately present in the senses. The object of the formal instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is called shape or form, as well in an exact as in an inexact acceptation; a conception that embraces all formal qualities of things and all relations of the same to the thinking powers. ”

“ For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided. ”

“ Before my questionings had taken form in my mind the answer came from the Presence: “No, they are not enmeshed by the thought-forms; their creation is the result of the present condition; remove the power to produce thought-forms, i.e., to create ones own environment and you remove all activity of mind. ”

“ The solemn boundaries of form become ridiculous when they wander without enclosing some expressive fact visible to the eye either in heaven above or in earth beneath, and the question only remains, How much of this array of fact is needful adequately to convey the given idea? ”

“ For instance, people speak of something which has certain attributes as form, and of something else which has certain other attributes as substance; ignorant as they are that form and substance are to be found existing without those particular attributes. ”

“ For, and this is at the root of the whole matter, everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; ”

“ The form of the objects of the senses is likewise divided into five parts, essentially connected with the five above-enumerated senses. 4. The forms peculiar to the living beings are the male and female sexes. 5. The forms of life taken abstractedly are the life of the body and the life of language or uttered words. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. ”

“ so, we shall find that the ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands. ”

“ Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of [Pg 10] an objective ‘content.’ In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. ”

“ To the three spheres of sentiment, of science, and of practice, conform three classes of character, in whom each respectively predominates. We feel the spirit of the first; we admire the intellect of the second; we deal only with the actions of the third. We turn to the first for inspiration and for influence ”

“ In modern times, however, an individual finds the abstract form ready made. ”

“ But, nevertheless, the Creator having formed the one regular, and the other irregular, we habitually associate ideas of regularity to the perfection of one, and ideas of irregularity to the perfection of the other ”

“ Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about good form? ”

“ We find the inner ground for this systematisation of judgments in the circumstance that when the Notion, which is the unity of Being and Essence in a comprehensive thought, unfolds, as it does in the judgment, it must reproduce these two stages in a transformation proper to the notion. ”

“ Thus, when we say nature, in the abstract, meaning physically, we should be understood as alluding to those general, uniform, absolute, consistent, and beautiful laws, which control and render harmonious, as a great whole, the entire action, affinities, and destinies of the universe ”

“ He fancies he can trace, through all the simpler forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the [78] human mind. The whole of nature he regards as a development of higher forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic change. ”

“ The forms in which appearance exhibits itself are swiftness, softness, and acting. 7. The forms of the signs of being are: the appearance of being, on coming into being, the remaining into being, the fulness of the state of being, and the destruction of being. ”

“ The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. ”

“ The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the [pg 499] subjective part is the inner “state” in which the thinking comes to pass. ”

“ The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object, only the traits which favor that theory. ”

“ The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. ”

“ The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. ”