Hash

“ That surer means does not consist in an abandonment of self, or stultification of the moral sense and will, nor in Mesmerism, or the use of hashish—the pestilent thing—nor in the employment of any unhealthful means, but in an increase and strengthening of will, and consciousness, and moral purpose ”

“ Even those attributes of an object which might seem with greatest propriety to be called states of the object itself, its sensible qualities, its colour, hardness, shape, and the like, are in reality (as no one has pointed out more clearly than Brown himself) phenomena of causation, in which the substance is distinctly the agent, or producing cause, the patient being our own organs, and those of other sentient beings. ”

“ In my own previous chapters on habit, memory, association, and perception, justice has been done to all these facts.
[531] "The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents at every instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose each chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic antecedent a multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic consequent a multitude of distinct consequents. ”

“ For every property, therefore, in facts, or in our mode of considering facts, which leads us to believe that they are habitually conjoined when they are not, or that they are not when in reality they are, there is a corresponding kind of Fallacy; and an enumeration of fallacies would consist in a specification of those properties in facts, and those peculiarities in our mode of considering them, which give rise to this erroneous opinion. ”

“ What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently irregular and wayward character. How different the manifestations in different beings! how unstable in all!—at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive! It seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is only in appearance. ”

“ In this kind of reasoning, then, from causation, we employ materials, which are of a mix’d and heterogeneous nature, and which, however connected, are yet essentially different from each other. All our arguments concerning causes and effects consist both of an impression of the memory or, senses, and of the idea of that existence, which produces the object of the impression, or is produc’d by it. ”

“ You have, further, a general law, founded on observation and experience, and that, too, is, I am sorry to say, a very universal and unimpeachable one,—that some men are thieves; and you assume at once from all these premisses—and that is what constitutes your hypothesis—that the man who made the marks outside and on the window-sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole your tea-pot and spoons. You have now arrived at a Vera Causa;—you have assumed a Cause which it is plain is competent to produce all the phenomena you have observed. ”

“ From this, it necessarily follows, that between none of our ideas is the association more intimate and intense, than between antecedent and consequent, in the order of events. Whenever we perceive an event, the mind instantly flies to its antecedent. I hear words in the street; event: some one, of course, is making them; antecedent. My house is broken, and my goods are gone; event: a thief has taken them; antecedent. This is that remarkable case of association, in which the combination is inseparable; a case of so much importance in explaining some of the more mysterious phenomena of thought. ”

“ The chain of particulars is too long and massy for us to lift it or put it into the most approved ethical scales. The concrete result does not answer to any abstract theory, to any logical definition. There is black, and white, and grey, square and round—there are too many anomalies, too many redeeming points, in poor human nature, such as it actually is, for us to arrive at a smart, summary decision on it. We know too much to come to any hasty or partial conclusion. ”

“ Indeed, every reality is in itself an undying source of myterious growth and decay. Even the theologian, like the scientist, recognizes the theory of causation and the continuity of the natural law. Neither good nor evil, in this sense, is a hard fact, but a liquid phenomenon. ”

“ Every one, indeed, of the four fundamental faculties of the human mind contains, in itself, a faulty disposition and pernicious germ of a special and precise form of scientific error, which establishes and fully develops itself in its appropriate domain, and which, when circumstances are favorable, is matured and shaped into a system of falsehood. ”

“ But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own essence, I did despise the ciphers and letters for the sake of a meaning I thought I knew beforehand, when I saw the world, when I touched the world, I called it delusion, I called my eye and my tongue random and worthless appearances. ”

“ And since the passivity of matter is limited to the sole reception of local movement, none but locomotive power can be admitted to reside in matter.
Essence of material substance.—We are now ready to answer with all desirable precision and clearness the question, “What is the essence of material substance?”—a question not at all formidable, when the active and the passive principle of matter have been properly defined and elucidated. ”

“ When the characteristics which belong to a kind and make it a kind were considered as the attributes of distinct entities, called essences, then the name was considered to be one of these essential attributes or properties by which the class was designated. Thus a fallacy was made to breed a fallacy, and the two fallacies grew up together and are often connected, and how can you dispel the fallacy of essence without dispelling the fallacy of inherent name? Thus a pair of ghosts stalk the world together, and fight each other’s battles. ”

“ Buried beneath activities that grow by themselves, that seem to pulse with mathematical passions and to multiply like a devouring fungus, the vanished ones send up a clamor for whys and wherefores. An official clamor. Life has become an enigma deeper than death. The cry is no longer "Who is God? And where does He live?" But, "Who are We and what are We?"
Surveying themselves they see nothing and demand explanations of this phenomenon. Baffled by their anonymity they demand identifications. ”

“ Very carefully, and wondering the while in a listless fashion why I should do so at all, I tore out the notice and put it carefully away in my pocketbook. I had the explanation now; I understood it all—the hidden ring at the end of the chain, and the shadow of which it was the symbol, the mystery and disturbance of the house, the continual pretexts to get rid of me, the effort to disguise any strangeness of appearance in the life of the family. And I understood why it was true that I must go away and utterly forget. And yet—was the explanation so perfect, after all? ”

“ In attempting to draw these fragmentary data together, to bridge the chasms, and to restore the shattered whole, we must beware of mistaking hypothesis for the facts which it only professes to cement; yet even if our hypothesis should be thought to bear a somewhat undue proportion to the facts, the excess may perhaps be overlooked in consideration of the obscurity and the importance of the enquiry. ”

“ Others, again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action of both thought and feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying fixed laws of which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants, but with which they have no causal connection. ”

“ Again, as in a building, If the first plumb-line be askew, and if The square deceiving swerve from lines exact, And if the level waver but the least In any part, the whole construction then Must turn out faulty—shelving and askew, Leaning to back and front, incongruous, That now some portions seem about to fall, And falls the whole ere long—betrayed indeed By first deceiving estimates: so too Thy calculations in affairs of life Must be askew and false, if sprung for thee From senses false. ”

“ You don’t believe! Don’t you remember that because there wasn’t a key, and the hasp wouldn’t catch, you suggested piling up the furniture to keep it close? What do you mean, then, by saying that you don’t believe? ”

“ Indeed the substance is one thing which no definition has been found to express, and the significance of the names employed concerning it varies, as the names are given from some operation or accident. Now the fact that there is no distinction in the operations we learn from the community of the attributes, but of the difference in respect of nature we find no clear proof, the identity of operations indicating rather, as we said, community of nature. ”

“ That process is essentially an inquiry into cases of causation. All the uniformities which exist in the succession of phenomena, and most of the uniformities in their co-existence, are either, as we have seen, themselves laws of causation, or consequences resulting from, and corollaries capable of being deduced from, such laws. If we could determine what causes are correctly assigned to what effects, and what effects to what causes, we should be virtually acquainted with the whole course of nature. ”

“ The state of determination in a thing is thus a state and expression of mere passivity; and a state of mere passivity is in itself an incomplete existence. Such passivity itself demands an activity to which it may be referred, by which it can be explained, and through which it first becomes conceivable;—or, as it is usually expressed,—which contains within it the ground of this passivity. ”

“ And therefore, the Psalmist saith: “My bones are not hidden, which Thou didst make in secret, and my substance in the underworld.” [3] For to His power and Godhead, the things that before the foundation of the world were done, though their magnificence was [as yet] invisible, could not be hidden. Here, then, we find mention of “substance.”
111. But it may be objected that the mention of His substance is the consequence of His Incarnation. I have shown that the word “substance” is used more than once, and that not in the sense of inherited possessions, as you would construe it. ”

“ These three groups are called intrinsic accidents, to distinguish them from the remaining six groups—action, passion, location, duration, position, habiliment—which, as their names sufficiently suggest, are simply extrinsic denominations accruing to a substance because of its bearings on some other substance. Quantity and quality, and, in a restricted sense, relation are said to be absolute accidents, because they are held to superadd some special form of being to the substance wherein they reside. ”

“ In itself it is of little moment whether we express the phænomena of matter in terms of spirit; or the phænomena of spirit, in terms of matter: matter may be regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of matter—each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred. ”

“ When into a chaos of detached observations is introduced an observation akin to them in which a causal relation is discernible, it forthwith commences assimilating to itself from this heap of observations those which are congruous, and tends even to coerce into union those of which the congruity is not manifest. ”

“ When the proposition or sentence is formed, it ought to bear evidence of the most direct connexion, for the purposes of being readily comprehended and enduringly retained. From the nature of our minds, we recollect events, however unconnected, in the order of their occurrence, and we acquire by heart any passage, of level construction, with greater facility than where the natural sequence [Pg 41] is disarranged ”

“ The laws too of matter seem more wonderful the more I study them, in the whirling eddies of the dust, in the curious shells of former life buried by thousands in a grain of chalk, or in the shining diagrams of light above my head. Even the ugly becomes beautiful [Pg 137] when truly seen. ”

“ Systems prematurely constructed, and under the impression of authority, have been especial impediments to our intellectual progress: and this truth has been remarkably exemplified in the works that have treated of the human mind. ”

“ The denial of substance leads inevitably to the substantializing of accidents. It is possible that the manner in which some scholastics have spoken of accidents has facilitated this error.235 Anyhow the error is one that leads inevitably to contradictions in thought itself. Mill, for instance, following out the arbitrary postulates of subjectivism and phenomenism, finally analysed all reality into present sensations of the individual consciousness, plus permanent possibilities of sensations. ”

“ The tale which used to thrill us in childhood, of the one locked room, the one forbidden key, bears in it a truth for men as well as for children. What is hidden must, we conclude, have some interest for us—else why hide it from us? What is forbidden must have some important bearing upon us. ”

“ Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be, it is at least secure from positive error and free from admixture of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more sharp. ”

“ Thought and experience however alike protest against concluding from the fact that certain properties of a thing, such as colour, or smell, may be represented as particular colouring or odorific matters, that we are then at the end of the inquiry, and that nothing more is needed to penetrate to the true secret of things than a disintegration of them into their component materials. ”