History of human thought

“ Although this fact is historical, and indeed the first of all historical facts, yet as it belongs to all mankind, and recurs in each individual, it may be regarded as a psychological fact and phenomenon of human consciousness. ”

“ They anticipate the human race, with long steps, striding before their kind. They learn not only from the history of man, but man's nature; not by empirical experience alone, but by a transcendent intuition of truth, now seen as a law, now as an idea. ”

“ Thus this ground-scheme of human consciousness, which formed the first result of the psychological investigation of our own selves, meets us here also on a grander scale as a part of the world’s history, and in the large dimensions of successive ages and centuries, as the first striking result in the history of man’s civilization during the twenty-five centuries which, as lying nearest to our own times, we are best acquainted with. ”

“ All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas.—Cliffe Leslie, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, 1879, 149. The history of philosophy must be rational and philosophic. It must be philosophy itself, with all its elements, in all their relations, and under all their laws represented in striking characters by the hands of time and of history, in the manifested progress of the human mind.—Sir William Hamilton, Edin. ”

“ But history, considered as a realm of actions, can be made especially fruitful of sound influence upon the active, moral side of human nature. The moral judgment is strengthened by a knowledge of the evolution of mankind in good and evil. ”

“ If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess." ”

“ As is the history of the individual, so has been the history of the human race. Human knowledge passes through three stages of development: the Supernatural, the Metaphysical, the Scientific, and the science of human conduct follows it. We find primitive man ruled by fear ”

“ History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human beings like ourselves. ”

“ It is thus my intention to render as intelligible as I possibly can the general results and the connection of all the past transactions in the history of the human race; to form a true judgment on the particular portions or sections of history, according to their intrinsic nature and real value in reference to the general progress of mankind, carefully distinguishing what was injurious, what advantageous, and what indifferent; and thereby, as far as is possible to the limited perceptions of man, to comprehend in some degree that mighty whole. ”

“ But this theory is even, from the point of view of the present, a violation of reality and psychology: and how much more so is the case when we have to deal with the longest period of man's history, his primitive history! ”

“ And we rely on these laws of history because they are the embodiment of ages of human experience.
Whatever be our system of philosophy we all practically rely on past experience and observation. Fire burns and water drowns. ”

“ In this sense, then, history is to be regarded as the reason, or the reflected consciousness, of the human race, and takes the place of an immediate self-consciousness common to the whole race, so that only by virtue of it does the human race come to be a whole, come to be a humanity. ”

“ The researches into the early history of man, of about a generation ago, were believed by some to “have revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial [4] differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life”. ”

“ And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that man, to be apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as in his natural powers, must be studied from below in the hierarchical progression of higher function from the lower forms of life. ”

“ The ideas which have prevailed in the past, in regard to the nature of the ultimate particles of matter out of which worlds are formed, reveal the speculative tendency as well as the intellectual status of the human mind in different epochs of the history of civilization. ”

“ Historical particulars can only serve to characterize the inward motives, the prevailing opinions, the decisive moments, the critical points in the progress of human society; and thus place more vividly before our eyes the peculiar character of every age—each step of mankind in intellectual refinement and moral improvement. ”

“ If the purpose of all historical knowledge is to understand the present condition of mankind in the light of its past, and, in so far as we also attribute to this knowledge a practical value, to indicate the probable course of the future, then the history of mind is the immediate source of historical knowledge. If this be true, it follows that the essential content of history consists in those events which spring from the psychical motives of human conduct. ”

“ 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 ”

“ No, I don’t mean the guess-work by which we live from day to day, and which is necessary to living: I mean the theories learned people propound to us about the past, about the meaning of human history. ”

“ It has accordingly and by many ways reached the conclusion that reality, lofty 16 though it be, and truth itself, which nourishes the mind and alone gives validity to human thought, are in life itself, in the development of the mind, in the growth of the human personality, and that this personality, though ideally beyond our grasp, is yet in the concrete always historical and actual, and realises itself in its immanent value. ”

“ To set these contingent and dubious constructions above the operations of pure thought and pure insight is indeed a return to the philosophy of the man in the street. 'Social morality, art, philosophy, and religion take us far beyond the spatio-temporal externality of history; these are concrete and necessary living worlds, and in them the finite mind begins to experience something of what individuality must ultimately mean.' Our inquiry has thus led us to the threshold of one of the fundamental problems of philosophy—the value and reality of time. ”

“ But neither this account nor the bare outline which our final chapter gives of the beginnings of the development to humanity must pretend to be a substitute for, or in any way to represent, a philosophy of history. The difference between an investigation such as ours and a philosophy of history is precisely the same as that which distinguishes a psychological description of mental life in general from a philosophical interpretation. ”

“ In this sense history is an auxiliary science of psychology, or rather, the psychology of the human race, for the evolution of the psychology of the individual—which has been studied very little—is merely an abbreviated history of the evolution of the psychology of the species. A past period of civilisation can be traced in the life of every fully developed man, and vice versa the stages in the life of the individual point the way in history. ”

“ The mental and social development of mankind, the history of ideas and of institutions, received fresh and unexpected illumination. It began to be possible to sketch a very different outline of human origins and early history from that which had hitherto remained almost unquestioned. ”

“ History, which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another lesson: if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform. ”

“ Before, however, we attempt to look upon that picture, it will be necessary to establish and defend the theory of man’s condition and history upon this earth, with which it is inseparably connected.
A view of human history, which has been strongly advocated of late, is that our race began physically, intellectually, and morally at the lowest possible point. ”

“ It is not until we have thus realized the fact that the study of history requires as diligent and as constant an exercise of the mental powers as any of the physical sciences, and until we have made what may be called the “personal equation,” disentangling ourselves as far as we can from the theories which we have inherited or formed, and recognizing the existence of under-currents of thought in past ages widely different from those which flow in our own, that we shall be likely to investigate with success the great problem that lies before us. ”

“ The principle once established makes it a matter of indifference [13] whether we proceed from the individual or from the broader standpoint of the psychological history of the race. This psychological history is made out by a study of the literature products left behind in the ascent from the lower levels of development to the higher, as represented in modern civilization. ”

“ This philosophy, which is in us and is ours, enables us to recognize it—that is to say, to recognize ourselves outside of us—in the thought of other men which is also our thought, and to discover it more or less clearly and perfectly in the other forms of contemporary philosophy, and more or less clearly in contemporary historiography. ”

“ The transformation of psychology.—Condillac.—The theory of sensation and of signs.
We now reach the core of moral science; the human being in general. The natural history of the mind must be dealt with, and this must be done as we have done the others, by discarding all prejudice and adhering to facts, taking analogy for our guide, beginning with origins and following, step by step, the development by which the infant, the savage, the uncultivated primitive man, is converted into the rational and cultivated man. ”

“ Faithful to our own, we here place ourselves at the historical point of view. Convinced that ideas have a history, and are most clearly and surely defined by their very evolution, we shall confine ourselves to following and describing that evolution. ”

“ But it has been reserved for the present generation, or rather for the generation which is passing away, to attempt the comprehensive study of man as a whole, to enquire not merely into the physical and mental structure of the individual, but to compare the various races of men, to trace their affinities, and by means of a wide collection of facts to follow as far as may be the evolution of human thought and institutions from the earliest times. ”

“ It is 'voluntaristic psychology' or, as others call it who see correctly the relation of this science to history, 'historical psychology.' It is practically 'apperceptionistic psychology.' The special activities of the historical man divide themselves again into volitions, thoughts, appreciations and beliefs, with their realization in the state, law, economical systems, knowledge, art and religion. Each of these special realizations must allow the same manifoldness in treatment which we found with the special physical or psychical objects ”

“ If, however, we include the Asiatic anticipations, we may give about three thousand years for the effective use of speculative Reason. This short period constitutes the modern history of the human race. Within this period all the great religions have been produced, the great rational philosophies, the great sciences. The inward life of man has been transformed. ”

“ We have called this exceedingly primitive way of conceiving the nature of existence “pre-scientific,” on the ground that both in the mental development of the individual and in that of a community of individuals it precedes even the most tentative conscious efforts to organise thought about the world into a coherent whole. ”

“ What is it that makes it possible for one human being to "live into" the experience of others who lived long ago, and for the present to conquer and alter the past? How can we account for the eternal trait in thought, for the unchanging laws of logic, for the consistency of moral ideals, and their transcendence over flesh and immediate circumstances? What is the force behind the idea, and how can we account for the continuous struggle of mankind in certain directions? ”

“ The views of the world growing out of the chronology of the human race, as the blossoms of a general process of civilization, are not so much thoughts as rhythms of thinking, not theories but views, saturated with appreciations.... ”

“ If we look into history we shall see that there has been a ruling power in the mental life of different peoples characteristic of every age, such as the mental devotion of the Romans to law and government, of the Greeks to art and philosophical disquisitions, of the people of the middle ages to mystical metaphysics and theological dogma, and so on. ”