Hypotenuse

“ If we would know why the same body seems greater, without adding to it, one time than another; they say, when it seems less, it is condensed; when greater, rarefied. What is that condensed and rarefied? Condensed is when there is in the very same matter less quantity than before; and rarefied, when more. As if there could be matter that had not some determined quantity; when quantity is nothing else but the determination of matter; that is to say, of body, by which we say one body is greater or lesser than another by thus, or thus much. ”

“ To my apprehension, a volition is not an efficient, but simply a physical, cause. Our will causes our bodily actions in the same sense, and in no other, in which cold causes ice, or a spark causes an explosion of gunpowder. The volition, a state of our mind, is the antecedent; the motion of our limbs in conformity to the volition, is the consequent. This sequence I conceive to be not a subject of direct consciousness, in the sense intended by the theory. The antecedent, indeed, and the consequent, are subjects of consciousness. But the connexion between them is a subject of experience. ”

“ An act of volition, whether followed by an effect or not, is accompanied by a consciousness of effort, “of force exerted, of power in action, which is necessarily causal, or causative.” This feeling of energy or force, inherent in an act of will, is knowledge à priori; assurance, prior to experience, that we have the power of causing effects. Volition, therefore, [pg 361] it is asserted, is something more than an unconditional antecedent; it is a cause, in a different sense from that in which physical phenomena are said to cause one another: it is an Efficient Cause. ”

“ This young lady who was so far from philosophy that she tried nature, and so far from nature that she longed for philosophy, chuckled and picked up her flower basket.
"You Oxford men," she said, "are more proud of what you have not read than of what you have read. Come, we can walk to The Cloisters together. I hope you like Lady Hyde-Bassett as well as I do."
"I should like her better if I thought she hada heart: no woman with a heart could have married Sir Benjamin." ”

“ How is it possible to imagine that volition, which is a state of consciousness, and, as such, has not the slightest community of nature with matter in motion, can act upon the moving matter of which the body is composed, as it is assumed to do in voluntary acts? But if, as is here suggested, the voluntary acts of brutes—or, in other words, the acts which they desire to perform—are as purely mechanical as the rest of their actions, and are simply accompanied by the state of consciousness called volition, the inquiry, so far as they are concerned, becomes superfluous. ”

“ If it be objected that every hypothesis is extra-experiential, it may be pointed out that a hypothesis must be framed in terms that can be drawn within the circle of experience, it must use a vera causa, an agent that is observable in nature. But, as we have already shown, the transmission hypothesis lacks this essential requirement. Its agent, disembodied consciousness, is not a vera causa, nor can it ever be drawn into the circle of experience. ”

“ The doctor might be compelled to tell him how she had been disposed of in the first instance, and he might be able to trace her out. Occurrences less probable had come to pass before, and why not in this case also? He might find her, and in her—though grown a woman, whom he should not perhaps know again—one who would yet be like her mother Frances over again, a pride and joy to his house, and a consolation in the last years of his existence. ”

“ In the next place, we are to set down the third way of subjection, under the name of children; and by what title one man cometh to have propriety in a child, that proceedeth from the common generation of two, (viz.) of male and female. And considering men again dissolved from all covenants one with another, and that (Part I. chap. XVII, sect. 2) every man by the law of nature, hath right or propriety to his own body, the child ought rather to be the propriety of the mother (of whose body it is part, till the time of separation) than of the father. ”

“ If we could find one antecedent, and only one, that was QUITE invariable, we could call that one THE cause without introducing any notion derived from mistaken ideas about will. But in fact we cannot find any antecedent that we know to be quite invariable, and we can find many that are nearly so. For example, men leave a factory for dinner when the hooter sounds at twelve o'clock. You may say the hooter is THE cause of their leaving. But innumerable other hooters in other factories, which also always sound at twelve o'clock, have just as good a right to be called the cause. ”

“ In this conception the identity of a supposed agent or force is evidently sustained in thought. Struck by the definite proportionality found to obtain between the changes occurring simultaneously in the substratum from which the force is thought to have been transferred, and the substratum to which it is thought to have been transferred, the mind is induced by means of a fictitious entity substantially to connect the changes as such, losing sight of the true substances, of which the changes are in reality mere affections. ”

“ In short, until a very strong degree of fear was present, no one was affected by the Force which made Itself evident, as a Woman. My theory explains why some tenants were never aware of anything strange in the house, whilst others left immediately. The more sensitive they were, the less would be the degree of fear necessary to make them aware of the Force present in the house.
"The peculiar shining of all the metal objects in the cellar, had been visible only to me. The cause, naturally I do not know; neither do I know why I, alone, was able to see the shining."
"The Child," I asked. ”

“ It never occurred to me, in thinking out the system, nor in writing the essays, that this very important step of putting Final Causation at the root of the causal system was any part of the positive argument for the belonging of the individual to the eternal order. Doubtless it is an indispensable precursor of the proof, in the way of showing just what is to be proved; for if the relation of God to souls is that of their Efficient Cause, or literal Maker, they cannot be possessed of a real freedom, cannot be the genuine causes of their own acts and character ”

“ Objectively regarded, what nature presents is only sequences of events, or phenomena, and the only relationship observed between cause and effect is simply one of invariable sequence. If of two phenomena one antecedent and the other consequent, the consequent is invariably observed to depend in its variation on the antecedent, such an antecedent is declared to be the cause of the consequent. To give an illustration. If a stone falls from a certain height on a heap of many layers of thin glass, the stone in falling breaks the glass. ”

“ Volition is said in Section V. to bear the same analogy to desire and aversion, which sensation does to pleasure and pain. And hence that, when desire or aversion produces any action of the muscular fibres, or of the organs of sense, they are termed volition; and the actions produced in consequence are termed voluntary actions. Whence it appears, that motions of our muscles or ideas may be produced in consequence of desire or aversion without our having the power to prevent them, and yet these motions may be termed voluntary, according to our definition of the word ”

“ Yet the doctrine that this is so, as well as the law of the force, were established only by this and the like demonstrations. The doctrine which is the hypothesis of the deductive reasoning, is the inference of the inductive process. The special facts which are the basis of the inductive inference, are the conclusion of the train of deduction. And in this manner the deduction establishes the induction. The principle which we gather from the facts is true, because the facts can be derived from it by rigorous demonstration. Induction moves upwards, and deduction downwards, on the same stair. ”

“ In other words, to handle space we utilize a formulation which we call a measure of space. In the same manner in order to handle time we make a hypothetical unit to be pragmatic. In handling the phenomena of electricity, we formulate other units. In my own mind there has grown up therefore the analogy that in order to handle psychological phenomena we have formulated the Oedipus by hypothesis. This hypothesis I would define as the unconscious biological directing of the energy of the child towards the parent of the opposite sex and away from that of the same sex. ”

“ It's just going to heighten their paranoia. But if I can convince them you're here for fertility treatment . . . In any case, it's important that nothing you, or I, do is at odds with that presumption. I hope it's true, but even if you chose to forgo it, I still need to put you on my normal regimen. You understand."
That's baloney. Somebody had me brought to Baalum. Whoever did it knows full well why I'm here. The problem is, I still don't know what they really want.
"Well, you can say I've come to take Sarah home," I told him. "That seems reason enough." ”

“ But, in my heart, I believe that it is a matter of chemistry — conditions and a suitable medium; but given the conditions, the brute is so almighty that it will seize upon anything through which to manifest itself. It is a force generated by conditions ”

“ It is clear that psychology is concerned essentially with actual particulars, not merely with systems of particulars. In this it differs from physics, which, broadly speaking, is concerned with the cases in which all the particulars which make up one physical object can be treated as a single causal unit, or rather the particulars which are sufficiently near to the object of which they are appearances can be so treated. The laws which physics seeks can, broadly speaking, be stated by treating such systems of particulars as causal units. ”

“ Let us not, however, be told, that pursuing this hypothesis, we attribute every thing to a blind cause—to the fortuitous concurrence of atoms—to chance. Those only are called blind causes of which we know not either the combination, the laws, or the power. ”

“ If there is such a thing as fixation, it is not permissible to base upon it a new hypothesis, claiming that at times during certain epochs of life the fixation becomes loosened and ineffective, while at others it suddenly becomes strengthened and effective In such cases we find the nucleus-complex as active and as potent as in those which apparently support the theory of fixation. ”

“ Using a convenient expression for describing the facts (though one that must not be construed into an hypothesis) , we may say that the force which builds up and repairs the individual is an attractive force, whilst that which throws off germs is a repulsive force. But whatever may turn out to be the true nature of the two processes, it is clear that they are mutually destructive; or, stating the proposition in its briefest form—Individuation and Reproduction are antagonistic. ”

“ Again, laws which were themselves generated in the second mode, may generate others in the first. Though there are laws which, like those of chemistry and physiology, owe their existence to a breach of the principle of Composition of Causes, it does not follow that these peculiar, or, as they might be termed, heteropathic laws, are not capable of composition with one another. ”

“ It is so strongly claimed, in every instance of possession, that the sensitive's own spirit must in some sense vacate the organism, in order to allow another spirit to enter,—and the evidence for the reality of possession is at the same time so strong,—that I think that we must argue back from this spatial change as a relatively certain fact, and must place a corresponding interpretation on earlier phenomena. ”

“ The hypothesis, in the next place, assumes no special cause, known or unknown, physical or hyperphysical, but accepts that which, by universal consent, is not only the cause of inorganic phenomena, but the invariable concomitant, if not the cause, of the phenomena of life. ”

“ One body is said to divide another, by penetrating it. This assertion, however, demands demonstration, for it is more reasonable to suppose that qualities may penetrate a body without dividing it. Such demonstration is attempted by the claim that qualities are incorporeal.63 But if matter itself be as incorporeal as the qualities, why could not some qualities along with the matter penetrate into some other body? That some solids do not penetrate other bodies, is due to their possession of qualities incompatible with that of penetration. ”

“ Either mental energies, as well as bodily ones, are quantitatively correlated to certain energies expended in their production, and to certain other energies which they initiate; or else nothing must become something and something must become nothing. The alternatives are, to deny the persistence of force, or to admit that every physical and psychial change is generated by certain antecedent forces, and that from given amounts of such forces neither more nor less of such physical and psychial changes can result. ”

“ The various sense organs, and still more, the various [106] physical apparatus with which we examine given states, are of very varying degrees of "sensibility," that is, the threshold for distinguishing the differences may be of very different magnitudes. Therefore, a thing which is discontinuous for a sensitive apparatus will behave as if it were continuous with a less sensitive apparatus. Accordingly, we shall find so many the more things continuous the less sharply developed our ability is to differentiate. ”