Law of thought

“ Nor shall we stop here; we shall go on to argue that the sceptic’s interpretation of the Law of Contradiction rests on a positive confusion. By a Law of Thought may be meant either (a) a psychological law, a true general statement as to the way in which we actually do think, or (b) a logical law, a true general statement as to the conditions under which our thinking is valid; the plausibility of the sceptical argument arises from an unconscious confusion between these two very different senses of the term. ”

“ We learn the laws of matter, that of attraction, for ex- ample, by observation and reflection; what we know thereof is the result of long experience, — the experienced sight and the experienced thought of many a thousand years. We might learn something of the moral law of justice, the law of right, in the same way, as a merely external thing. Then we should know it as a phenomenon, as we know attraction; as a fact so general, that we called it universal and a law of nature. ”

“ It is plain that there is no universal law operating here, except the law that each person’s conceptions are governed and limited by his individual experiences and habits of thought. We are warranted in saying of all three, what each of them already believes of the other two, namely, that they exalt into an original law of the human intellect and of outward nature one particular sequence of phenomena, which appears to them more natural and more conceivable than other sequences, only because it is more familiar. ”

“ But the mistake we make from not seeing the basic principle of the whole thing, is that of looking to the conditions to form the Life, instead of looking to the Life to form the conditions; and therefore what we require is a Standard of Measurement for our Thought, by which we shall be able to form The Perfect Word which will set in motion the Law of Cause and Effect in such a manner as to fulfil that Basic Desire of Life which is common to all Humanity. ”

“ Again, as has been said, the great law operating in connection with the thought-forces is one with that great law of the universe,—that like attracts like. We can, by virtue of our ignorance of the powers of the mind forces and the prevailing mental states,—we can take the passive, the negative, fearing, drifting attitude, and thus continually attract to us like influences and conditions from both the seen and the unseen side of life. ”

“ You may write down a thought which, sooner or later, may alter the whole condition of China. What is a law but a thought? Therefore thought is infinite. Therefore thought has power; not in proportion to its value—a bad thought may make a bad law as potent as a good thought can make a good one.”
“Yes; what you say confirms my own theory. Through invisible currents one human brain may transmit its ideas to other human brains, with the same rapidity as a thought promulgated by visible means. ”

“ It shows this law to be truly transcendental, belonging not to transient material forms or physiological structure, nor to special psychical constitutions of men or races, nor organized instinct, nor subjective mental illusion, nor peculiar hereditary experience, nor transformed sense of realized or supposed utility, nor any local adventitious circumstances and training, but to the supreme super-sensible realm of universal and necessary ideas and truth, in which the universe of rational thought and divine order lives and moves and has its being and welfare. ”

“ Thus, then, the words Use, Advantage, Interest, Good, find no application in a world in which no consciousness exists. [p. 7] Things there are neither good nor bad; they simply are or are not. Ideal truth-to exist at all requires that a mind also exist which shall deal with it as a judge deals with the law, really creating that which it professes only to declare. ”

“ The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions,—have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. ”

“ Should any one allege that the workings of human thought, as manifested in these contradictory propositions about space and time, indicate certain essential laws of human thinking, and that such laws, being essential, must be transferred, if any are to be transferred, to all thinking, I answer that these laws are not essential to human thinking, unless their opposites are shown to be nonsensical and contradictory by an appeal to the principle of contradiction. ”

“ The understanding may err, just because it is conscious; but experience always corrects these mistakes. Nature, as gifted with mind, is no new nature; the laws of thought are the natural laws of the mind. ”

“ In attempting, then, to interpret the spirit of this new philosophy, we commence by remarking that the distinction which lay at the foundation of all the older philosophies is not to be rejected and set aside altogether. Unless we made some sort of discrimination between our perceptions and outward objects, no consciousness or knowledge would be possible. This principle is one of the laws of human thought, one of the first conditions of intelligence. ”

“ For he must be aware, if not of the fact, at least of the belief of his opponents, that the laws of the mind—the Laws of Association, according to one class of thinkers, the Categories of the Understanding, according to another—are capable of creating, out of those data of Consciousness which are uncontested, purely mental conceptions, which become so identified in thought with all our states of Consciousness, that we seem, and cannot but seem, to receive them by direct intuition. ”

“ It lays down the laws of thought, not as laws which exist only to be broken, but as laws which exist only to be binding. It teaches that man thinks and can think only in conformity with the laws of intelligence, and not, as all psychology teaches, that man thinks and can think in opposition to these laws. ”

“ The difference between our imperfect and fumbling knowledge of things, and our absolute and perfect knowledge about Laws of Thought, has been thus described:—
"The general Laws of Nature are not, for the most part, immediate objects of perception. ”

“ It takes us into the region of contingent truth—of truth, in regard to cognition, which might conceivably have been other than it is. Till now we have been dealing with necessary truth—of truth absolutely unalterable—of law binding universally. The twenty-one preceding propositions give expression to the necessary truths of reason,— the universal and unchangeable laws of knowledge,—the conditions without a compliance with which all cognition and all intelligence are impossible. They lay down the laws not simply of our knowing and of our thinking, but of all knowing and of all thinking. ”

“ As regards the last point, our ordinary consciousness, the often-boasted consciousness of common sense, was found to harbour a widespread, very persistent duplicity towards such vital things as reality, wholeness or unity, space and time, the causal relation, knowledge, moral freedom and natural law; and science, to which many when dislodged from their ordinary standpoint have been accustomed to retreat with greatest confidence and hope, was examined with similar results. ”

“ If we study the laws of thought merely that we may know what they are, we are making it a speculative science; if we study the same laws with a view to deducing rules for the guidance of thought, we are making it a practical science. ”

“ But to illustrate by example: we could not, for instance, have the ideas of good and evil without their objective realities, nor of right and wrong, in any intelligible form, without the moral law to which they refer,--which law we call the Conscience; nor could we have the idea of a moral law without a moral lawgiver, and, if moral, then intelligent, and, if intelligent, then personal; in a word, we could not now have, as we know we have, the idea of conscience, without an objective, personal God. ”

“ One can readily understand this condition in the objective mind from the observation of physical phenomena. It is equally comprehensible how the subjective mind, or soul, may be deprived of a conscious existence when we remember the fundamental law of its being, the law of suggestion. We have already seen how the law of suggestion operates upon the soul in cases of cataleptic trance, where the suggestion is made that the patient is dead. ”

“ In just the same proportion as we recognise the law of causality, we shall also recognise the moral law. Reason itself is compelled to arouse in us conscience,—theoretical consciousness awakens ethical consciousness. ”

“ And fourthly, a profounder study of the nature of thought, an analysis of personal consciousness, reveals that there are necessary principles, ideas, and laws, which universally govern and determine thought to definite and immovable conceptions--as, for example, the principles of causality, of substance, of identity or unity, of order, of intentionality; and that it is only under these laws that we can conceive the universe. ”

“ So we will not ask the supporters of the present system to sing of such subjects: we will merely beg of them to think. For thought is surely the best and truest standard by which we may distinguish the right from wrong. That action and system are the best which can best stand the scrutiny of thought. ”

“ We are obliged, indeed, it is conceded, in practical life to follow the guidance of our necessary forms of thought. But the knowledge is merely regulative for present activity; and being a product created and shaped largely by the particular organization of our minds, this merely relative and regulative perception of truth may be different in other minds or be hereafter so changed as to present changed phenomena, superseding the judgments now given by other judgments under other82 views. ”

“ Corresponding to the thinker's positive knowledge, to the specific law or order, which at one time or another he finds manifest in his world, there is the well-known, but often misunderstood, character of nature as a great mechanism, moving of course under the law. ”

“ This very law which the logicians would impose upon us—if I may give the name of logicians to those who would rule out all participation of our willing nature from the formation of our opinions—is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can find no use. ”

“ Invoked in the first instance as a vehicle for the knowledge of universals, the higher principle presently is made the indispensable vehicle of all thinking whatever, for, it is contended, "a universal element is present in every thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike [Pg 475] actus purus and awe-inspiring principles and despise the reverential mood, content themselves with saying that we are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the face of an universal ”

“ Our systems of science, our conclusions in philosophy, our intuitions into first truths and laws, and all the confidence with which we accept truth in all these great realms of mental life, rest back on the observations, reasonings and conclusions for whose reality and order consciousness is our most fundamental voucher. To its tests and verifications all the processes of knowing must submit. No truth is even visible except in the light in which consciousness holds all our acts and forms of intelligence. ”

“ By a consciously self-realising principle is meant a principle that is determined to action by the conception of its own perfection, or by the idea of giving reality to possibilities which are involved in it and of which it is conscious as so involved; or, more precisely, a principle which at each stage of its existence is conscious of a more perfect form of existence as possible for itself, and is moved to action by that consciousness. ”

“ No matter what show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its cause, its designer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and absolute Reality, — the only being in existence having such compass, such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. ”

“ 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. Such familiar maxims, when collected a posteriori from observation of life, occupy among the truths of the science the place of what, in our analysis of Induction, have so often been spoken of under the title of Empirical Laws. ”

“ The new system admits only one of the principles of common sense, as a first principle; and pretends, by strict argumentation, to deduce all the rest from it. That our thoughts, our sensations, and every thing of which we are conscious, hath a real existence, is admitted in this system as a first principle; but every thing else must be made evident by the light of reason. Reason must rear the whole fabric of knowledge upon this single principle of consciousness. ”

“ When the principles of Essence are taken as essential principles of thought they become predicates of a pre-supposed subject, which, because they are essential, is 'Everything,' The propositions thus arising have been stated as universal Laws of Thought. ”

“ Just as we find natural laws. When we find the truth of natural bodies, reason sees the laws which inhere in them, and prudence dictates [221] such action on our part as these laws require. When we come to truth, on the moral plane, or to such knowledge of the facts as corresponds to the truth, reason, unless perverted, sees the laws that reside in them, and conscience dictates that these laws should be obeyed. Conscience unerringly and infallibly approves the right. ”