Modern philosophy

“ Modern thought began with an endeavor to find a true and rational doctrine about the real outer universe, and to state this doctrine in clear and even mathematical form. The rediscovery of the importance of the inner life led, however, during the eighteenth century, to a skeptical scrutiny of the powers of the human reason itself, and the magnificent systems of earlier thinkers appeared, when examined in the light of such scrutiny, dogmatic and uncertain. ”

“ The origin of modern philosophy is analogous to that of science, and is contemporaneous. The general trend of its development was settled in the seventeenth century, partly at the hands of the same men who established the scientific principles. ”

“ INTRODUCTION The subject matter of the history of philosophy consists of the efforts which individual thinkers have made to explain or perchance to solve the ultimate problems of knowledge and of being. Modern philosophy—i. e. the philosophy of the last three centuries—has been specially concerned with four great problems. ”

“ The thread, firmly held, will soon lead us back again to the study of the natural order, back again to the kingdom of modern science, to the region where the facts are indeed stubborn, but where the deepest problems, as the idealists will meanwhile have taught us, must needs be spiritual. ”

“ What you wish to know further, through this introductory lecture, is, how this natural tendency to reflect critically upon life leads men to frame elaborate systems of philosophy, why it is that these systems have been so numerous and so varied in the past, and whether or no it seems to be true, as many hold, that the outcome of all this long and arduous labor of the philosophers has so far been nothing but doubtful speculation and hopeless variety of opinion. ”

“ The two great preoccupations of modern philosophy now lie clearly before us. The study of mind divides into psychology, or the study of mental functionings as considered in themselves and in their mutual relations, and into epistemology, or the theory of the knowledge of a common objective world. In other words, there is the study of the cogitations, quâ passions of the mind, and their study quâ leading to an inspection (intuition) of an objective world. ”

“ The obvious value of such a theory is that it is at once idealistic in its analysis of the presuppositions of life, just to the direct and irresistible reality of the facts of experience, and disposed, after all, to go deeper than experience in its search for the ultimate truth of the world. ”

“ The philosophers of modern times, while they may not adopt the principles of the ancient philosophy, still recognize their power, their forms of thought, and their activities, and their great influence on the intellectual development of the world. ”

“ In a word, the tendency of modern philosophy is anti-Scholastic, humanistic, and naturalistic. This summary must suffice for preliminary orientation, while the detailed division, particularization, modification, and limitation of these general points must be left for later treatment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the particular case of philosophy, the distinction in tonality lies on the surface. Modern philosophy is tinged with subjectivism, as against the objective attitude of the ancients. The same change is to be seen in religion. ”

“ They incessantly boasted of the greatness of General Influence of the Philosophers. philosophy, and the obsolete character of Christianity. They believed that successive developments of human nature, without the aid of influences foreign to itself, would gradually raise society to a state of perfection. ”

“ We must go on to indicate the principles which have been adopted and stand opposed to one other, and the development of the same, in order to comprehend the transition into modern history and the present standpoint of philosophy. For this reason we must speak of the further progress of universal spirit. For thought was distorted by reason of its being bound to an externality, and spirit was in it no longer acting for spirit. ”

“ He contends that philosophy, if it is to be consistent, must annul all distinctions, combine everything into a single series of causes and effects, and thus not only the perfect and the vital, but even all originality and individuality, would be annulled. ”

“ In the following course of lectures I shall try to suggest, in a fashion suited to the general student, something about the men, the problems, and the issues that seem to me most interesting in a limited, but highly representative portion of the history of modern philosophy. ”

“ For grant that the philosophers are all in fact expressing not dead truth, but the essence of human life, then because this life is many-sided, the individual expressions cannot perfectly agree. It is the union of many such insights that will be the one true view of life. Or again, using the bolder phrases, let us say that all these thinkers are trying to comprehend a little of the life of the one World Spirit who lives and moves in all things. ”

“ In view of all this, what we need to learn concerning philosophy is, not whether its leaders have in any sense failed or not, but whether its enterprise has been essentially a worthy one, one through which the human spirit has gained ”

“ Yet, on the other hand, the necessary imperfections of a partial expression of the truth never ought to discourage us from expressing all the truth that we can. The purpose of the subsequent lectures will in any case be sufficiently accomplished, if they bring you nearer to the throbbing heart of this intense modern speculative interest, so that you shall better know that warm blood flows in philosophic veins. ”

“ In the line of development from the speculations of Nicolas of Cusa to the establishment of the English philosophy of nature, of religion, and of the state by Bacon, Herbert, and Hobbes, and to the physics of Galileo, modern ideas have manifested themselves with increasing clearness and freedom. ”

“ As theories of the absolute, these two doctrines represent conflicting philosophical interests whose discussion would belong elsewhere. Our present concern is the more directly human one. Of the two attitudes towards the great spiritual interests of man which these systems embody, which is the deeper? ”

“ If you fear, I say, the pang of such a discovery, — and, as I can assure you, the pang is often keen, — then do not try philosophy. For the rest, however, this relation of philosophy to positive faith is one whereof I may speak in yet a very few words before I leave it. Let me point out in what sense philosophy is critical, but in what sense also it can hope to be constructive. ”

“ His philosophy sprang from the necessity of discovering a governing principle which would serve the purpose of organizing a series of studies in natural science, psychology and social science into a system. ”

“ Such a discrepancy in life and consciousness involves for modern culture and its understanding the demand that the contradiction should be resolved. Yet the [Pg 104] understanding cannot release itself from the fixity of these antitheses. ”

“ The world is ruled by ideas, by abstract thought. Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them. We recognize this clearly in studying any past period. ”

“ The Absolute Philosophy, or the thought knowing itself as all truth, and reproducing the whole natural and intellectual universe from itself, having the system of philosophy for its development—a closed circle of circles. ”

“ But we have now won the philosophical right, and have become subject to the practical obligation, not only thus to follow out our theoretical interests, but also to show how the philosophy set forth in our earlier lectures stands related to the more immediate problems of life. ”

“ Yet more, only from exact science can you get the best concrete examples of that unity of conception, that mastery of complex details, that exhaustive perfection of insight, that we must attribute in an infinitely complete form to our all-embracing Ideal Thought, now that we have got it before us as our Ideal. That all facts and relations of facts should appear in one moment of insight to the all-knowing thought is our postulate, and, as we have shown, it is no mere postulate, but a necessary and absolute principle of philosophy. ”

“ The doctrine is as deep and pure as it is simple and true. It is eminently characteristic of a philosophy which, by virtue of its attribute of reality, subordinates all scientific conceptions to the social point of view, as the sole point from which they can be co-ordinated into a whole. ”

“ The construction and disposition of the universe, the arrangement and functions of the human body, the doctrines of property, of rights and of the state—all these materials belong as truly to philosophy as to their appropriate sciences. That which is given in the world of experience, that which is real, is the content likewise of philosophy. ”

“ I wish only to maintain that the motives and interests which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and the problems with which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be regarded as touching any of the questions that, to my mind, constitute genuine philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you view philosophy in this fashion, you subordinate the study of the World as Fact to a reflection upon the World as Idea. Begin by accepting, upon faith and tradition, the mere brute Reality of the World as Fact, and there you are, sunk deep in an ocean of mysteries. ”

“ To satisfy these two wants is the problem of the philosophy of our time.—Universal and necessary principles.—Examples of different kinds of such principles.—Distinction between universal and necessary principles and general principles.—Experience alone is incapable of explaining universal and necessary principles, and also incapable of dispensing with them in order to arrive at the knowledge of the sensible world.—Reason as being that faculty of ours which discovers to us these principles.—The study of universal and necessary principles introduces us to the highest parts of philosophy. ”

“ It is ours to show this normative function of philosophy, this power to reign as the unifying discipline in the entire realm of our possible knowledge; to show it by showing that the very nature of philosophy—its elemental concepts and its directing ideals, its methods taken in their systematic succession—is such as must result in a view of universal reality that will supply the principle at once giving rise to all the sciences and connecting them all into one harmonious whole. ”

“ If any intellectual pursuit has gone round in perpetual circles, incapable apparently of progression or rest, it is that glorious study of philosophy which has tasked more than any other the mightiest intellects of this world, and which, progressive or not, will never be relinquished without the loss of what is most valuable in human culture. ”

“ Is not every moral theory dependent in truth on a theory of things? Is it possible for us to make for ourselves our ideal, and only afterwards to go to the real world and to see if our ideal is realized? ”

“ 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 ”

“ Everywhere there stands over against this ideal some critic who says: “The choice of this aim for life is an accident. I reject this boastful ideal. For where in reality is found the firm basis of fact on which the ideal is founded?” Then possibly the idealist, relaxing the rigor of his idealism, points out in the external world some real or mythical support for his ideal. ”

“ How shall we set about the acquisition of a philosophical as distinguished from a common consciousness? Here, too, I shall merely offer a few hints, for I think that by this time you ought to have formed for yourselves a pretty distinct conception of what philosophy is in its means and in its ends.
3. To obtain a distinct idea of philosophy let us ask, first of all, What is its converse? If we can get hold of the opposite or counter idea, this will help us to grasp the conception we are in quest of. The converse of philosophy is opinion. ”

“ Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence of the freedom of life. ”