Natural philosopher

“ Yet when this spiritual light shall haverevealed the law of more earthly natures,—when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. ”

“ The necessary tendency therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phaenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What would be thought of a naturalist, were he, in composing a treatise on fishes, first of all, to set about proving to himself and others that there were such creatures? Would he not be thought rather a natural than a naturalist? Such very reasonably might I have been thought, if I had ever dreamt of proving to the world, either that Knowledge was, or that Being was. ”

“ In brief, it makes all that is to be made in Nature. But many great Philosophers conceive Nature to be fuller of Intricacy, Difficulty, and Obscurity, then she is, puzling themselves about her ordinary actions, which yet are easie and free, and making their arguments hard, constrained, and mystical, many of them containing neither sense nor reason; when as, in my opinion, there is nothing else to be studied in Nature, but her substance and her actions. ”

“ The fundamental convictions of naturalism, its general tendencies, and the points of view which determine its outlook, are primarily related to that order of facts which forms the subject of the natural sciences, to “Nature.” ”

“ Let us call it philosophy of nature; then we may say that only by becoming a true philosophy of nature are natural sciences of all sorts able to contribute to the highest questions which man’s spirit of inquiry can suggest. ”

“ We must go to nature itself, and be guided by the same kind of rule as the chemist in his analysis, who accounts every ingredient an element till it can be decompounded and resolved into others. So, in natural philosophy, we must account every phenomenon an elementary or simple one till we can analyse it, and show that it is the result of others, which in their turn become elementary. ”

“ And the characterization of nature in terms of thought is just the work of the pure philosophy of nature. Such a characterization presupposes for its realization an accurate and most "general" knowledge of nature, in and by itself considered, or as object. It likewise presupposes the knowledge of the forms or functions of thought. Its office will be, or is, the synthesis of these sorts of knowledge, the reading into the highest truths of the sciences, those of pure mind, the transformation of the formulas of natural science into those of thought. ”

“ But how, finally, are poetry and eloquence to exercise the power of relating the modern results of natural science to man's instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty? And here again I answer that I do not know how they will exercise it, but that they can and will exercise it I am sure. I do not mean that modern philosophical poets and modern philosophical moralists are to come and relate for us, in express terms, the results of modern scientific research to our instinct for conduct, our instinct for beauty. ”

“ Natural Philosophy.—To philosophize concerning nature is, in a certain sense, to create nature—to raise it from the dead mechanism in which it had seemed confined, to inspire it with freedom, and transpose it into a properly free development. And what, then, is matter, other than mind which has become extinct? According to this view, since nature is only the visible organism of our understanding, it can produce nothing but what is conformable to a rule and an end. ”

“ Are we better acquainted with the effects of Nature, from being told that nothing is made without a reason, or that all is made in view of perfection? What is this sufficient reason? what is this perfection? are they not moral beings created by intellects purely human? ”

“ And these experiences of ours in the formulation and working out of our ideal give us the clue to the manner in which Nature on her part works out her ideal. We are the representations and representatives of the whole, and we may assume that the whole works in much the same way as we ourselves work. ”

“ Preliminary Note.—By naturalism is meant that system of philosophy which defines the universe in the terms of natural science. In its dogmatic phase, wherein it maintains that being is corporeal, it is called materialism. ”

“ The philosophers observing, that one body can differ from another only in colour, figure, or magnitude, it was taken for granted, that all their particular qualities must arise from the various combinations of these their essential attributes. And therefore it was looked upon as the end of natural philosophy, to shew how the various combinations of these three qualities in different bodies produced all the phenomena of nature. ”

“ The truth is, by the help of Philosophy our minds are raised above our selves, into the knowledg of the Causes of all natural effects. But leaving the commending of this noble study, you are pleased to desire my opinion of a very difficult and intricate argument in Natural Philosophy, to wit, of Generation, or Natural Production. ”

“ In this connection the question may be in order, as to why the student of the natural sciences, who is in the habit of proclaiming, so loudly, the necessity or at least the constancy of everything in nature, should yet elect to assign to consciousness the character of the non-essential, that is the accidental. ”

“ Its highest end, which is to become object to itself, is first attained by nature” (instead of nature we should call it the Idea of nature) , “through its highest and ultimate reflection, which is none other than man, or, more generally, it is that which we call reason, through which nature for the first time returns completely within itself, and whereby it becomes evident that nature is originally identical with what is known in us as intelligence or the conscious. Through this tendency to make nature intelligent natural science becomes the philosophy of nature.” ”

“ He first treats of Naturalism, that solution of the problem that makes the sense experience of surrounding nature the basis of life, subordinating even the life of the soul to the level of the natural, material world.
Nature in the early ages had been superficially explained, often in the light of religious doctrine. Man gave to nature a variety of explanations and of colouring, depending largely upon his ideas of the place of nature in relation to himself and to the invisible world. ”

“ So much the more must an idealist to-day be unwilling to talk of nature as coming for the first time to self-consciousness in man, or to limit the categories in terms of which nature is to be interpreted, to those which are found directly serviceable in the human process of cataloguing and describing the natural phenomena which come within our finite ken. ”

“ But Man may have one way of Knowledge in Philosophy and other Arts, and other Creatures another way, and yet other Creatures manner or way may be as Intelligible and Instructive to each other as Man's, I mean, in those things which are Natural. ”

“ I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I way that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality. ”

“ But to conclude, The Rational degree of Matter is the most intelligible, and the wisest part of Nature, and the Sensitive is the most laborious and provident part in Nature, both which are the Creators of all Creatures in Infinite Matter ”

“ In accordance with the foregoing, the philosophy of nature may, in view of the fact that for common consciousness, and for natural science, even, nature and mind are opposed, be described as the reconciliation of nature with mind, or vice versa ”

“ And as for Nature's actions, let those whom Nature hath indued with such a proportion of Reason, as is able to search into the hidden causes of natural effects, contemplate freely, without any restraint or confinement; for Nature acts freely, and so may natural Creatures, and amongst the rest Man, in things which are purely natural; but as for things supernatural, man cannot act freely, by reason they are beyond his sphere of conception and understanding, so as he is forced to set aside Reason, and onely to work by Faith. ”

“ More to the point, at this stage of our inquiry, than a formally precise definition of Nature, is a consideration of the motives which lead us to acknowledge as real the facts that we all call physical, — viz. to acknowledge the existence of matter, the laws of natural processes, and the dependence of our own mental life upon these processes. To this aspect of the problem of Nature we accordingly at once proceed. ”

“ I use the term, as I explained in Chapter II., in opposition to ‘natural.’ I call those philosophers preeminently ‘metaphysical’ who have recognised most clearly that not everything which is is a ‘natural object.’ ‘Metaphysicians’ have, therefore, the great merit of insisting that our knowledge is not confined to the things which we can touch and see and feel. ”

“ There is spirit everywhere in nature, and we know of no spirit outside of nature. Hence, also, the common antithesis of natural science and mental or moral science is untenable. Every science, as such, is both natural and mental. ”

“ It follows that Thought and Discourse, in furnishing us with Knowledge, must themselves be active, and must in some way or other reproduce the activity of Nature. Thought, in short, is an Activity which reproduces the activity of things, the activity in which the phenomena of Nature arise.
But how do we arrive at any apprehension of Natural Action? What informs us that Nature is a potency ever operative? What suggests to us [61] the conception of potency at all? We reply that we arrive at the idea of potent action because we are ourselves active beings. ”

“ But even the domain of the natural itself, as we know it, is by no means simple and capable of a unified interpretation. Nature, especially in the realm of organic life, the animal and plant world, appears to be filled with marvels of purposefulness, with riddles of development and differentiation, in short with all the mysteries of life. ”

“ If these classifications are not mere inventions, if they are not an attempt to classify for our own convenience the objects we study, then they are thoughts which, whether we detect them or not, are expressed in Nature,—then Nature is the work of thought, the production of intelligence carried out according to plan, therefore premeditated,—and in our study of natural objects we are approaching the thoughts of the Creator, reading His conceptions, interpreting a system that is His and not ours. ”

“ The accusation that we have been running counter to the principles of natural philosophy, therefore, is devoid of foundation. The only question which can arise is whether we have, or have not, been tacitly making assumptions which are in opposition to certain conclusions which may be drawn from those principles. ”

“ The older philosophy of nature was not merely too much disposed to anticipate scientific results in an a priori way; it was also too crudely and anthropocentrically empirical in its classifications of natural fact, and in its attempts to unify natural fact. ”

“ Whereof my opinion is, that the sensitive and rational parts of Matter are the living and knowing parts of Nature, and no part of nature can challenge them onely to it self, nor no creature can be sure, that sense is onely in Animal-kind, and reason in Man-kind; for can any one think or believe that Nature is ignorant and dead in all her other parts besides Animals? ”

“ The True Naturalism. But naturalism becomes fundamentally different when it ceases to remain at the level of naïve or fancifully conceived ideas of “nature” and “natural occurrences,” when, instead of poetry or religious sentiments, it incorporates something else, namely, exact natural science and the idea of a mathematical-mechanical calculability in the whole system of nature. “Nature” and “happening naturally”, as used by the naïve intelligence, are half animistic ideas and modes of expression, which import into nature, or leave in it, life and soul, impulse, and a kind of will. ”

“ That many persons, misled perhaps by the word Natural Philosophy, expect to find transcendental deductions from natural phenomena, such as, in different fragments, exist elsewhere, and will regard natural philosophy generally as a part of transcendental philosophy, whereas it forms a science altogether peculiar, altogether different from, and independent of, every other. ”

“ These three discrete planes form and constitute the Natural Mind. The Natural Mind is that which is frequently though vaguely designated as the lower nature of man. The Natural Mind is the natural man. ”

“ Next, when I do attribute an Infinite Power, Wisdom, Knowledg, &c. to Nature, I do not understand a Divine, but a Natural Infinite Wisdom and Power, that is, such as properly belongs to Nature, and not a supernatural, as is in God; For Nature having Infinite parts of Infinite degrees, must also have an Infinite natural wisdom to order her natural Infinite parts and actions, and consequently an Infinite natural power to put her wisdom into act ”