Object (philosophy)

“ Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders: every object which falls in his way elucidates some principle, affords some instruction, and impresses him with a sense of harmony and order. ”

“ They are what we have called reasons. If we are to explain the existence of an object in the universe it may be necessary to introduce formal causes, concepts, to show why the thing exists, to show in fact its reasons. ”

“ The dualism of Object and Subject and their pre-established harmony are what the psychologist as such must assume, whatever ulterior monistic philosophy he may, as an individual who has the right also to be a metaphysician, have in reserve. ”

“ The object of all true Philosophy is to frame a system which shall comprehend human life under every aspect, social as well as individual. It embraces, therefore, the three kinds of phenomena of which our life consists, Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions. ”

“ To which my answer is in short, that the Rational part of Matter in One composed figure, as in Man, or the like Creature, may make such figures, as the senses did never make in that composed Figure or Creature; And though your Authour reproves those that say, [2] Imaginations rise of themselves; yet, if the self-moving part of Matter, which I call Rational, makes Imaginations, they must needs rise of themselves; for the Rational part of matter being free and self-moving, depends upon nothing, neither Sense nor Object, I mean, so, as not to be able to work without them. ”

“ The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. ”

“ Logic aims to instruct the human mind as to its own nature and processes; it will lay bare the interior working of our mind for our guidance. The object of [Pg 182] the study of logic is thought, its nature, and its proper classification. ”

“ Or again that, since an object necessarily implies a subject, and since the whole world must be an object, we must conceive it to belong to some subject or subjects, in the same sense in which whatever is the object of our experience belongs to us. ”

“ We are trying, in advance of a finished conception of the Being of the object, to define the essential relation that makes an object the object of that particular idea. And as the idea, precisely so far as it intends truth at all, is through and through a selection, a choosing of an object, I ask what reason you can have to say that the object is the object of the idea, unless you observe somehow that the idea chooses for itself this object. ”

“ Connected with the distinction just made between ‘object’ in the sense of the qualities actually before the mind and ‘object’ in the sense of the whole thing which possesses the qualities actually before the mind, is another distinction of the utmost importance for a correct analysis of the constituents necessary to a valuable whole. ”

“ And other philosophers have suggested that what we mean by "real" is—"connected in some way with a purpose—helping or hindering, or the object of a purpose." But if we look into their meaning, we find they mean—connected with a real purpose. ”

“ The idea, I have said, seeks its own. It can be judged by nothing but what it intends. Whether I think of God or of yesterday’s events, of my own death, or of the destiny of mankind, of mathematical truth, or of physical facts, of affairs of business, or of Being itself, it is first of all what I mean, and not what somebody merely external to myself might desire me to mean, that both gives me an object, and determines for me the standard of correspondence to the object whereby I must be judged. ”

“ We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. ”

“ So far, then, we have restated and developed our Fourth Conception of Being as the only one capable of defining how an idea can correspond to an object which is other than the idea, but which is still the very object consciously meant by the idea. ”

“ If it be said that the object does exist independently of man, though not in the phenomenal guise under which we know it, I would reply—Not so; for it is to the existence under this phenomenal guise that we apply the word "object." ”

“ We have thus defined the object and the truth of an idea. But observe that thus we stand upon the threshold of a new definition of Being. Being, as our Third Conception declared, is what gives true ideas their truth; or in other words, to be real is to be the object of a true idea. We are ready, now that we have defined both object and truth, to assert, as our Fourth and final Conception of Being, this, that What is, or what is real, is as such the complete embodiment, in individual form and in final fulfilment, of the internal meaning of finite ideas. ”

“ This is found in the objects of Nature; in the sublime, the useful, the beautiful, the common things we meet; in the ideas and conceptions that arise unavoidably when man, the thinking subject, comes intellectually in contact with external things, the object of thought. ”

“ Now in defining this complete life, in which alone the finite idea, as a passing thrill of conscious meaning, can find the genuine object that it means fully embodied, we have so far still used many expressions derived from the conception of mere validity. ”

“ Either we affirm the intuition of the concrete, real object, from which the abstract conception of the good, the beautiful, and the true is derived, or we can prove only the existence of these conceptions in the mind, and cannot argue from the conceptions to the reality, or in any way perceive clearly the existence of the reality in an order external to our own mind. ”

“ The object which fulfils this definition, and which is therefore worthy to be called real, is of necessity in itself One and only One; since variety, when consciously faced, calls forth thought, and arouses demands for characterization and explanation. ”

“ Let us therefore set an object clearly before us, let us sever it in thought so far as is possible from all other objects, and we shall at once be able to determine what properties and relations are essential and what are not essential to it. ”

“ Subject and object in one,—the conscious being and that of which I am conscious, gifted with intuitive knowledge and myself revealed in that intuition, the thinking mind and myself the object of the thought—inseparable, and ever present to each other. ”

“ And sometimes we may know some one or more of those powers or properties,—as, for example, the desires and affections of the soul,—and be ignorant of the essence, and make it the object of investigation. ”

“ They deal either with the objectified world, with objects of consciousness which are describable and explainable, or with the subjectivistic world of real life in which all reality is experienced as will and as object of will, in which everything is to be understood by interpretation of its meaning. In other words, we deal in one case with phenomena and in the other with purposes. ”

“ In other words, our conceptions, though they may be clear, are not appropriate for our purpose, unless the properties we comprise in them are those which will help us toward what we wish to understand--i.e., either those which go deepest into the nature of the things, if our object be to understand that, or those which are most closely connected with the particular property which we are endeavoring to investigate. ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say, any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ I. The proposition, that the object—for there is only one object, since the asserted existence of something external and independent of us, which constitutes the real character of an object, belongs to all objects in the same manner—is neither felt in sensation, nor beheld in contemplation, but altogether and solely thought, is as important as it has never yet been recognized. ”

“ Well, this case of the vague purpose that one seeks, not to abandon, but to get present to the moment’s consciousness in another, that is a more explicit and precise, form, and if possible, in what would finally prove to be an absolutely determinate form, — this case, I insist, is typical of every case where an idea seeks its object. ”

“ The subject to be studied is, the origin and sources of all those qualities in human beings which are interesting to us, either as facts to be produced, to be avoided, or merely to be understood; and the object is, to determine, from the general laws of mind, combined with the general position of our species in the universe, what actual or possible combinations of circumstances are capable of promoting or of preventing the production of those qualities. ”

“ When we talk of seeing a beautiful object, or, more generally, of the cognition or consciousness of a beautiful object, we may mean by these expressions something which forms no part of any valuable whole. ”

“ The nature, then, and the degree of that correspondence between idea and object which is meant when one talks of the truth of an idea, is a doubtful matter, and we shall have to consider it more closely. As to the other one of these two problems about idea and object, it seems plain, and in fact seems to be implied in the very definition of truth, that an idea can have an object without rightly corresponding to its object. ”

“ The features of any object that we contemplate may with intelligent judgment be divided into two classes, according as they are inherently essential, or else merely contributory, to the existence of that object as an individual entity. ”

“ So, then, hypothetical judgments tell us that some ideally defined object, often of very complex structure, finds no place in Being. Even the fantastic examples of the wishes and the bowl involve the same sort of assertion, true or false, as to a real world. ”

“ Yet we hold that whatever the mind cognizes at all, it cognizes in the concrete, as an individual object. And therefore we deny that the ideas of the necessary, the universal, of necessary cause, and the like, which the author calls intuitions, and treats as first principles, necessary assumptions, abstract ideas, etc., are abstractions, mental conceptions, or generalizations ”

“ By what rational title—even granting for the sake of argument that they are the genuine postulates of categorical and of conditional syllogizing—can this Subject and this Object, these correlate factors in the Self, rank as Ideas with the Idea of their conditioning Whole—the Self, that in its still unaltered identity fulfills, in Practical Reason, the high rôle of Person? ”

“ On the other hand, every . such duality of idea and object, or of fragment and whole, is secondary to and subservient to the one will or purpose which the idea partially, and the completed individual life of the object wholly, embodies, and embodies even by including the fragmentary will of every idea. ”

“ The object to be presented and which must inspire devotion is an ideal object. It is complex and it performs practical functions, but it is through and through such an object as appeals most deeply to the æsthetic feelings. ”

“ Whenever an idea of any grade aims at truth, it regards its object as other than itself, and that the object shall be thus other than itself is even a part of what the idea means and consciously intends. But as a will seeking its own fulfilment, the idea so selects the object, that, if the idea has a perfectly definite meaning and truth at all, this object is to be a precisely determinate object, such that no other object could take its place as the object of this idea. ”

“ All things are included under subject and object. The subject is an entity in which mental operations are awakened whenever there are objects, while the object consists of all things, visible and invisible, knowable and unknowable, etc. ”

“ The objects of sense-perception are external, individual, "nearest to sense," and occasionally or contingently present to sense. The objects of the intellect are inward, universal, and the essential property of the soul. ”

“ There is, indeed, a sense, in which, according to our view, any rational idea in the whole universe seeks and in its complete development finds, as the expression of its ultimate meaning, the whole of the universe. ”

“ When we view the essence as existing, we call it thing. In the relation of a thing to its properties we have a repetition of the relation of form and content. The properties show us the thing in respect of its form, but it is thing in respect of its content. ”

“ What you choose to call the essence of things may be of this character, but not what they called the essence of things. With the old philosophers the essence of things was precisely that part of them of which a clear conception could be formed: with you of the modern school it is precisely that part of them of which there can be no conception. ”