Philosophizing

“ 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. ”

“ Under this conception, the oppositions of thought which play so important a part in philosophy,—Being and Thought, Mind and Nature, Soul and Body, Freedom and Law, Natural Inclination and Moral Effort, Mechanism and Teleology,—are reconciled. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 six headings under which the disciplines of philosophy are commonly classified are: metaphysics, which deals with such abstract subjects as cosmology, theology, and the nature of being; logic, which deals with the laws governing rational thinking, or, as it has been called, "the doctrine of fallacies"; ethics, which is the science of morality, individual responsibility, and character--concerned chiefly with an effort to determine the nature of good; psychology, which is devoted to investigation and classification of those forms of phenomena referable to a mental origin ”

“ The inevitable defects of philosophical study are to nobody clearer than to one who, sincerely loving philosophy, devotes his life, as best he can, to seeking clearness of thought and a soul-stirring vision of the truth. ”

“ The author’s meaning is, that it is only by a process of philosophical reasoning that you can decide whether philosophy is possible, valid, or useful. You must philosophize in order to decide whether you ought or ought not to philosophize. ”

“ For what act can be more vitally practical than the act by which we realise our existence as free personal beings? and what act can be attended by a more practical result than the act by which we look our passions in the face, and, in the very act of looking at them, look them down?
Now, if consciousness be an act of such mighty and practical efficiency in real life, what must not the practical might and authority of philosophy be? Philosophy is consciousness sublimed. ”

“ This branch of learning, too, makes the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false, of discovering correspondences and proportions, so as to hunt out for similarity in things dissimilar; and conducts us to the discovery of length without breadth, and superficial extent without thickness, and an indivisible point, and transports to intellectual objects from those of sense.
The studies of philosophy, therefore, and philosophy itself, are aids in treating of the truth. ”

“ What do our conclusions indicate and demand with reference to philosophy itself? For the philosophy which reaches such conclusions regarding knowledge and mind must apply them, sincerely and whole-heartedly, to its idea of its own nature. For philosophy claims to be one form or mode of knowing. If, then, the conclusion is reached that knowing is a way of employing empirical occurrences with respect to increasing power to direct the consequences which flow from things, the application of the conclusion must be made to philosophy itself. ”

“ V THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE [75]
Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible to be. Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of substance, and things of another. Consciousness, flowing inside of us in the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating itself in the shape of passion or emotion, can be directly felt as the spiritual activity which it is, and known in contrast with the space-filling objective ‘content’ which it envelopes and accompanies. ”

“ The opposition between a philosophy guided by scientific method and a philosophy dominated by religious and ethical ideas may be illustrated by two notions which are very prevalent in the works of philosophers, namely the notion of the universe, and the notion of good and evil. A philosopher is expected to tell us something about the nature of the universe as a whole, and to give grounds for either optimism or pessimism. ”

“ And that each of these principles (has boundless powers ... everything which you perceive by your mind or which you pass over for lack of thought) [23] is formed by nature to become [each of the principles] as in the human soul every art is to be learned. ”

“ Let us begin, then, with a definition, which, though it conveys very little in-formation, is quite unexceptionable—is, indeed, what the whole world is willing to assent to—and let us say that philosophy is the pursuit of truth. This is the first, and simplest, and vaguest conception and definition of philosophy which we can form. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Thus, in attending to the fact which philosophy brings along with her, we find that consciousness and philosophy become identified,—that philosophy is a systematic or studied consciousness, and that consciousness is an unsystematic or unstudied philosophy. ”

“ As regards philosophy in its proper and genuine sense, we find put forward without any hesitation, as an entirely sufficient equivalent for the long course of mental discipline—for that profound and fruitful process through which the human spirit attains to knowledge—the direct revelation of the divine and the healthy common sense of mankind, unconcerned with and undisciplined by any other knowledge or by proper philosophical reflection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The notion is that philosophy is concerned with topics of the mind, and that natural science takes care of topics concerning matter. The whole conception of philosophy as concerned with the discipline of the speculative Reason, to which nothing is alien, has vanished. ”

“ I assent to the veracity of sense, and I believe that the very perception or sensible image is the external object, and on no account whatever will I consent 'to disclaim this principle.' Your philosophy—your more rational opinions— representation—your reasonings which, you say, necessitate me to depart from my primary instincts—all these I give, without reservation, to the winds. ”

“ If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life. And that philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. ”

“ There is a way of choosing one’s philosophy even less troublesome than yours. Put the names of all the philosophers into an urn. Then call a little child, and let him draw the name of the philosopher you shall follow all the rest of your days. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Undoubtedly, every philosopher must begin the construction of his philosophy by the analysis of thought, either as presented him in consciousness or as represented in language, or both together. This is a mental necessity. ”

“ Advance in philosophy is advance in interpreting the meaning of each of these three postulates, and of their mutual relations, as seen in an improved conception of what ‘matter’ means, what ‘self’ means, and what ‘God’ means. ”

“ And this is nothing else than Understanding, a faculty of the soul, capable of studying existences,—of distinguishing and comparing what succeeds as like and unlike,—of enjoining and forbidding, and of conjecturing the future. And it extends not to the arts alone, but even to philosophy itself. ”

“ In the mind of the deep thinker it is moulded into a sublime and living philosophy, and he cannot subsist under its influence without thinking more deeply, and becoming more truly a philosopher than before. ”

“ Such are the steps by which we vindicate the title of philosophy to the rank of a real and practical discipline of humanity. To sum up: we commenced by noticing, what cannot fail to present itself to the observation of every one, the inert and unreal character of our modern philosophy—metaphysical philosophy as it is called—and we suspected, indeed we felt assured, that this character arose from our adopting, in philosophy, the method of the physical sciences. ”

“ Let us then run over, if you choose, the opinions of the philosophers, to which they give boastful utterance, respecting the gods; that we may discover philosophy itself, through its conceit making an idol of matter; although we are able to show, as we proceed, that even while deifying certain demons, it has a dream of the truth. ”

“ To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge. ”

“ When the adherents of the Positive Philosophy proceed to define matter as merely "a permanent possibility of sensations,"21 faith in the reliability of our knowledge of the realities about us, as true for those realities, is thoroughly undermined. ”

“ Instead of recognizing, as in the Cours de Philosophic Positive, an essentially sound view of philosophy, with a few capital errors, it is in their general character that we deem the subsequent speculations false and misleading, while in the midst of this wrong general tendency, we find a crowd of valuable thoughts, and suggestions of thought, in detail. ”

“ Philosophy, therefore, dear reader—or, since this word might lead to disputes,—the science of knowledge first of all utterly abstracts from all that we have above characterized as higher degrees of consciousness, and limits itself with its assertion, which we shall directly state, to the primary and fundamental determinations of consciousness, altogether in the sense stated above. ”

“ But let it be borne in mind that the end which philosophy pursues is the truth as it exists for intellect universal, and not for intellect particular—for intellect unmodified, and not for intellect modified—for intellect whether with senses like ours, or with senses totally different ”

“ 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. ”

“ Philosophy, that lean'd on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. ”

“ Sense, in fact, still remained the criterion of truth; all that can be affirmed is, that there was a tendency to rise to a different standard, the standard of thought and reason, in the settlement of philosophical questions—the tendency to find something which should be true for all intellect, and not merely for our intellect; and this tendency showed itself unmistakably in the reduction of all sensible phenomena to one sensible principle—to wit, water, or moisture. ”

“ Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. ”

“ By the reflective part, I mean all that deals with the connection of things, the discovery of principles, the laws that regulate emotion and influence, the motives of human nature, the basis of existence, the solution of the problem of life and being—that vast class of subjects which lie just below, and animate concrete facts, and which are the only things worthy of the devotion of a philosopher, though no knowledge is unworthy of his attention. ”

“ In that method of philosophy which takes its rise in no dead and abstract thinking, but rather in life itself and the living thought, reality, together with the immediate feeling of whatever is thus real and actual in the inward perception, as well as in external experience, and also in the revelation from above, forms the first beginning out of which all is developed. ”

“ All that philosophers meant was—that we had perceptions of objects, and that these perceptions were not the objects themselves. Yet even this, the least exceptionable form of the theory that can be maintained, was found sufficient to subvert the foundations of all human certainty. ”