Rational knowledge

“ First, I was long before fixed in a deep, rational conviction of the shortness of human knowledge, and that there was no truth which we receive, whether upon the evidence of metaphysical, mathematical, or moral principles, or even on the evidence of our senses, against which there lay not insoluble objections. ”

“ That there are degrees in the knowledge of rational beings, and also in their capacities to acquire it, cannot be disputed, as it is so very obvious among mankind. ”

“ Evidently all rational beings have will as well as understanding; God wills, the Angels will, man wills. Indeed, how could knowledge progress but for the will to know? Yet of the two, considered in themselves, understanding is higher than will—
“for its object is the ratio, the very essential nature, of the desired good, while the object of will is the desired good whose ratio is in the understanding.... ”

“ Any man of sense has only to open his eyes, or to observe himself within, to appreciate how all original knowledge is of the concrete, the definite, the individual. This, I say, is what the traditional method in logic seems to imply. ”

“ I proceed to the pleasures of the understanding, which possess a high rank in point of dignity. Of this every one will be sensible, when he considers the important truths that have been laid open by science; such as general theorems, and the general laws that govern the material and moral worlds. The pleasures of the understanding are suited to man as a rational and contemplative being ”

“ All such conceptions can be viewed either as relatively valid, or as metaphysically final, only upon the basis to be established by a general theory of what constitutes our own type of knowledge. And for such a theory, — our whole present concern, — experience and reality alike contain only fulfilment of purpose, complete or incomplete, conditions of interest and attention, expressed or partially expressed in present consciousness, — acknowledgments of facts, and ignorance of facts, — beliefs, and truths related to beliefs. ”

“ And since it is by these laws, combined with the facts of each particular case, that the whole of the phenomena of human action and feeling are produced, it is on these that every rational attempt to construct the science of human nature in the concrete, and for practical purposes, must proceed. ”

“ By these means I was led to see that a great part of what we call knowledge does not come to us, as we falsely suppose it does, through mere logic or Reason, nor through unaided experience, but through the emotions and the Imagination, tested by Reason and experience. ”

“ So far we have looked at our intellectual endowment from the standpoint of ordinary common-sense experience. Let us now consider the philosophical theory based on this view, which explains the nature of knowledge by showing its purpose. The intellect not only selects, but in selecting transforms the reality. It presents us with knowledge that indeed corresponds with reality, for it is essentially a view of reality, but also in selecting it marks out divisions, and gives to reality a form that is determined by practical interest. ”

“ To what 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 reflected on the present condition of those branches of knowledge. ”

“ Of Ethology, Or The Science Of The Formation Of Character.
§ 1. 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. ”

“ They are truths which, to an intelligence sufficiently refined, would shine forth in their own unborrowed light, without the need of those connecting links of thought, those steps of wearisome and often painful deduction, by which the knowledge of them is actually acquired. Let us define as fundamental those laws and principles from which all other general truths of science may be deduced, and into which they may all be again resolved. ”

“ Consciousness, evidence, and intellectual instinct or common sense, are the three means; to which correspond truths of consciousness, necessary truths, and common-sense truths. These are distinct, different, and in many cases unconnected with each other; and he, who seeks to acquire complete and accurate ideas upon matters relating to the first principle of human knowledge, must mark out their limits with great care. ”

“ Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand, that one which awakens the active impulses, or satisfies other æsthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more rational conception, and will deservedly prevail. ”

“ By thus first distinguishing sharply between the conscious internal meaning of an idea and its apparently external meaning, we get before us an important way of stating the problem of knowledge or, in other words, the problem of the whole relation between Idea and Being. ”

“ The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form—in other words, that every fact consists in some thing having some quality—has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science and daily life. ”

“ First, that even if your knowledge and its object are facts which when examined, say by a psychologist, appear to him to be causally connected, or which, when externally observed, seem to agree, still any such linkage, where it exists, is no part of the essential nature, i.e. of the mere definition, either of your object in so far as it is real, or of your knowledge in so far as it consists of mere ideas. If your knowledge is true, is sound, is valid, it is indeed such as somehow to agree with the object. ”

“ This is why the true universal judgment has long been seen by logicians to be essentially hypothetical, and why, again, thought or knowledge always appears to the common-sense man to be dealing with realities which have previously been given independently of the “work of the mind.” ”

“ Over against this false we must place the true conception of the relativity of knowledge. We must hold, as the spontaneous sense of mankind and the best sustained psychology and philosophy of the centuries affirm, that our cognitive powers are genuine faculties for discerning the truth of things, that, while not infallible nor unlimited, they give us substantially correct knowledge, as far as it goes, of the realities of the natural and moral world in which we are placed. ”

“ Wherever we perceive any agreement or disagreement amongst them, there we have general knowledge; and by putting the names of those ideas together accordingly in propositions, can with certainty pronounce general truths.... What is once known of such ideas will be perpetually and forever true. ”

“ Finally, by the application of logic to objective realities, namely, by the study of metaphysics, a wonderful bond is established between the rational faculty and objective truth, the first getting hold of the second, and the second reacting after its own manner on the first; so that reason, enlightened by objective truth, knows how to pronounce a right judgment on the merit of things, and in its natural rectitude feels compelled to give them that relative place in its estimation to which each of them is reasonably entitled. ”

“ Thus, knowledge of general principles must be applied to particular affairs, and this supposes that one knows how to reason correctly, how to infer the particular from the general, how to put facts together. ”

“ For if the successively deeper interpretations of nature which constitute advancing knowledge, are merely successive inclusions of special truths in general truths, and of general truths in truths still more general ”

“ Positive logic abstains, as we see, from speculating upon the leading principles of knowledge, principles of identity, of contradiction of causality, etc. These kinds of principles are not objects of examination or of discussion. ”

“ If there be necessary and universal truths expressible in propositions of axiomatic simplicity and obviousness, and having for their subject-matter the elements of all our experience and all our knowledge, surely these are the truths which, if experience suggest to us any truths at all, it ought to suggest most readily, clearly, and unceasingly. ”

“ But as the knowledge of any subject may be also acquired through the study of its accidents, that is, its essential properties, so it is suggested that the knowledge of Vital Principle may be arrived at through the study of its faculties. ”

“ Upon the basis of the general theory of human knowledge thus broadly sketched, we shall next pass to a study of the questions offered to our scrutiny by Nature, when viewed in its relation to Man. Here our main purpose shall be to apply our general idealistic doctrine, concerning what is meant by Reality in general, to the problem as to the sense in which Nature and Man are real. ”

“ Thus our involuntary adhesion to the first, and our inability to hold the last, answer to their respective claims as measured by the fundamental test of credibility. The instinct justifies the logic: the logic accounts for the instinct. It was hinted at the outset, that an inquiry into our knowledge by means of our knowledge must, if rightly conducted, be consistent in its results—that the analysis of Philosophy must agree with the synthesis of Common Sense. ”

“ It differs, again, from the experimental 6sciences in that, like Logic and Ethics, it does nothing to increase the stock of our knowledge of particular facts or events, but merely discusses the way in which facts or events are to be interpreted if we wish to think consistently. Its question is not what in detail we must regard as the reality of any special set of processes, but what are the general conditions to which all reality, as such, conforms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us, then, employ the term rational to that characterization of the nature of things which to metaphysics is thus inevitable and indispensable. The world must in the last analysis be rational in its constitution, and its agencies and forms of being must be construed as rational in their type. ”

“ Not any nature of things which may seem to be will also seem to be ipso facto rational; and if it do not seem rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way. The study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject into which I cannot enter now with any detail. ”

“ This realism is complemented by a corresponding theory of knowledge, according to which reason is the gradual product of an experience more or less long, and gives a faithful representation of the order in the external world. These premises condition the adoption of the 'natural' method, which consists in always reasoning from the physical to the moral, from the inferior to the superior. ”

“ What is the precise effect of our argument on the subject of the human mind? Its precise effect and bearing is to turn us to the study of fact—of a clear and a peculiar fact—from the contemplation of an object which is either an hypothesis, or else no object at all (not even an hypothesis but a contradiction) , or else an irrelevant object of research, and one which cannot by any conceivability contain the fact which it is our business to investigate. ”

“ They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding,—its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind. ”

“ Every concrete act of knowledge, in our conscious life, includes, then, a more or less deliberate abstraction from the background of recognized reality which we conceive as the world, for the sake of a clearer attention to certain special objects of our present acknowledgment. ”

“ Of the science, therefore, which expounds the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth, one essential part is the inquiry: What are the facts which are the objects of intuition or consciousness, and what are those which we merely infer? But this inquiry has never been considered a portion of logic. ”

“ The instances of new theories agreeing with and explaining old empiricisms, are innumerable. All the just remarks made by experienced persons on human character and conduct, are so many special laws, which the general laws of the human mind explain and resolve. ”

“ 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. ”