Realization

“ What we wish to contemplate here are the plain facts, the knowledge of which enlivens and enriches one’s mind and nature. If the contemplation of them kindles one’s fancy or excites one’s emotions, these results at least will not be second-hand. ”

“ To begin, you surely know how to distinguish the really actual, that which is the true fact of your present experience and life, or that which you actually live and experience, from the non-actual, the merely imagined. ”

“ I mean by this that the conceiving or theorizing faculty—the mind's middle department—functions exclusively for the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. [2] It is a transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different world,—the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose whatsoever. ”

“ How in the concrete it takes place, in what special ways our consciousness is at once transcended, and included in a wider experience, it is the purpose of our whole present series of discussions to make clearer; and not until the end of the undertaking can one judge the degree of our success.
We proceed next to the characterization of certain more special principles that consciously determine us, at any moment, to acknowledge as real one rather than another fact or system of concrete facts, such as the existence of our fellows, or of Nature, or our own past lives. ”

“ Our whole argument in our transition to the Fourth Conception of Being illustrated how it is of the very nature of our human experience of our Internal Meaning to point beyond what is presented, for the sake of defining the very fulfilment which our presented meanings demand, and without which they have neither truth nor Being. ”

“ We are to assert that just what the internal meaning already imperfectly but consciously is, namely, purpose relatively fulfilled, just that, and nothing else, the apparently external meaning when truly comprehended also proves to be, namely, the entire expression of the very Will that is fragmentarily embodied in the life of the flying conscious idea, — the fulfilment of the very aim that is hinted in the instant. ”

“ As a result we shall soon find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals. ”

“ Now indeed you know yourself as one Self, as a person. For, first, you know your empirical self as the Seeker, meaning, intending, aiming at, that life-ideal; and here you have a contrast of real and ideal self. And, secondly, since your ideal is this ideal, the expression of the meaning of your unique experience, you can rightly contrast yourself with all the rest of the world’s life. ”

“ But when such observation is ended or at fault, and the man retreats, as it were, into his inner self, then in the quiet all the senses merge and harmonize into a single perfect instrument of perception. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. ”

“ Let us say "external objects take effect upon me, and perception is the result." We now then ask, To what period of our life is this proposition meant to have reference? Does the philosopher of "mind" answer that it may be applied to us during any period, from first to last, of our existence? ”

“ Is any better than experience, and wisdom, and reason?
There cannot be a better, he said.
Then, I said, reflect. Of the three individuals, which has the greatest experience of all the pleasures which we enumerated? Has the lover of gain, in learning the nature of essential truth, greater experience of the pleasure of knowledge than the philosopher has of the pleasure of gain? ”

“ And so, though it is true that our knowledge of the world is determined by what is given to our senses, it is equally true that our idea of the world is determined quite as much by our own active combination, completion, anticipation of sense experience. ”

“ The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. ”

“ Understanding, or the force of conceiving and combining, independently of the sensible order, is another of the data furnished by our own experience. As this is a fact of consciousness, we know it by intuition, not by abstract ideas; it is the exercise of an activity which we feel within ourselves; it is the me which we ourselves are. ”

“ For then we learn that our present will demands for its full expression, not merely contents or facts that are yet to be discriminated, but other wills than this present conscious will of ours, other purposes than we as yet observe within the limits of this instant’s consciousness. ”

“ Is it not indeed plain that, as we ourselves have often heretofore said, when we talk of Being, we are indeed seeking for what, if present, would satisfy or tend to satisfy our conscious needs and meanings? Let us take this very character as the sole basis of our definition of what it is to be. Let us first say that whenever we talk of Being we mean a definitely Possible Fact of experience, viewed just as something possible for us. ”

“ But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth? By observation—so men say—and by experience. But by whose experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. ”

“ What I say is that our present recognition of the concrete things in which we all believe is not a mere acceptance of any content of sense, but does include an intention to act, and does fulfil, as far as it goes, a purpose, and our own conscious purpose. ”

“ The Theory of Being requires us to view every fact of nature, and of man’s life, as a fragmentary glimpse of the Absolute life, as a revelation, however mysterious and to us men now in detail illegible, of the unity of the perfect Whole. Why we hold this to be a true theory, we have set forth at length in the foregoing series of lectures; and the detailed proof of the general thesis concerns us here no longer. ”

“ This notion of a FIRST in the shape of a most chaotic pure experience which sets us questions, of a SECOND in the way of fundamental categories, long ago wrought into the structure of our consciousness and practically irreversible, which define the general frame within which answers must fall, and of a THIRD which gives the detail of the answers in the shapes most congruous with all our present needs, is, as I take it, the essence of the humanistic conception. ”

“ By 'practical reason' we mean a consciousness of a possibility of perfection to be realised in and by the subject of the consciousness. By 'will' we mean the effort of a self-conscious subject to satisfy itself. In God, so far as we can ascribe reason and will to Him, we must suppose them to be absolutely united. ”

“ At bottom the process is one of conception, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ In other words in sense-perception and conception we have already, as in self-conscious thought, the necessary distinction between the perceiving, conceiving and thinking Ego and the object of perception, conception, and thought. ”

“ It may be said to comprehend every thing which we perceive, and remember, and imagine, and compare, and admire, all those mysterious processes of thought, which, in the happy efforts of the philosopher and the poet, are concerned in the production of their noblest results, and which are not less deserving of our regard, as they are every moment exercised by all, in the humble intellectual functions of common life. ”

“ I called the understanding and the will, the reason and the fancy, the four principal branches of the human consciousness, of which all other mental powers or faculties of the soul, usually ascribed to man, are but so many offshoots. ”

“ But when, on the contrary, one accepts a logical and luminous system of thought, a revelation which offers an explanation of the mystery of being entirely consistent with reason, you think that very remarkable! ”

“ But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. ”

“ Thus, and this is the conclusion at which we aim, it is in the soul, regarded as the focus of all those rays refracted through the senses, as the central light outshining all others, that we must set the power and the right to discern what the senses do not discern, and to pierce to a depth forever beyond their reach. ”

“ Whoever denies this conception covertly, so we affirm, asserts it whenever, expressly or by implication, he talks of Being at all. For to talk of Being is to speak of fact that is either present to a consciousness or else is nothing. And from that one aspect of our definition which is involved in the thesis that whatever is, is consciously known, all the foregoing view of the unity of Being inevitably follows. ”

“ This generalised form of attention, which we attribute to the Absolute Experience, is now conceived by us as that aspect of this Absolute which, in the total movement of the world’s unity, determines the ideas to find this concrete realisation which they do find. ”

“ They were meant to know, to act, and to feel—to know everything which the mind is able to contemplate, to name, and to classify; to do everything which the will, prompted by the passions and guided by the conscience, can undertake; and, subject to the same guidance, to feel in its utmost vigor every emotion which the contemplation of the various persons and objects which surround us can excite. ”

“ For the latter, inasmuch as it results from life itself, and man’s inmost feelings and experiences, is as obvious and intelligible as the visible shape and phenomenon and as the pure consciousness of life itself. ”

“ No other evidence of this is needed than that our conception is clear and distinct; in this clearness and distinctness we find the principle of certitude. Mind, then, exists, and is known to us as a thinking substance. ”

“ Yet the truth appears by no means difficult to find, if we only observe the steps, by which the mind acquires its knowledge, and the exigencies which give occasion to the contrivances to which it resorts. ”

“ But the conditions which make many moments of experience, many thoughts, or many people, refer to the same content or moment of experience, or to the same fact in any sense, are not themselves, as conditions of the sameness of reference, contents of anybody’s experience, or part of the flow of its ceaseless stream. These conditions, then, presupposed in all rationality, are ipso facto transcendent. ”

“ We let them pass by and still live on in the world until, in some unlooked-for moment, and some unhoped-for way, the true solution, and the answer to these cavils which call in question the reality both of man’s inner life and his personal experience, spontaneously suggest themselves. ”

“ But the universal form in which any opinion comes to your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity, in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight. ”

“ This negative character of the universal judgments holds true of them, as we have said, just in so far as you sunder the external and the internal meanings, and just in so far as you view the Real as the Beyond, and as merely the Beyond. If you turn your attention once more to the realm of the ideas viewed as internal meanings, you see, indeed, that they are constantly becoming enriched, in their inner life, by all this process. ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”