Subject (philosophy)

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the fancy is the apprehension or seizing of an object, the reason a combination or distinction, so the understanding is the faculty which penetrates, and, in its highest degree, clearly sees through its object. We understand a phenomenon, a sensation, an object, when we have discerned its inmost meaning, its peculiar character and proper significance. ”

“ Without Knowledge of the Human Nature. “Varied, according to character, are the demands made by heart and mind,” assures us a representative of modern philosophy, “corresponding to them is the image of the world to which the individual turns by inner necessity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 I wonder, Madam, your Author says in this place, That Reason is not born with Man, when as in another place, [2] he says, That every man brought Philosophy, that is Natural reason with him into the World ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, in this act, which is arbitrary and in time, for the philosopher as such, but which is for the Ego—which he constructs, by virtue of his just deduced right, for the sake of subsequent observations and conclusions—necessarily and originally; in this act, I say, the philosopher looks at himself, and immediately contemplates his own acting; he knows what he does, because he does it. ”

“ And thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All objective sensibility is founded on the intuition of extension; all the pure intellectual order in what relates to indeterminate ideas, is founded on the idea of being. We have seen that from the idea of being proceed the ideas of identity, distinction, unity, number, duration, time, simplicity, composition, the finite, the infinite, the necessary, the contingent, the mutable, the immutable, substance, accident, cause, and effect. ”

“ A world, the work or the child of the universal reason, developing in time, how can any reflective mind be content with this account of things? The universal reason surely means something by its process, surely lacks something when it seeks for higher forms. ”

“ The scope of this closing volume includes a sketch of an idealistic Theory of Human Knowledge, an outline of a Philosophy of Nature, a doctrine about the Self, a discussion of the origin and destiny of the Human Individual, a summary consideration of the world as a Moral Order, a study of the Problem of Evil, and, finally, an estimate of all these views in the light of what seem to me to be the interests of Natural Religion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This faculty is reason,—the supreme faculty, above sensibility, above understanding. Reason gives the final generalization, the idea of a universe comprehending the infinitude of details presented by the senses, and the worlds of knowledge shaped by the understanding; the idea of a personality embracing the infinite complexities of feeling, and gathering under one dominion the realms of consciousness; the idea of a supreme unity combining in itself both the other ideas; the absolute perfection, the infinite and eternal One, which men describe by the word God. ”

“ Having established the worth of the principles of consciousness, of evidence, and of contradiction, in relation to the dignity of fundamental, we will now examine the intrinsic value of the different criteria. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. ”

“ Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly{3} speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ “On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But truly in comparison with the wonderful fact that our thoughts, however different otherwise, can still be of the same, the question whether that same be a single thing, a whole class of things, an abstract quality or something unimaginable, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, problematics, and universals, mixed together in every way. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For what is your famous "two aspects" principle more than the postulate that the world is thoroughly intelligible in nature? And what the practical outcome of the distinction between whatness and thatness save the sending us to experience to ascertain the connections among things, and the declaration that no amount of insight into their intrinsic qualities will account for their existence? ”

“ Yes, it would be to know what the whole individual Being called the World is; and who the Individual of Individuals, namely the Absolute, or God himself, is. Just such final determinateness, just such precision, definiteness, finality of meaning, constitutes that limit of your own internal meaning which our theory will hereafter seek to characterize. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We can be sure, he says, that anything we shall ever experience must show the characteristics affirmed of it in our a priori knowledge, because these characteristics are due to our own nature, and therefore nothing can ever come into our experience without acquiring these characteristics. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”