System (philosophy)

“ His philosophy sprang from the necessity of discovering a governing principle which would serve the purpose of organizing a series of studies in natural science, psychology and social science into a system. ”

“ Now man is placed in the midst of this orderly, law-regulated yet ever progressive system, and is himself a part of it; and if we can understand his real relations to its other parts, we shall have made some approximation to a true philosophy. ”

“ Everybody is expected to have ‘a system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative,’ and to be able to account for everything, even for things it used not to be thought sensible to believe in, like ghosts and haunted houses. ”

“ This adequate form is a system or organic unity which contains in itself the premisses of its conclusion or the means to its realisation,—which is a process within itself, and when complete and self-supporting perforce gives itself reality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the social application of the system will have far more influence on the result than any overstrained attempts at exact scientific accuracy. The object of our philosophy is to direct the spiritual reorganization of the civilized world. ”

“ At any rate, it must be admitted that we have no settled, definite philosophy to guide us in this important function, and the lack of a determinate system may justly be assigned as a cause for such indeterminate results. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But no study is likely to be fruitful of results if carried on without a system. The majority of those who pursue knowledge for its own sake pursue it after an aimless and desultory fashion. ”

“ To be means simply to express, to embody the complete internal meaning of a certain absolute system of ideas, — a system, moreover, which is genuinely implied in the true internal meaning or purpose of every finite idea, however fragmentary. ”

“ Every system, as we have seen, must be founded in principle—a principle rooted in the active powers, resting down upon the main-springs of the soul, so as to be moved forward by all the mental energies combined. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My reader, does a philosophical system, such as I have just now described, appear to you to be honorable to common sense and its interests—a system which insists of common sense that it should be cured of its inborn blindness in the school of the philosopher, and should there get an artificial light to replace its own natural light? ”

“ Your system appears to me not only coherent in all its parts, but likewise justly deduced from principles commonly received among philosophers,—principles which I never thought of calling in question, until the conclusions you draw from them in the Treatise of Human Nature made me suspect them. If these principles are solid your system must stand; and whether they are or not can better be judged after you have brought to light the whole system that grows out of them, than when the greater part of it was wrapped up in clouds and darkness. ”

“ As to our judgment of things, or the belief which we have concerning them, the new system allows no part of it to be the gift of nature, but holds it to be the acquisition of reason, and to be got by comparing our ideas, and perceiving their agreements or disagreements. ”

“ The universal then which I am to realize is the system which penetrates and subordinates to itself the particulars of all lives, and here and now in my life has this and that function in this and that case, in exercising which through my will it realizes itself as a whole, and me in it. ”

“ Why not view the Individual Whole as a whole of many related but not therefore mutually determined individuals? Why is not that at least possible? Do you say that one system of Thought, one ideal unity of universal Ideas, or Laws, is by our hypothesis to be fulfilled, and that therefore the individual fulfilment can only be such that it realises the very system of laws in this system of facts, where the Whole is contingent, but the parts are predetermined by the unity of the system? ”

“ Our detailed theory of the relation between the unity of the world and its multiplicity must do equal justice to both, and it must be consistent with our previous recognition of the experiential nature of the real.
We may perhaps work out our theory in detail as follows. The world for knowledge must, we have seen, be an orderly whole or system. To be a system at all, it must be the development or expression in detail of a single principle. ”

“ I do not, of course, wish to abuse systems of philosophy. Each of them is an experience of thought, a moment in the life of thought, a method of exploring reality, a reagent which reveals an aspect. Truth undergoes analysis into systems as does light into colours. ”

“ It is possible for us to group together as states of the same thing qualities which a profounder insight would have disjoined, and vice versâ. And in the end, if all that is is contained in a single coherent self-determined system, it is clear that, 140speaking rigorously, there will ultimately be only one “substance”—the central nature or principle of the system itself—of which all subordinate aspects or parts of existence will be the attributes. ”

“ The system which they discovered is one of profound intellectual interest, bringing together and unifying an endless variety of apparently detached phenomena, and displaying a cumulative mental power which cannot but afford delight to every generous spirit. ”

“ This method I will not call a system, for systems are unknown to these sons of nature, who, by following alone her dictates, have at once discovered, and followed without effort, that plain obvious path which the philosophers of Europe have been so long in search of. ”

“ Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a tiny being or soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the living being, it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system of rules which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly complete and harmonious whole. The flaw--and it is a fatal one--of the system lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises; in its conception of the nature of life, not in any irrelevancy of the conclusions which it draws from that conception. ”

“ What, then, shall be, the common standard that shall decide which is the man that thinks with the greatest justice? What the scale by which to measure who has the best regulated imagination? What balance shall be found sufficiently exact to determine whose knowledge is most certain, when he agitates subjects, which experience cannot enable him to examine, that escape all his senses, that have no model, that are above reason? ”

“ The new system admits only one of the principles of common sense, as a first principle; and pretends, by strict argumentation, to deduce all the rest from it. That our thoughts, our sensations, and every thing of which we are conscious, hath a real existence, is admitted in this system as a first principle; but every thing else must be made evident by the light of reason. Reason must rear the whole fabric of knowledge upon this single principle of consciousness. ”

“ Consider, for instance, such a system as is formed by the life-work of a man of marked “individuality.” On the whole, the life of such a man may fairly be said to be the systematic working out of a consistent scheme of purposes. ”

“ You see that the world in which we live is, after all, not so badly organised, seeing that the new one which you have tried to create on better principles, as you imagined, turns out, at the end of the account, to be an exact reproduction of the existing system.”—Leisure Hour. ”

“ The progress has been represented by personifying the ideal and supposing the person to change with each new ideal. Again, "goodness consists, we saw, of a system of conduct in the individual himself or in society, and this system forms a series in time. ”

“ If the symbols of our system stand for entities for which the axioms hold, then all the propositions of the system will be true of those entities. Or, in other words: If entities can be found which satisfy the axioms of the system, then the system will be science of these entities. ”

“ Whether moral and social phenomena are really exceptions to the general certainty and uniformity of the course of nature; and how far the methods, by which so many of the laws of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevocably acquired and universally assented to, can be made instrumental to the formation of a similar body of received doctrine in moral and political science. ”

“ We haven’t got the right system, we have inefficient half-baked systems, or no system at all, and a wild confusion and war of ideas in all these respects. But there is a right system possible none the less. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The very recognition of the fact that any one individual purpose or interest can only get expression by accommodating itself to a definite set of conditions, which constitute the reality corresponding to that purpose, carries with it the implication that the world is ultimately a system and not a chaos, or, in other words, that there is ultimately a certain constitution of things which, under one aspect or another, is of moment for all individuals, and must be taken into account by every kind of purpose that is to get fulfilment. ”

“ We understand by system a supposition; for if a system can be proved, it is no longer a system, but a truth. In the meantime, led by habit, we say the celestial system, although we understand by it the real position of the stars. ”

“ So we will not ask the supporters of the present system to sing of such subjects: we will merely beg of them to think. For thought is surely the best and truest standard by which we may distinguish the right from wrong. That action and system are the best which can best stand the scrutiny of thought. ”

“ A system which, on any subject, and more particularly on a subject like this, contents itself with merely laying down the true or correct doctrine on any point, does only half its work, and that half very imperfectly ”

“ The system, however, is very far from professing to declare what the unknown things or thoughts may be, or what the powers of the unknown subject may be, or what the special nature of the unknown synthesis may be which subsists between it and its objects. ”

“ And precisely because the whole of experience is a single system, no lesser system within the whole is entirely explicable in terms of its own internal structure. For a full understanding of the nature of the lesser system, and of the way in which it manifests a common character through the variety of its elements, you have always, in the last resort, to go outside the system itself, and take into account its relation to the rest of the whole system of existence. 114And for that very reason no subordinate individual, considered in itself, is a completely coherent self-determined whole. ”

“ Those who have dispensed with the assumption of such a universal standard, have only been enabled to do so by supposing that a moral sense, or instinct, inherent in our constitution, informs us, both what principles of conduct we are bound to observe, and also in what order these should be subordinated to one another. ”

“ I must clearly show the moral need for the system, by exposing the moral inadequacy of all the other current philosophical schemes, even of the many current idealisms, thus bringing out more exactly, on the way, the precise and pertinent points in which the system is new ”

“ Unity of system alone would prescribe, that answerableness or correspondence of use be the tie between all spirit and all nature, and between each particular spirit and its bodily organ, as it confessedly is the tie which unites man to all his works, and the channel which carries forth human ends through the extensive ramifications of our mundane dwelling. ”

“ Without attempting in this place to justify my opinion, or even to define the kind of justification which it admits of, I merely declare my conviction, that the general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform, and the test by which they should be tried, is that of conduciveness to the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings ”

“ A right understanding of the mental process itself, of the conditions it depends on, and the steps of which it consists, is the only basis on which a system of rules, fitted for the direction of the process, can possibly be founded. ”