64 quotes
“We hear constantly, too, that theism, to be real, must teach that there is a being who is truly God: that the Principle of existence is a Holy Person, who has revealed his nature and his will to his intelligent creatures, and who superintends their lives with a providence which aims to secure their obedience to his will as the only sufficient condition of their blessedness.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“This empirical volition seduced by the vision of the sense-world, be this sensual or malicious, or be it ever so much raised above the brutal,—this willingness to stay where one temporally is, to accept the actual of experience for the ideal, the mere particular of sense for the universal of the spirit, the dead finite for the ever-living infinite, the world for God,—this is exactly what sin is.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“His [Christ’s] point of view, of the literal divine-son ship of every lowliest and most sinful and sinning spirit, committed him logically to the assertion of the implicit equality of all spirits with each other, far as concerns their moral powers and destination no matter what their actual and contingent state; and also of their potential equality with God. His doctrine may well be summarised in the consecrated phrase, usually applied only to himself, "The son of man is the son of God."”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“On the ground either of positivism or of materialism, ethics can never, properly speaking, be morals. If it escapes fatalism of the hardest sort, with all the consequent hopelessness for most, it cannot avoid hedonism, nor, in the logical end, an egoistic and utterly transient and trivial hedonism.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“In fine, a condition of our making freedom possible in a world ordered by the rigour of natural law is that we accept an idealistic philosophy of Nature: the laws of Nature must issue from the free actor himself, and upon a world consisting of states in his own consciousness, a world in so far of his own making.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“Thus, by mere confusion of thought, or by inability to rise above conceptions couched in terms of space and time, the original theistic formula — which in its contrasting of theism against deism and pantheism is unobjectionable, and correct enough so far as it goes — is brought in the end to contradict its own essential idea.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“But now we come upon another objection, which I judge will be the last you can raise. You will say, I suspect, that this world of freedom, self-equipped for sin, is indeed a world which "lieth in wickedness," that in truth there is no real hope of good in it: it is a world of inherent and inexpugnable wrong, and not only damnable, but in fact already damned.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“A mind heartily moral knows better, when the poet, however plausibly, declares that "whatever is is right." As moral beings, we know that much which is is wrong, and is in no way palliable, or even to be tolerated, by a good being; yes, that our whole business with it is simply to get rid of it, and to bring on a state of the world in which it shall no longer have room to exist.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
They are every one of them (with the single exception named below) coloured through and through with creationism, — at least tacit, and generally conscious and deliberate, — a term by which, taken literally, I conveniently designate the reference of all realities to a single First Cause, conceived as explaining existence by being their efficient, or originating, or producing Source.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“When we say that the mind is a function of the brain, we are therefore to understand that in exact scientific truth we can mean nothing more than this: That physical and physiological changes go on, seriatim, side by side with changes in psychic experience; or vice versa, that psychic changes run parallel, pari passu, with physiological changes in the brain and the other neural tissues.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“So the free being, as self-determined and taken in his whole contents, is definite in both senses of the word: he defines himself, and thus has the definiteness of unpredestination; he defines his empirically real world of things, and thus adds to himself a field of action having the definiteness of predestination, — in a manner arms himself with it, inasmuch as he transcends and controls it.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“And there will be, and will ever remain, an impassable gulf between the religious consciousness and the logical, unless the logical consciousness reaches up to embrace the religious, and learns to state the absolute Is in terms of the absolute Ought.”
“The moral government of God, springing from the Divine Love, is a government by moral agencies purely. It relies utterly on the operation of the powers native to the soul itself; and leaving aside all the juridical enginery of reward and punishment, it lets his sun shine and his rain fall alike on the just and on the unjust, that the cause of God may everywhere win simply upon its merits.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“The agnostic position, the largest historic view of philosophy would say, is an unwarrantable arrest of the philosophic movement of reason; and its unjustifiable character appears in the fact, which can clearly be shown, that it involves at once a petitio and a self-contradiction.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“As poetry is a species of art, its essential principle must be a specific development of the principle essential to all art; and it will merely remain for us to determine what the specific addition is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's art make to the principle of art in general.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“In the place, then, of death's ending us, — death, but one item in the being of the natural world, the whole of which is conditioned upon our central self-consciousness,—we arrive at the settled and logically immovable conception that we are ourselves the changeless ground of that transition in experience into which death thus gets interpreted.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“For the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognises others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“That is, art is not the cancelling of the actual and imperfect, and the putting in its place of a vague and fanciful perfection that is only an illusory abstraction after all; it is the transfiguring of the actual by the ideal that is actually immanent in it. The actual hides in itself an ideal that is its true reality and destination, and this hidden ideal it is the function of art to reveal.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond of their law which in the mood of vague and inaccurate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an effect.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)
“My readers, I fear, have like my reviewer been somewhat misled by looking into my concluding essay for the most important proofs of my main position. But there I am dealing with a problem, or with problems, important and intricate, indeed, but still subordinate to this main one, and only auxiliary to my principal aim.”
The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905)