The A.B.C. of Thought: Consciousness the Standard of Truth; Or, Peerings Into the Logic of the Future

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William & Norgate, 1861 - Consciousness - 144 pages
 

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Page 33 - ... with their correlatives freedom of choice and responsibility — man being all this, it is at once obvious that the principal part of his being is his mental power. In Nature there is nothing great but Man, In Man there is nothing great but Mind.
Page 27 - MANIFEST in his sight; for all things are NAKED and OPEN to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.
Page 109 - When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent inquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them.
Page 101 - ... those pictures just as fit subjects of geometrical experimentation as the realities themselves ; inasmuch as pictures, if sufficiently accurate, exhibit of course all the properties which would be manifested by the realities at one given instant, and on • simple inspection...
Page 67 - That, in short, no reasoning from generals to particulars can, as such, prove anything, since from a general principle we cannot infer any particulars, but those which the principle itself assumes as known.
Page iv - In the existing state of the cultivation of the sciences, there would be a very strong presumption against any one who should imagine that he had effected a revolution in the theory of the investigation of truth, or added any fundamentally new process to the practice of it.
Page 109 - Nature is always too strong for principle. And though a Pyrrhonian may throw himself or others into a momentary amazement and confusion by his profound reasonings, the first and most trivial event in life will put to flight all his doubts and scruples, and leave him the same, in every point of action and speculation, with the philosophers of every other sect or with those who never concerned themselves in any philosophical researches.
Page 109 - To suppose their falsehood, is to suppose that we are created capable of intelligence, in order to be made the victims of delusion ; that God is a deceiver, and the root of our nature a lie.
Page 101 - ... distinctness equal to reality : in other words, the exact resemblance of our ideas of form to the sensations which suggest them. This, in the first place, enables us to make (at least with a little practice) mental pictures of all possible combinations of lines and angles, which resemble the realities quite as well as any which we could make on paper...
Page 109 - ... and unanimity will prevail. Now to notice some of these peculiarities, the demonstrative inquirer, whether the philosopher with a posteriori bias, like Mr. Mill; or with a priori bias, like Ferrier, too frequently seeks to limit knowledge to what is within his own clear but yet unextensive view. Thousand to one, says Lessing, the goal of your philosophy will be the spot where you become weary of thinking any further. He who insists too much for proof in all things seems to overlook the fact,...

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