Reading Notes: December 30th, 2021

“But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. It can rise to a universality which is not foreign to, but the very inward nature of things in themselves, not the universal of an abstraction from the particular and different, but the unity which is immanent in them and finds in them its own necessary expression; not an arbitrary invention of the observing and classifying mind unifying in its own imagination things which are yet essentially different, but an idea which expresses the inner dialectic, the movement or process towards unity, which exists in and constitutes the being of the objects themselves. This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated ideal or organic universality.” (Caird, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 217–218) 

“I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind….[W]hat we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits.” (Pierce, The Law of Mind, 339-350) 

“Moore’s critique rests on a conflation between the ontological claim that sensation is a sensation of something, hence of that which is outside spirit, outside experience but given in it through sensation, and the epistemological claim that what is given in sensation is identical with, or the same as, what stands outside experience.” (Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy, 67)  

Reading Notes: December 29th, 2021

“The demand which rests at the basis of Descartes’ reasonings thus is that what is recognized as true should be able to maintain the position of having the thought therein at home with itself….The second proposition of the Cartesian philosophy is hence the immediate certainty of thought. Certainty is only knowledge as such in is pure form as self-relating, and this is thought; thus then the unyielding understanding makes its way on to the necessity of thought….Descartes begins, just as Fichte did later on, with the “I” as indubitably certain; I know that something is presented in me. By this Philosophy is at one stroke transplanted to quite another field and to quite another standpoint, namely to the sphere of subjectivity. Presuppositions in religion are given up; proof alone is sought for, and not the absolute content which disappears before abstract infinite subjectivity. To consider the content in itself is not the first matter; for I can abstract from all my conceptions, but not from the “I”. We think this and that, and hence it is—is to give the common would-be-wise argument of those incapable of grasping the matter in point; that a determinate content exists is exactly what we are forced to doubt—there is nothing absolutely fixed. Thought is entirely universal, but not merely because I can abstract, but because “I” is thus simple, self-identical. Thought consequently comes first; the next determination arrived at, in direct connection with it, is the determination of Being. The “I think” directly involves my Being; this, says Descartes, is the absolute basis of all Philosophy. The determination of Being is in my “I”; this connection is itself the first matter. Thought as Being and Being as thought—that is my certainty, “I”; in the celebrated Cogito, ergo sum we thus have Thought and Being inseparably bound together.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 226-228) 

“The thinking subject as the simple immediacy of being-at-home-with-me is the very same thing as what is called Being; and it is quite easy to perceive this identity. As universal, thought is contained in all that is particular, and thus is pure relation to itself, pure oneness with itself. We must not make the mistake of representing Being to ourselves as a concrete content, and hence it is the same immediate identity which thought likewise is. Immediacy is, however, a one-sided determination; thought does not contain it alone, but also the determination to mediate itself with itself, and thereby—by the mediation being at the same time the abrogation of the mediation—it is immediacy. In thought we thus have Being; Being is, however, a poor determination, it is the abstraction from the concrete of thought.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 229-230) 

“In its abstraction [Being] would be really only that return into itself, that simple equality with itself, which constitutes thought.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 257) 

“This Idea of Spinoza’s we must allow to be in the main true and well-grounded; absolute substance is the truth, but it is not the whole truth; in order to be this it must also be thought of as in itself active and living, and by that very means it must determine itself as mind. But substance with Spinoza is only the universal and consequently the abstract determination of mind; it may undoubtedly be said that this thought is the foundation of all true views—not, however, as their absolutely fixed and permanent basis, but as the abstract unity which mind is in itself. It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy. For as we saw above, when man begins to philosophize, the soul must commence by bathing in this ether of the One Substance, in which all that man has held as true has disappeared; this negation of all that is particular, to which every philosopher must have come, is the liberation of the mind and its absolute foundation.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 257-258) 

“For [the finite—according to Spinoza—comes] to an end, it is not there; what is there is something else. This something else must, however, be of like nature; for those things which are to limit each other must, in order to be able to limit each other, touch each other, and consequently have a relation to each other, that is to say they must be of one nature, stand on a like basis, and have a common sphere.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 259) 

“What cannot have a conception formed of it without the aid of something else, is not independent, but is dependent on that something else.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 259) 

“The great service of [Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism”] is to insist on the truism that when you perceive you perceive something, and that what you do perceive cannot be the same as the perception of it.” (Broad, Perception, Physics, and Reality, 5) 

“It just seems to me that no mental act is ever its own object, not even an act of awareness.” (Grossmann, Phenomenology and Existentialism, 53) 

“Just as one must distinguish between the perception and that which is perceived, on must distinguish between the introspection and that which is introspected….A mental state cannot be aware of itself, any more than a man can eat himself up….Intentionality…is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience…” (Zahavi and Parnas, Models of the Self, 258-260)

Reading Notes: December 27th, 2021

“If I know X, X obviously must be in relation to my mind at the time I know it, and again at any other time also it must bear the relation to my mind of “going to be known by me after such a lapse of time” or “having been known by me so many hours, months, or years ago,” but it does not follow that the relation is essential to X or that X could not exist without being in that relation.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 15) 

“Anything that is ever known must always have been such that it could eventually come to be known…It must indeed be admitted that any fact whichever comes to be known must be in that respect related to the knowing of it and the knower…” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 15) 

“[W]e can only think an object existing independently of our consciousness by thinking it as it would be if it were present to a mind. For example, if we are really to understand what is meant by talking of the state of the earth prior to man we must imagine some mind as contemplating it at the time…and think it as it would have been for that mind. We can make correct verbal statements about it without doing this, but this is the only way in which we can picture to ourselves what the statements really mean. Similarly, I can only realize other facts by picturing them as they would be for a knowing mind. It may even be contended that the only way in which I can think an a priori universal truth to be necessarily valid is by thinking it as such that any mind must necessarily accept it as true if he understands it.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 21) 

“It is sometimes argued that mind can only know what is like itself, namely mind, and that therefore reality must be mental….An argument to this effect might be based on the premise that the presence of a relation implies that its terms have a determinable in common, in respect of determinate values of which the relation holds, (as it seems to be the case with most or, some would say, all relations), and conclude that what knows and what is known must be of the same genus if this condition is to be fulfilled.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 27) 

“To know is to know something, and this something cannot be just our knowing it….[K]nowing clearly presupposes an object to be known, and this object is logically prior to and cannot be dependent on or made by the knowing….To say that an object depends for its existence or being on the knowledge of it thus involves a vicious circle, for it must be already if it is to be known.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 27-38) 

“We may note also that most of those who reject the view that an object implies consciousness seem to accept the converse proposition, namely, that consciousness implies an object. But anyone who makes such an admission as this is altogether debarred from rejecting the idealist view on the ground that an object is different from the consciousness of it and therefore cannot imply the latter. The fact that A implies B does not necessarily carry with it the conclusion that B implies A….” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 32-33) 

“Now we have already found an idealistic element in knowledge in the fact that in order to determine what something is we must first think what it would be for a mind fully and discriminately aware of it….For to think of objects of cognition as they are or would be for a knowing mind is a method necessary if we are to attain any truth at all. By this I do not mean merely the trivial tautology that what I cognize must stand in a relation, namely, the relation of being cognized, to a conscious mind, my own. I mean that to know any fact, X, or form any intelligible opinion about X, I must ultimately think X as it would be for a mind which was consciously aware of it as a present fact, though there may never be or have been such a mind...Thus ultimately we can only think of unperceived physical thinks in terms of a possible observer, in the sense that we must think them as if they were objects of actual present experience or rather conscious perception. A similar contention may be put forward even in regard to “necessary truths.” As far as I can see we can only think universal principles as true a priori by thinking them as in some sense necessary for any mind that accepts the premises on which they are based, by thinking of them as such that any mind which realized their meaning would be bound to accept them as true...The cognitive process…is idealistic…as it always involves thinking facts as they would be for as mind, as if they existed for a mind.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 56-58) 

“In the first place a relation, if it is to be a relation at all, must unite some terms. Secondly, most, if not all, kinds of relation presuppose a specific common character, usually or always of the type called by Mr. Johnson a determinable in the related terms, without which the assertion of the specific relation would be not merely false but absurd…” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 128) 

“Spatial relations presuppose in this way the common determinable of extension….the relation of similarity presupposes some common determinable in the determinate value of which the objects are said to be similar, the relations of enmity or love the common determinable of emotional capacity, the relation of causality the common character of being events or continuants in time, and perhaps membership in some specific causal system…..[A relation] could not be present at all if its terms were not characterized by a certain determinable and if their determinate qualities within this and other subordinate determinables did not fall within certain limits….” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 129-130) 

“If we are to think of the spatial objects to which we usually give the name, physical, as existing unperceived by us…we must think of them…as objects of experience…by thinking of them as standing in the position of images relatively to a non-human experience….In order to think what physical objects are we must think of them as if they were objects of experience….For example, in order to give full intelligibility to propositions about the state of the earth prior to man, we must imagine some mind as contemplating it at the time when no human mind was in fact contemplating it, and think it as it would have been for that mind. We can make correct verbal statements without doing this, but this is the only way in which we can picture to ourselves what the statements really mean. In this sense, it may be true that propositions about material objects can only be interpreted in terms of experience, either actual experience or the imaginary experience of an imaginary observer.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 393-399) 

“It is true that we cannot give a meaning to propositions about physical objects except in terms of experience, if experience is used in the wide sense in which it covers characteristics experienced, that is, it is true that the objects must ultimately be interpreted in terms of characteristics which have been on other occasions experienced by human beings.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 397) 

“T.H. Green, in order to prove the unthinkability of physical things apart from mind, makes use of an argument from the nature of relations. If A and B are related they are at once separate and together, and for this to be possible “there must be something other than the manifold of things themselves which combines them without effacing their severalty.” Now we can see how this is possible if there is an intelligence which thinks the related things together; we know that, when we think two things, they are distinct and not merged in one, and yet also fall within the same unity of consciousness, and so are together. Such a process as comparison involves at once the difference and union of its objects. They must be different, for otherwise there would be no distinction and therefore no comparison; they must also be united together, for to think first A and then B is not to compare A and B, to compare them we must hold them together. But it is impossible to conceive how related terms could in any other way be thus at once a unity and separate, therefore the fact of relation implies the existence of an intelligence to which both the related terms are present.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 399-400) 

“Propositions about physical objects cannot be analyzed in terms of actual and possible sensa of human beings. On the contrary, in such propositions we are normally ascribing at least primary qualities to physical objects existing independently of us in the same sense as we ascribe them to sensa. Hence, unless such independent objects with at least primary qualities exist, most or all of the propositions of “common sense” and science about physical objects are false. (ch. VII).” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 441)

Reading Notes: December 23rd, 2021

“You cannot think anything at all without adding in thought your Ego as self-conscious; you cannot abstract from your self-consciousness.” (Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 71) 

“Even in regard to the realm of thought and knowledge many writers are fond of dwelling upon the idea that each of us lives in a little world of his own, in which things are arranged in a way not quite identical with the mental cosmos of any other individual….Such exaggerations of the subjective aspect of our consciousness have their value, and even their necessity, at particular stages in the life of the individual or the race. But they contain only one side of the truth, and if they tempt us to obliterate the other side, and to entrench ourselves in a theory of subjective idealism (such as is commonly attributed to Berkeley), they become self-contradictory and contain their own refutation. The consciousness of self, it must be again pointed out, is always primarily and immediately a return upon self from objects; and though this return involves a kind of opposition between the self and that from which the return is made upon it, yet it should be remembered that a negative relation is still a relation, and, in this case at least, a necessary relation. If there is no consciousness of the object except in relation to the subject, as little is there a consciousness of the subject which is not mediated by a consciousness of the object….Hence, the idea of a pure consciousness of self, shut up in itself without any knowledge of objects, is the abstraction of one element in our life, which, in losing all relation to the other elements, loses all its own meaning….The conception of the individual subject as at any time alone with himself, conscious of nothing but his own states, and seeking nothing but his own pleasures—or, at best, seeking only the realisation of a purely subjective law—is a fiction which, logically, is as fatal to self-consciousness as it is to the consciousness of the objective world. The Berkeleian Idealism—if this view of the pure subjectivity of consciousness is to be attributed to Berkeley—rests on a confusion between the truth, that all objects are objects for a subject, and the error that the only possible objects are, or at least direct objects, for such a subject are its own states. The truth is that we are conscious of our own states as such only in distinction from, and in relation to, the objects to which we refer them; but neither these states nor anything else can be known except in relation to a subject….And a theory which speaks of inner experience as one thing and outer experience as another and totally different thing, might as well, to employ a homely illustration which Professor Ferrier was fond of using, speak of a stick with one end only. It is as absurd in the realm of spirit as in the realm of matter to suppose that we can have an inside without an outside, or an outside without an inside.” (Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 129-133) 

“Book II of [Stout’s God and Nature] continues with a criticism of Russell’s pluralism which Stout regards as based wholly on his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. To know about X, we must have prior knowledge of X. Description involves relations and universals. Acquaintance is with particulars. It is inexpressible and neither true nor false. These particulars, thus directly known, free from all relations, constitute Russell’s pluralistic universe. Stout attacks this epistemology effectively….There is no reason to suppose that the X we know by acquaintance is self-complete, for this presupposes without justification that we know its whole nature by acquaintance. From the fact that a relation is not part of a thing we cannot conclude that this thing could exist not so related. (Relation to the inside of something is not part of the surface, but the surface could not exist without the inside.) Knowledge by acquaintance, as Russell defines it, cannot be knowledge at all; for there can be no knowledge where nothing is known about the object and where there is no truth….Stout thinks that the same dangerous distinction between knowing X and knowing about X led Locke to his puzzles about substance.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 525) 

“The only solution for the difficulties both of Locke and Russell is to maintain that all knowledge of X is knowledge about X; and consequently that “X itself” is simply the group of its intrinsic characteristics united in a special form of unity. But this means all its characteristics. The problem then arises how we can claim to have direct awareness of X when we certainly do not know directly all the characteristics of X. It was Russell’s awareness of this problem which drove him to his views that the particulars we know by acquaintance are self-complete and are fully known by acquaintance. Such knowledge, he held, cannot include any knowledge of relations between characteristics which are immediately experienced and those that are not. Stout maintains on the contrary…that we can know a whole without knowing all its parts severally, that what we know directly is known in that very experience to be partial and incomplete, that in knowing some characteristics of X directly we know something about X as a whole, and that in knowing X as a whole we know something about the wider whole to which X belongs. In memory, for example, we have an immediate experience which points beyond itself to the past. The past is not immediately known, nor is it inferred.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 525-526) 

“Sensa are continuous with and akin to physical objects and are therefore material not mental in character. They are parts of matter but not parts of physical objects; they are the parts of matter directly presented to mind….Stout holds, in agreement with Berkeley and against Alexander and an early view of Moore, that no sensum could exist unperceived. For some sensa (organic) cannot exist unperceived and no line can easily be drawn between them and the others, especially if we accept Ward’s view that all sensa arise from differentiation of a relatively homogenous presentational-continuum. All sensa then are mind-dependent. But sensa are parts of matter, so matter is mind-dependent also. (This conclusion is fortified by the argument of Mind and Matter that mind cannot be matter-dependent but can be derived only from mind).” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 529) 

“The last sections of [Stout’s God and Nature] argue that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe. This is argued first in connection with cognition. The unity of the mind in knowing presupposes the systematic unity of the universe known. This Kantian argument is combined…with the non-Kantian view that the knowing mind does not determine the structure of what is known. The argument is that ignorance is always partial. What we do not know we always to some extent do know as connected with what we know already. If there were two experiences between which there could be no knowable relation this would be equivalent to saying the two experiences must belong to different minds. For experience to be related, their objects must be related too. If I were aware of two universes between which there were no intelligible relations, I should not be a single cognitive self….Thus, for me to have achieved a (relatively) unified cognitive self I must know a (partially) unified universe. And so far as my ignorance itself is, as it must be, the partial awareness of other conditions intelligibly linked with what I know already, I have (potentially) a fully unified cognitive mind, but this potentiality presupposes a fully unified universe.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 533) 

“Knowing and being then are essentially and inseparably united aspects of the whole universe. [Stout is here, I think, converting the proposition, which he has so far proved, that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe, and suggesting that the unity of the universe implies a single universal mind. But this conversion is undefended.] It follows that there must always have been knowing minds or mind.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 534) 

Fragmentary Notes §19—§25

§19

All the rays of conscious activity emanate from a lone, aperspectival locus, an apperceptive unity, a kernel of self-determining and self-bestowing meaning, a being who is inclusive of all that is lived and known; this is the “I”—the knowing Subject—that being for whom, and to whom, all is Object.

§20

A fragmented, makeshift patchwork of discrete and discontinuous atomic qualities is not to be found in Experience. Indeed, a genuine pluralism is, strictly speaking, inconceivable—to think of Many is to think of Many-in-and-for-One. Just as a single, lone sound is heard from the moment of birth and rounds off at the time of death, so too is there but One Experience—the World of Experience. This sound, like Experience, may flicker and oscillate in tone, quality, shape, and definition, but its permanent essence remains invariant and One.

§21

Being is but the ribbons of feeling that dance on the winds of knowledge.

§22

All lies before the silent, stationary, and eternal “I”. The “I” cannot be brought into the light of consciousness, for it constitutes the limit of consciousness.

§23

Experience is immaterial, and Consciousness is immaterial activity poured out in time.  

§24

In the act of self-reflection, the one “I” becomes acquainted with the sublimity of its inner sense—that scrolling canvas which collects the showers of colored-meanings bestowed upon it in and through the gaze of the knowing Subject, the “I”.  The inner sense is a sandy beach which memorializes each unique bead of rain with an ephemeral crater, only to be filled again by the tide’s mighty arm—a crashing wing whose foaming feathers sweep the shoreline and prepare the canvas to be mottled anew with heaven’s tears.

§25

The present is a durationless sliver wedged in the heart of Being, crushed between the arms of eternity. The present is a rocky islet whose towering spire emerges from the roaring waves of ceaseless change and punctures the static vault of heaven.  Stretching into the infinite past and infinite future, the wings of time shelter the whole of Being.  If one were to climb that lone, crumbling mound, and reach its misty peak, one would find the “I”. However, the “I” cannot be seen, for it sees everything; the “I” cannot be heard, for it hears everything; the “I” cannot be known, for it knows everything. Apart from this seeing, hearing, and knowing being—there is nothing.¹

Reading Notes: December 20th, 2021

“Ultimate reality [is that] into which all else can be resolved and which cannot itself be resolved into anything beyond, that in terms of which all else can be expressed and which cannot itself be expressed in terms of anything outside itself.” (Haldane, The Pathway to Reality, 19) 

“If Idealism is to be a tenable theory at all, it must endeavor to show that Reason underlies the objective world, not by imagining the self to direct its activity upon a hypothetical manifold of sense, but by demonstrating the fundamental laws of Nature to be nothing but thought-forms or categories of mind. It must exhibit the inter-connection of these categories and trace them up to the highest principle, viz., Absolute Self-Consciousness.” (Haldar, Green and his Critics, 172) 

“Nature, as we know it, cannot exist unless it is related to mind, but this mind cannot be our finite mind, because the finite mind itself has a gradual growth in time and as such requires explanation. If Nature is not the creation of any finite mind, and if it cannot be conceived as unrelated to intelligence, it must be regarded as the object of divine thought.” (Haldar, Green and his Critics, 173) 

“Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product of nature?....We may have admitted most unreservedly that all the so-called functions of the soul are materially conditioned, but the question how there come to be for us those objects of consciousness, called matter and motion, on which we suppose the operations of sense and desire and thought to be dependent, will still remain to be answered. If it could be admitted that matter and motion had an existence in themselves, or otherwise than as related to a consciousness, it would still not be by such matter and motion, but by the matter and motion which we know, that the functions of the soul, or anything else, can for us be explained. Nothing can be known by help of reference to the unknown. But matter and motion, just so far as known, consist in, or are determined by, relations between the objects of that connected consciousness we call experience.” (Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Ch. I, §9) 

“Miss Calkins, who has given lately a brilliant and, I believe, unanswerable defense of idealism [cf. “The Idealist to the Realist,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. VIII., p. 449], considers that a hypothetical unknown, an extra-consciousness reality, is utterly negligible.” (Ladd-Franklin, The Foundations of Philosophy Explicit Primitives, 711)

Reading Notes: December 18th, 2021

“The [objective component of experience is the] component of the not-self within my center of experience on which I especially concentrate my attention in doing so….When I see an object, the objective component, the relevant given part of the not-self, possesses shape and color, and perhaps “suggested” qualities such as a degree of felt warmth or coolness. Likewise, it normally possesses as part of its inherent character qualities pertaining to the thing’s recognized or actualized use value and its cultural significance….The given shape of what lies within experience is essentially perspectival, [and] depend[s] upon the position of the perceiver….And, of course, there are all the facts about the way in which the sensible character of the objective component of experience depends, as very little learning shows us, on the…varying states of [ourselves].The aesthetic aspect of every form and quality of the objective component, the perspectival character of every shape found there, and the manner in which the particular uses we envisage or utilize in the thing bite into every aspect of the given object’s inherent being, all make nonsense of the idea that anything resembling it in anything but the most abstract of ways could exist outside consciousness. These facts make nonsense too of the more naïve kind of representational realism according to which the objective component is a close likeness of the thing we perceive by way of it. Naïve realism is incoherent, then, so long as it includes the idea that the thing perceived has, or could have, a being outside all consciousness.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 42-44) 

“If the material thing is a concrete universal, there must be a particular type of concrete relation which links its instances, and there must be an abstract universal present in these instances thus concretely related….Roughly speaking, the concrete relations are a matter of the way in which the whole set of present versions of the material thing have been generated by a previous such set to the shared character of which the present shared character is peculiarly due, and the way in which this present set’s shared character is in process of determining the shared character of the set to follow. That a certain set of perspectival versions of a physical thing are instances of one single physical thing as it is at a moment turns on their being different determinations of a certain common character (that common character which qua being exemplified by them is the thing at that moment), on their occurring within actual or possible sensory fields which are likewise different determinations of a certain common character (that of the environment) and on their having been generated by, and themselves being in process of generating, a further set of perspectival variants on a common theme having a qualitative continuity with their common theme such that these momentary common themes are themselves variations on a still more generic common theme which passes through these variations with a certain lawfulness. Putting it more loosely still, and treating the various perspectival versions as continuants in their own right, we might say that they are different perspectival versions of the same thing because they all shift their character together.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 70-71) 

“The claim that the different perspectival versions of a thing are instances of a single abstract universal, concretized by this set, may seem to exaggerate the element of identity in their character. But I think the identity is usually much greater than we may be inclined to recognize in the abstract, and that even where it is lacking, they are still susceptible of interpretation as adumbrations of perspectives which really would be variations on the identical. The extent to which one’s different perspectival presentations of an object possess characters which are as genuinely alternative specifications of an identical generic form of being as are the different sorts of triangularity, the different shades of red, or the character of different performances of (say) Beethoven's fifth symphony, increases with one’s growing knowledge of the object or its type. The fully common theme is a kind of ideal towards which our varied experiences of the same object move as our knowledge qualifies the immediate quality of the presented version by a sense of how the thing would appear from different perspectives on it...” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 71) 

“The material object in its fullness…is the common theme, the concretized abstract universal, which would be present to such an idea observer. His various “presentations” of the object would be particulars actualizing specific or determinate versions of that abstract universal….The presentation, without being a concrete universal in our present sense, is, none the less, that universal which is its total character tied down to a particular locus. In such a situation, the material object would be literally an immanent component with the center of experience, since…a universal is there wherever it is actualized. On the other hand, its ability to be different from itself in different versions is explained as a case of the general fact that a generic universal is wholly and identically there in each actualized differentiation of itself, but as different from itself in another.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 72-73) 

“Since we do not normally or ever perceive objects with the kind of maximal knowledge of our ideal observer, it seems that what is present of the object, qua concrete universal, in our consciousness is some universal which can function as adumbration of the total universal theme, which, as concretized, is the thing perceived itself. That can be expressed properly, and in a way suggestive of how we ordinarily think ourselves related to the real thing, by saying that this real material thing is present in our consciousness in a manner less than completely full, via an adumbration of it. That it is that actualized form of being rather than another of which it is the adumbration, consists partly in the intrinsic way in which that would be its fulfilment of its own nature, and partly in the fact that it is that which would enter our consciousness in its full being if appropriate enquiry, triggered by that adumbrating form, and continuing through harmoniously enriching presentations developing the theme vaguely suggested, and without kinaesthesias as of travel away therefrom, reached some ideal terminus. Thus, as we come to know an object better, our perceptual awareness of it involves direction on a component of experience in which it is more and more fully present.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 73-74) 

“[The identity theory holds] that every state and element of consciousness is, in truth, synthetically identical with some element, state or process in the brain….The crucial thing, of course, on which the identity theorists insists is that A and B may be identical, although the expressions “A” and “B” may single them out in such different ways that it is an empirical discovery that they are so. We may have known of the existence of something answering to each expression without knowing that we are dealing with the same thing in each case, or have known of the existence of something answering to the first expression without realising that there was such a very different way of specifying that same thing as is represented by the other expression. We have the old example of the morning and evening star, and more significant examples such as that of the identity of a lightning flash with a certain discharge of electrons. In every version of the identity theory proper, it is contended that every particular mental event is identical with some particular brain event….We must never allow ourselves to think of identity as some kind of correlation between two closely related things….[Identity theorists] base their position, in effect, upon the possibility, which certainly exists, of one and the same thing answering to two different definite descriptions, not equivalent in meaning to each other. The placing of a sign of identity between the two such descriptions, or between singular terms which refer in virtue of the satisfaction of these descriptions by their referents, will produce a synthetic identity truth. There is also, perhaps, the possibility of a synthetic identity truth where there is a label, like what used to be called a logically proper name, on the one side, and a definite description, or singular term of the kind just indicated, on the other.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 97-98)

Reading Notes: December 16th, 2021

“One of the most important and fundamental elements in the Objectivist philosophy is the concept of man as a being of volitional consciousness….The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not….Psychological determinism denies the existence of any element of freedom or volition in man’s consciousness.” (Rand and Branden, “The Contradiction of Determinism,” The Objectivist Newsletter, May, 1963)  

“Every state of consciousness involves two fundamental attributes: the content (or object) of awareness, and the action (or process) of consciousness in regard to that content.” (Rand and Branden, “The Contradiction of Determinism,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January, 1963) 

“There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind.” (Rand, “Aristotle,” The Objectivist Newsletter, May, 1963) 

“Man’s soul or spirit is his consciousness; the motor of his consciousness is reason; deprive him of freedom, i.e., the right to use his mind—and what is left of him is only a physical body, ready to be manipulated by the strings of any tribe.” (Rand, “Requiem for Man (Part III),” The Objectivist, Sept 1967) 

“Now the deepest thing Objectivism has in common with Aristotle—and it has many things in common—is this: Aristotle was the first to grasp what most people still do not, namely, that everything that exists is a specific, concrete entity, or an aspect of one, such as an action of an entity, an attribute of an entity, a relationship it bears, etc. But the base of everything is an entity—not an idea or abstraction.” (Rand, The Art of Non-Fiction, 28) 

“By existence, I mean objective reality, i.e., that which can be perceived by a human consciousness. That which exists in your own mind is only a state of consciousness.” (Rand, The Art of Non-Fiction, 73)  

“Objectivists are not dualists in the Platonic definition [of dualism], of two worlds opposed to each other; but that does not make us monists either—monist, meaning, that there is only one entity, and that everything has to be subsumed under that one entity. For instance, “everything is matter”—that’s materialism—“consciousness is an illusion.” Or, “everything is consciousness, therefore matter is just a content of consciousness”—that’s the idealists. Both of those are wrong because the perceivable facts are: there is matter, and there is the faculty of perceiving it. [These facts] are what you get by extrospection and what you get by introspection. Now, you can call that dualism—there’s two [kinds], but they’re integrated in living organisms, they’re not opposed to each other. They obviously have different characteristics. You can drop a ball, like Galileo did, and gravity will pull it down; but you can’t drop your mind. A consciousness of a certain level can introspect; but a stone cannot. I mean, you have a huge list of different attributes, so you cannot subsume one under the other and say that it doesn’t exist. And one of the attributes of consciousness is free will.” (Peikoff, The Peikoff Podcasts, Oct 27th, 2008) 

Reading Notes: December 15th, 2021

“Absolute idealism lays it down as fundamental that there is but one order of reality—an order which presents everywhere a twofold aspect, that of subject and object. Its essential character is to be “experience”; and it may be viewed alternatively as objects experienced or as the experience of a subject. The two aspects are inseparable. The subject is nothing without an object: if we endeavor to conceive it, our idea is reached in virtue of an unreal and illegitimate abstraction. For the subject in experience is simply a term of a relation: and we cannot have one term of a relation without the other. Similarly, there can be no objects without an experiencing subject: for they too are what they are as related. As to the nature of this reality we should err if we said that it is purely mental. Such a statement would imply a distinction between the order of being and the order of knowing. Knowing and being are one. We must accept reality, in which both these aspects are present, as ultimate, when we have proved and purged it by the dialectic reason. It is idle to attempt to refer it to any order other than itself. Indeed, the very name idealism may mislead, insofar as it is taken to suggest some such theory as Berkeley’s, according to which our experience, being limited to ideas alone, is not in contact with the real.”  (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 492-493) 

“Moreover, reality is one. It is inconceivable that the world of experience should present ultimate differences. The fact that all parts of reality fall within experience shows that they are interrelated: and things which are related to each other constitute of necessity a single system—a unity. This unity should be conceived after the analogy of a living organism. Where unity is less than this, it is not a veritable unity, but presupposes independent and separate entities brought into artificial connection by an external agent. Yet in regard of reality the idea of an external agent, such for instance as God, is out of the question. For the unity which forms the real order must itself include that ultimate reality which is the source of the manifold of experience, and which we term the Absolute or God. For the Absolute is not unrelated to the manifold; but, as we have just said, is its source. It is the One which the mind postulates as the explanation of the many. And again, the principle which gives unity to a manifold must of necessity be of it and not outside it.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 493) 

“This conclusion that reality is a single organism inclusive of the Absolute which is its ultimate Ground, is also established by an argument of different character. As soon as we philosophize on the data of experience, we find ourselves involved in insoluble contradictions. Those fundamental notions which meet us upon the very threshold of philosophical enquiry—unity, multiplicity, identity, diversity, cause and effect, time and space, etc., etc.—are seen to lead up to contradictory conclusions. We are driven to the conviction that our knowledge is of appearances only, and that human reason is debarred from knowing reality as it is. Yet on the other hand we are no less convinced that our knowledge is true. It is the very presupposition of our enquiry that our minds are capable of truth: and without this belief it would be idle to reason at all. The only means of reconciling these opposite convictions is to admit that ultimate truth can only be attained when the knowledge of the whole is reached. It is here as with the knowledge of an organ of a body. If we consider it apart from the whole organism of which it is a member, our conclusions, however carefully formed, are incomplete and erroneous. Only when we know it in relation to the whole of which it is part, do we arrive at the real truth regarding it. The same holds good of reality.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 493-494) 

“Our best knowledge is provisional and partial: it is a stepping-stone only, and will require revision as we gain further and further experience. It is not truth, but truth mingled with error. For what is truth? The old explanation that truth lies in correspondence of the notion with the reality is meaningless. If, as has been argued, there are not two orders—knowing and being—but only one, there can be no question of correspondence. Truth lies in the coherence of knowledge. When knowledge reaches its final term, and all its parts are integrated into a consistent whole, then we shall have truth in the full sense of the term. At present we can do no more than, at each successive advance into the real, bring into a coherent system the data which we possess. It is truth now—provisionally so. But a higher truth lies behind it—the truth of the Absolute. And we must anticipate that little by little our truth will be sublimated by approaching nearer and nearer to this ideal of entire and final truth—an ideal never to be fully attained.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 494-495) 

“This explanation must not lead us to suppose that there is an Absolute Mind whose experience constitutes reality, so that we attain to truth in so far as we grow to share His experience, while our knowledge falls short of truth in so far as it is different from it. We have no ground for asserting the existence of any self-consciousness other than human. We are not set over against the Absolute: we are ourselves the Absolute as self-conscious. The experience which is reality becomes self-conscious experience in us. Hence minds should not be regarded as substances: they are “adjectival” to reality, which is the only veritable substance. The status of independent and self-contained units which we are disposed to attribute to ourselves, is not really ours. Our independence is but relative: and we are not complete units. Indeed, it would be more in accordance with fact to speak of Mind than to employ the plural and speak of minds. The latter mode of expression inevitably suggests the false idea of independent agents.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 495-496) 

“Nor again must we conceive that there is an objective reality prior to the activity of our minds and independent of it. This would involve the supposition of an experiencing subject other than conscious. Reality is what it is for our experience, and beyond our human experience it is not. Knowledge and reality advance pari passu. As our knowledge goes forward along some hitherto untrodden path, so does reality widen its area. Nor do we thus open the door to any arbitrary action on the part of thought. The advance takes place along definite lines. It is an evolution of reality in accordance with its inner nature.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 496) 

“The distinction between reality and the discursive movement of the intellect appears to me to be for us a distinction within the intellectual world.” (Bosanquet, Knowledge and Reality, 19) 

“We always refer to an “I” in our experience, and therefore to a subject not less than to an object, and subject and object are neither properly separable nor mutually exclusive facts. The subject is the expression of experience in its quality of being foundational, as it is in the judgments we make and refer back to the self which judges. Our experience regarded on its subject side, as the experience of self, is approached through the instrumentality of conceptions which are appropriate only to a stage in reflection different from that at which the object-world is treated as self-subsisting. We can, and in daily life for many purposes do, think of the self as a thing, a body clothed with an infinity of properties and relationships, in fine as if it were a substance in space and time resembling other substances But it is not the less, when we follow out more fully what its nature implies, subject as much as it is object, and the more we abstract from the characteristics with which its objective form invests it, the more nearly does it present itself for reflection as a center, not itself situated somewhere in space and time, but to which space and time are referred; as the “here” and “now” in distinction from the “there” and “then.” But these expressions stand, not for points in an absolute framework of space and time, but for universals with the identity of conception that characterises universals whoever may express them. The characteristic of the center is therefore a reference back to thought, and this takes us straight to the focal point in knowledge, that activity of the self….The conception of subject, if followed out, becomes more than a mere point or focus of reference for activities or events in space and time. Space and time are for it; they require the implication of a subject reflecting for which they are conceived as its own facts before we can attach meaning to the words.”(Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 197-198) 

“We saw that the principles of degrees implies the view that knowledge is foundational in the sense of being all-comprehending, the first as well as the last within mind itself. It must therefore be that in which exists self-developed the entire hierarchy of degrees, within mind and within the reality which has no existence apart from it. We also saw that not only has the universe no meaning apart from such foundational mind, but that even the distinction between subject and object is mind’s own creation and falls within it….We may thus speak of such foundational knowledge as the absolute of which we are in search…” (Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 387) 

“Mind is foundational to reality in all its forms. Not a mind, for to speak of a mind is to treat knowledge as a mere instrument, as a particular thing, as something which might properly be interpreted through the conception of substance. But that conception and every other form of the actual and the ideal, alike fall within knowledge. Its distinctions are those that itself it makes. Subject and object, conception and feeling, thinking and willing, these all arise as of separate characters only in virtue of differences which the activity that is of the essence of reflection establishes. Outside knowledge, interpreted in this larger significance, we cannot get….The distinctions which we make between the mediate and the immediate contents of our consciousness, the fashion in which by abstraction we define and separate out our standpoints and the conceptions that belong to them, the contrasts we establish between the relative and what we take to be absolute, are all of them the outcome of the purposes we pursue in arranging our results in forms which by reason of our finitude we seek in order to give them distinctness. Abstraction as the outcome of concentration on particular ends is everywhere present. Now it is just this kind of distinction and division that must be regarded as no longer final in knowledge as foundational to reality. That such distinctions and divisions must be assumed as in a degree preserved in even knowledge at this level, the knowledge which is both last and first, and has all its purposes as part of and within it own nature, seems clear. For they are the creations and outcome of that knowledge, although their emphasis is due to the finite forms it gives itself.” (Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 394-395) 

“Within [mind] all abstractions fall, for out of the activity of mind they all proceed. It is therefore the most concrete in the hierarchy, for nothing even appears to fall outside it, except in virtue of some distortion. It is no instrument that can be taken up or laid down, or subjected to outside scrutiny. For the taking up and the laying down, and the very scrutiny and the testing of the truth thereby, are its own act and assume its validity. It must therefore study itself, not from without but from within, in its awareness of its own working, in its consciousness of itself.” (Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 397-398) 

“Find any piece of existence, take up anything that anyone could possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being, and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. Try to discover any sense in which you can still continue to speak of it, when all perception and feeling have been removed; or point out any fragment of its matter, any aspect of its being, which is not derived from and is not still relative to this source. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. And as I cannot try to think of it without realising either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced, I am driven to the conclusion that for me experience is the same as reality. The fact that falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. It is a vicious abstraction whose existence is meaningless nonsense, and is therefore not possible.” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 145) 

“This argument is unanswerable, and yet it proves nothing…For Mr. Bradley requires us to “find,” “take up,” “assert,” that is, to possess as experience, what, at the same time, must not be experience. It is impossible to do so; but that tells us nothing as to the nature of experience….That we cannot go beyond experience, that “we can conceive only the experienced,” does not…throw any light whatsoever upon its constitution. Neither does the fact that “nothing remains when all perception and feeling are removed” prove that nothing exists except perception and feeling. It is an old fallacy, exposed by Mr. Bradley himself, to conclude that because the removal of one element in a whole destroys the whole, therefore that one element is the whole….Neither of these arguments proves that “reality is experience”; or that it consists, on both its subjective and objective aspects, of feelings, thought, or volitions. They show that the object is relative to the subject, and that subject and object are indiscerptible elements of experience; but not that they are so indistinguishably one that knowledge knows knowledge, feeling feels feelings, volition wills volitions.” (Jones, The Working Faith of the Social Reformer, 559-560) 

“If we take all reality, for the sake of convenience, as limited to three individuals, A, B, and C, and suppose them to be conscious, then the whole will be reproduced in each of them. A will, as conscious, be aware of himself, of B, and of C, and of the unity which joins them in a system. And thus the unity is within each individual. At the same time, the unity is not in the individuals as isolated. For the whole point of saying that the unity is for A, is that it exists both out of him and in him….All the meaning we gave to the expression that A was for B was that the content of the one was also the content of the other. If A and B are different, this means something. But if A and B are identical, then it would only mean that a thing’s content was its content…a useless tautology.” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 150- 153) 

“Lotze, also, holds the view that the differentiations of the Absolute cannot be conceived except as conscious beings. His reason, indeed, for this conclusion is that only conscious beings could give the necessary combination of unity with change [cf. Mikrokosmus, §96]…” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 158) 

“Reality is a differentiated unity, in which the unity has no meaning but the differentiations, and the differentiations have no meaning but the unity. The differentiations are individuals for each of whom the unity exists, and whose whole nature consists in the fact that the unity is for them, as the whole nature of the unity consists in the fact that it is for the individuals. And, finally, in this harmony between the unity and the individuals neither side is subordinated to the other, but the harmony is an immediate and ultimate fact.” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 170) 

“Experience can be analyzed into two abstract, and therefore imperfect, moments—the immediate centers of differentiation and the relations which unite and mediate them….The view of the dialectic…accepts both elements as real, but asserts that neither has any separate reality, because each is only a moment of the true reality. Reality consists of immediate centers which are mediated by relations. The imperfection of language compels us to state this proposition in a form which suggests that the immediacy and the mediator are different realities which only influence one another externally. But this is not the case. They are only two sides of the same reality. And thus we are entitled to say that the whole nature of the centers is to be found in their relations. But we are none the less entitled to say that the whole nature of the relations is to be found in the centers.” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 174) 

“That A’s nature should consist in recognizing B’s nature, would present no difficulties, if B had an independent nature of its own. But if B’s nature consisted merely in recognizing A’s nature, it is not very easy to see how either of them can have any nature at all. Nor is the matter improved by the increase of the number of individuals….If the nature of everything consists simply in reflecting others, what is there to be reflected?” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 175) 

“A mere isolated reaction or occurrence in consciousness. It would be a mere instant of feeling; and though we may suppose a hundred such instants, each is alone and blindly self-centered. Sentient life, if we keep the unifying vehicle of consciousness out of view, would be a mere series of pulses, each pulse being unaware of the others. In Kant’s words, perceptions without conceptions are blind. The spark of fire which runs along the line of sensations and sets them in a blaze; the string which gathers the single beads into a necklace; the glass which collects the beams of sentient life into one focus,—is what we call intellect. Synthetic unity is the one function of thought—the one architectonic idea which lays sense-brick to sense-brick, and builds the house of knowledge.” (Wallace, Kant, 165) 

“Between the perceptions as such, there is no connexion; they are distinct and independent existences. They only get a connexion through our feeling; we feel a “determination” of our thought to pass from one to another. The one impression has no power to produce the other; the one thing does not cause the other. “We never have any impression that contains any power or efficacy,” Hence the power and necessity we attribute to the so-called causal agent and to the connexion are an illegitimate transference from our feeling, and a mistranslation of our incapacity to resist the force of habitual association into a real bond between the two impressions themselves, The necessity is in the mind—as a habit-caused compulsion—not in the objects.” (Wallace, Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy, 95) 

“The general Significance of the world, and the definite sense of its particulars, is something of which we are conscious within our perceiving, representing, thinking, valuing life, and therefore something “constituted” in some subjective genesis….We have to recognize that Relativity to Consciousness is not only an actual quality of our world, but, from eidetic necessity, the quality of every conceivable world. We may, in a free fancy, vary our actual world, and transmute it to any other which we can imagine, but we are obliged with the world to vary ourselves also, and ourselves we cannot vary except within the limits prescribed to us by the nature of Subjectivity. Change worlds as we may, each must ever be a world such as we could experience, prove upon the evidence of our theories, and inhabit with our practice.” (Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology, 189-190)

Reading Notes: December 13th, 2021

“It is assumed that all illusion arises from the relation of things to us, and that, when we know things in themselves, there can be no illusion. But if there is always illusion in the relation of things to us, then there is no possible way to detect and measure the illusion. For we find out illusion by comparing our conceptions with those of others, or by repeated observations. But we can never contrast the object as related to us with the object apart from all relations to our consciousness….An object apart from all relations to us would be absolutely unknowable. It is non-existent for us. We, then, know things in their relation to us and to one another. And the fact that we so know them is no discredit to our knowledge….Things apart from all relation to us are absolutely unknowable for us, and it is mere dogmatic assumption to say that they exist at all.” (Keirstead, Metaphysical Presuppositions of Ritschl, 686) 

“For if we speak of an object as absolutely unrelated, both to other objects and to our sense and intelligence, we are talking nonsense; for such an object is inaccessible to us….Things are made of such stuff as thoughts are. They are thought-constructs and represent modes of action. Thought itself arises in experience when a habit is broken, to form a new method or habit of action. From the intellectual point of view, the thing is a concept; from the practical, it is a more or less fixed mode of action….There is but one test to the reality of a thing, and that test is its function.” (Keirstead, Metaphysical Presuppositions of Ritschl, 688-718) 

“Ritschl teaches the doctrine of subjective idealism. And this doctrine fails to explain (a) the origin of sensation,(b) why just these qualities and not others are united in the concept of a thing, (c) why others experience the same unities as I, and (d) why I am justified in supposing that other persons beside myself exist at all. Subjective idealism always leads to realism, but seldom in so naïve a manner as in Ritschl. For in the same proposition in which he tells us that a thing is a product of the faculty of presentation, he makes the thing at the same time the cause of sensations. Here we have in one sentence subjective idealism and naive realism, with the contradiction that the thing is at the same time both cause and product.” (Keirstead, Metaphysical Presuppositions of Ritschl, 709) 

“When Pfleiderer, however, asks for the origin of sensations, he is asking for an explanation of consciousness. But this is an impossible demand. We cannot go behind consciousness. The category of causation cannot be carried beyond experience.” (Keirstead, Metaphysical Presuppositions of Ritschl, 711)

Reading Notes: December 11th, 2021

“Reality is a differentiated unity, in which the unity has no meaning but the differentiations, and the differentiations have no meaning but the unity. The differentiations are individuals for each of whom the unity exists, and whose whole nature consists in the fact that the unity is for them, as the whole nature of the unity consists in the fact that it is for the individuals. And, finally, in this harmony between the unity and the individuals neither side is subordinated to the other, but the harmony is an immediate and ultimate fact….It still remains true that it is that particular relation of which the only example known to us is consciousness.” (McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 21) 

“If I am to distinguish myself from any other reality, then, obviously, I must be conscious of this other reality. But how can I be conscious of it without it being in me? If the objects of consciousness were outside me, they would make no difference to my internal state, and, therefore, I should not be conscious of them. And, also, if they were outside me, I should not exist. For the pure I, though doubtless an essential moment of the self; is only a moment, and cannot stand alone. If we withdraw from it all its content—the objects of cognition and volition—it would be a mere abstract nonentity….Thus the nature of the self is sufficiently paradoxical. What does it include? Everything of which it is conscious. What does it exclude? Equally—everything of which it is conscious. What can it say is not inside it? Nothing. What can it say is not outside it? A single abstraction. And any attempt to remove the paradox destroys the self….its content is both in and outside it. By the very act of knowledge it at once accepts the content as part of itself, and repels it as an independent reality. And thus no limits can be put to the self. For if we exclude whatever is not self, the self shrinks to a point, and vanishes altogether. On the other hand, if we include all that is self, it includes all of which we are conscious, and, in the ideal self, would include the whole of reality.” (McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 22-40) 

“When Socrates, in the immortal conversation at the house of Cephalus, defined the philosopher as the lover of the vision of the truth, he was describing, not the metaphysician, but the seer. For philosophy, in the more technical sense, differs from the mere love of wisdom; it is reasoned knowledge, not pure insight, and the philosophic lover of the vision must work out the blessed way to realized truth. With philosophy in this more restricted meaning of the term, a meaning which Plato and Aristotle fixed by adopting it, this chapter and this book will principally deal. Philosophy, once conceived as reasoning discipline, is not, however, completely defined. Thus regarded, philosophy is indeed distinguished, as reflective, from everyday experience which accepts or rejects but does not reflect on its object; and is distinguished, as theoretical, from art which creates but does not reason. In both these contrasts, however, philosophy resembles natural science, for that also reflects and reasons. The really important problem of the definition of philosophy is consequently this: to distinguish philosophy from natural science. Evidently, philosophy differs from science negatively in so far as, unlike science, it does not seek and classify facts, but rather takes its materials ready-made from the sciences, simply reasoning about them and from them. But if this constituted the only contrast, then philosophy would be a part, merely, of science, not a distinct discipline. For science does not stop at observation, though it begins with it; in truth, science as well as philosophy reasons and explains. Philosophy, therefore, if conceived simply as the process of reasoning about scientific phenomena, would be merely the explanatory side of science. There are, however, in the view of most students, two important contrasts which hold between science and philosophy: philosophy must take as its object the utterly irreducible nature of some reality; and philosophy may take as its object the ultimate nature not only of a single fact or group of facts, but of all-that-there-is, “the ultimate reality into which all else can be resolved and which cannot itself be resolved into anything beyond, that in terms of which all else can be expressed and which cannot itself be expressed in terms of anything outside itself”. In both respects a natural science differs from philosophy. To begin with the character last named: philosophy, as has been said, may concern itself with the all-of-reality—and an adequate philosophy will certainly seek to discover the nature of the all-of-reality; a science, on the other hand, studies facts of one order only, that is, it analyzes merely a limited group of phenomena. Again, philosophy, whatever its scope, always concerns itself with the irreducible nature of some reality; whereas a science does not properly raise the question whether these, its phenomena, are in the end reducible to those of another order.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 3-4) 

“These distinctions may be readily illustrated. The physiologist, for example, does not inquire whether or not the limited object of his study, the living cell, is in its fundamental nature a physical or a psychical phenomenon—whether, in other words, protoplasm reduces, on the one hand, to physical energy, or, on the other hand, to consciousness. On the contrary, the physiologist, properly unconcerned about the completeness or about the utter irreducibleness of his object, confines himself to analysis within arbitrary limits of his living cells, leaving to the philosopher the questions: What is the real nature of these psychical and these physical processes? Is reality ultimately split into psychical and physical? Is the division a final one, or is the psychical reducible to the physical? Is thought a function of brain activity? Or, finally, is the physical itself reducible to the psychical; that is, is matter a manifestation of conscious spirit? More than this, the physicist links fact with fact, the rising temperature with the increased friction, the spark with the electric contact. The philosopher, on the other hand, if he takes the largest view of his calling, seeks the connection of each fact or group of facts—each limited portion of reality—with the adequate and complete reality. His question is not, “How does one fact explain another fact?” but “How does each fact fit into the scheme as a whole?”. Both characters of the object of philosophy are indicated by the epithet “ultimate,” of which frequent use is made in this book. Because the object of philosophy is entirely irreducible and because the object of philosophy may be the all-of-reality—for both these reasons, it is often called ultimate and is contrasted with the proximate realities of natural science. It is ultimate because it is utterly irreducible and is not a mere manifestation of a deeper reality; it is ultimate, also, in so far as there is nothing beyond it, in so far, that is, as it includes all that exists. It follows, from the utter irreducibleness and from the absolute completeness which an adequate philosophy sets before itself, that philosophy is rather a search, a pursuit, an endeavor, than an achievement….All these characters assigned to philosophy may finally be gathered up into one definition: Philosophy is the attempt to discover by reasoning the utterly irreducible nature of anything; and philosophy, in its most adequate form, seeks the ultimate nature of all-that-there-is.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 4-6)

“Causality is not an external relation—that is, a relation existing independently of consciousness….Now, if causality be mental, the facts connected by causality must be mental facts; in other words, the causal relation, being through and through mental, cannot extend beyond mind….If causality is a purely mental connection, it surely cannot be a bridge between the mental and the non-mental....Objects inferred to exist are…none the less objects of consciousness, objects “present to the mind.” But nothing which is present to the mind can possess an existence independent of mind. It is then a contradiction in terms to teach that the mind must infer (whatever be the principle of inference) the existence of external objects; for it is the nature of such objects to be independent of consciousness….Descartes and the other dualists had taught that matter, namely, reality independent of consciousness, must exist as cause of our perceptions. In reply to this…causality is a relation within consciousness and consequently cannot assure us of the reality of anything outside consciousness; and second, whatever the basis of the inference, inferred objects must be known objects, objects present to the mind, and cannot therefore be possessed of independent existence….Causality is no character or relation of things independent of consciousness, and that, on the contrary, causality is a transition of the mind, a mental connection…this mental transition [is] “thought”….Unity and causality are mental activities, ways in which we think.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 170-219) 

“If anything exists besides itself, then any limited reality is necessarily related to this other reality by relations of comparison and dependence. And now…my consciousness of my own limitation is a direct witness to the existence of more than one reality. Thus, in knowing the limited reality as related to whatever else may exist, I know it as related, not only to an ideal other (or others), but to an actual other.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 374) 

“The Absolutist does not deny the existence of many reals, but merely asserts that the really many things are parts of one unique and all-including being and that the universe is one in a sense more fundamental than that in which it is many.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 442) 

“Relation does not lie in objects and cannot, so to speak, be borrowed from them by sense perception and so first be taken up into the understanding; on the other hand, connection is exclusively an achievement of the understanding.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B134) 

“There is no possible form of being which we can form a conception such that we can form a conception of its being actualized in some manner which is definitely non-psychical.  That is, with every possible form of being, though we may conceive it as actualized, without bringing its being experienced or otherwise into question, wherever we raise this question and try to conceive it either as actualized in a whole, or as a whole...which is experienced, or as actualized in detachment from any such whole...we find we can form a conception only of the first.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 127)

Reading Notes: December 9th, 2021

“Let us look at some of Moore’s main philosophical contributions. In his important essay “The Refutation of Idealism,” Moore undertook to prove that the main conclusion of idealism—that reality is spiritual or mental—can never be proved to be true by any idealistic argument. He maintains that every such argument must contain an essential premise which, under every non-tautological interpretation of it, is false. That premise is: To be is to be perceived (i.e., to be is to be the object of sensation or thought). Under certain interpretations, this premise, Moore shows, is self-contradictory. In all others, it is also false (but not self-contradictory). Hence the idealist conclusion can never be shown to be true.” (Turner, Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, 544) 

“We are only justified in attributing reality to an idea if reality is already present in the discovery of the idea….My real must already be given, in order that my idea may be found real….Reality can only be proved by the ontological argument; and conversely, the ontological argument can only be applied to reality. But in so far as reality dwells in Self, or Other Mind, or Nature, an ontological argument may be stated in proof of their existence. Thus, the Cartesian certitude may with greater validity be put into this form: I think myself, therefore I exist; or, I have an idea of Self, Self exists. For in thinking myself I find myself in experience and thus in living relation to that reality which experience presents.” (Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 313-314) 

“While from the assumption that two contradictory statements cannot both be true, it is possible, as we saw above, to launch at once upon the dialectic of idealism, the more common route is through the concept of the knowability of things. All conceptual dealing with the world assumes, so the argument runs, that knowledge is possible, and from the fact that knowledge is possible one may finally reach the conclusion that the outer world is in some sense a thought product or is “cast in the molds of thought.” Whatever be the force of this deduction better, known as the epistemological argument, it is mentioned in this connection only to remark that it is essentially the same as the objective reading of the principle of non-contradiction. If it be assumed that the detection of inherent contradiction is what is meant by inconceivability, then from the statement that the inconceivable is not true one may infer the obverted converse that the true is conceivable—which is to say that the world is amiable to thought, or that knowledge is possible.” (Van Riper, “Some Epistemological Premises” in Studies in Philosophy and Theology, 209) 

“If we had things on one side and thought on the other whose function it was to penetrate and know the things; and if thought apprehended or comprehended those things only in terms of ideas which were essentially the product and creatures of the thinking subject; and if in relation to each other these ideas were possessed of certain intrinsic qualities known as mutual compatibility or consistency, and contradiction, in virtue of which the mind could categorically permit or deny certain combinations of predicates from any real subject qua real, then, certainly, thought processes might at once be taken as a prototype for the philosophical understanding of the world. To be specific: The judgment “S is P” professes to describe a certain reality, “A,” which may or may not be named by the grammatical subject, “S.” The judgment “S is P” is either true or false of “A,” and it is evident that the ground of this relationship must be either “A” itself or something that may, without loss or gain or modification, be substituted for “A.” And so, if there are purely mental qualities of ideas—such as consistency and contradiction—that can of themselves to any degree mark the judgment as true or false then those qualities must be epistemological equivalents (in the sense that the one may legitimately and validly be substituted for the other) of some assignable properties of the reality in question, “A.” In so far that is to say, as the ideas “S” and “P” have about them inherently logical marks that determine to any extent the truth or falsity of the judgment “S is P” then to just that extent is “A” built on a framework of logical laws This would be the epistemological argument in an irrefragable form, since it would require as an alternative either the condemnation of knowledge as a whole (or at least of that part of it which is logical in character), or the acknowledgement of a Reality in which mental principles are structural.” (Van Riper, “Some Epistemological Premises” in Studies in Philosophy and Theology, 210-211) 

“Indeed, Professor Royce comes to the conclusion that error contributes to the epistemological enterprise only insofar as the fact of error can be shown to involve a basis of truth. A judgment is not true or false in general or in and of itself. It can be true or false only concerning some ideally designated object or other, and for it to be false in that necessarily teleological sense it must assume in particular the validity…of the reference by which its object is identified.” (Van Riper, “Some Epistemological Premises” in Studies in Philosophy and Theology, 241) 

“Does the possibility of knowledge mean that everything is ultimately knowable?....It is hard to see, if it be regarded as an epistemological necessity, how any limiting line is to be drawn. If the limitation were in the facts themselves, we could never know it any more than we could know a limit of space. Just as, in the latter case, we would be thinking back to a region (a space) in which there was no space, so in this case we would assume to know of strata in reality that could not be known. This would mean (1) that there were things so at parallax with our minds that our judgments could be neither correct nor mistaken concerning them, or else (2) merely that they were so constructed that our thought about them could not be valid concerning them. And either is obviously set aside by the familiar consideration that to know such a limit is already to transcend it.” (Van Riper, “Some Epistemological Premises” in Studies in Philosophy and Theology, 241-242) 

“Reality, according to the school to which Bowne belonged, is not definable in the terms and categories of mechanical physics, but in terms of consciousness. Moreover, consciousness is not a mere collection of passive and passing states, mere momentary and shifting ideas, as Hume had taught; consciousness, when adequately understood, can only be a conscious self, the permanent and independent subject of experience and of life. The universe is immaterial, conscious and personal in its constitution: this is the sweeping formula of personal idealism.” (Wilm, Bowne’s Philosophy, 10) 

“And when you come to the subject-object relation, the consequences are tremendous. Here, if anywhere, the relation must be strictly external if realism is to stand. That is to say, if you take the subject and object as your terms and knowing as your relation, knowing will not be grounded in the nature of either subject or object; subject and object alike will make no difference to knowing; though, if we take Dr. Moore’s reservation into account; knowing may make a difference to the terms. It may make a difference to the object, then, as well as to the subject. But this is just what cannot happen on a realist hypothesis; so that Dr. Moore’s reservation, which rested on the distinction between relations and relation properties, cannot in this case apply. Subject, object, and the relation of knowing, will be three hard, distinct, mutually repellent entities, and it is hard to see how, on the realist theory, they ever could have contrived to come together. Nor are you a bit better off if you take the form of this relation to be: the subject’s knowing-of-the-object, or (reduced to the simplest possible terms) contemplation-of-object, when, whatever mysterious relation “of” may be, it is equally indifferent to “contemplation” or to “object.”” (Sinclair, The New Idealism, 40) 

“On the other hand, once recognize that terms are sympathetic to their relations, once admit that it does make a difference to the object to be known and to the subject to know, and you have let in the thin end of the idealist’s wedge. If knowing is not grounded in the “nature” of the object, it will at least be grounded in a “relational property” of the object. And this can only mean that there is something in the object by reason of which it is known; it has a side by which knowing takes it. But this relational property, so far from being the only property of the object which is known, is precisely that property which is not known, since it is impossible to mark down the property in question and say it is this rather than that. And supposing all the properties of the object to be known except this one property which makes it known, each of those properties will have its own relational property as being one property of the object among others, but as something pertaining to or inherent in the object as a whole and in each one of its properties, and that is as good as saying we cannot think of it as a property at all, but as a relation grounded in the nature of its terms, which brings us straight to the idealist position that the nature of known things is to be known; in other words, that being known makes a difference to things. Or, you may knock out the term “nature,” as introducing an unnecessary complication, and say simply: the relation is grounded in the object, and the being of objects is to be known.” (Sinclair, The New Idealism, 41) 

“But modify the position in the interests of realism and say: Things are, and are such that they are known, draw a hard and fast line between the “are” and the “are such,” and you are landed, again, with an unknown thing-in-itself. Carry on the process with each of the “are-suchnesses,” and distinguish between their being and their “suchness,” and you are only multiplying things-in-themselves within things.” (Sinclair, The New Idealism, 41-42) 

“You can only avoid the conclusion by regarding consciousness as an empty transparency; and you are then faced with a difficulty. If consciousness is an empty transparency that makes no difference to its object, its objects, presumably, must make a difference to it. But it is hard to see how anything can make a difference to an empty transparency. Either objects are the content of consciousness or they are not. If they are, they cannot be said to be either outside or independent of consciousness. If they are not, consciousness remains an empty, meaningless transparency. Meaningless, because if it had meaning, its meaning must profoundly modify its objects. And if you contend that objects themselves have meaning, you must either distinguish between the meaning and the objects or not distinguish. If you do not distinguish, you have no business to take about meaning at all. (If meaning is to have any meaning, it must be distinguishable). If you then say, distinguishing, that objects have meaning for consciousness which they have not apart from it, you are again admitting that consciousness makes a difference to objects; consciousness will invade them at all points of meaning. If you simply say that consciousness adds its own meaning to the object, you are again carrying consciousness over into the objective world.” (Sinclair, The New Idealism, 42) 

“Let us now examine Professor Perry’s theory of value. He has made it very easy for us to classify him under one of our rubrics. Since he holds that “value is dependent on consciousness,” specifically on interest (for the unitary self of personalism is to him, discoverer of the “ego-centric predicament,” anathema) his seems obviously to be what we have called an impersonal, subjective, consciousness theory of value. Herewith a veto is interposed on an immediate investigation of Professor Perry’s theory of value; for if value be dependent on consciousness, it becomes of prime importance to know what is meant by consciousness….Professor Perry asserts that “the nature of mental action is discoverable neither by an analysis of mental contents nor by self-intuition;” for him, then, consciousness is neither awareness nor agency….[Perry] means by mind “only the peculiar way in which a living organism endowed with a central nervous system behaves.”….The subject is the activity of the organism, the object or content is the parts of the environment “selected” by that organic activity.” (Brightman, Neo-Realistic Theories of Value, 33-34) 

“Of the alliance between realism and behaviorism, Professor Perry is aware. American realists, he tells us, are in accord with behaviorism…the theory that means by mind “only the peculiar way in which a living organism endowed with a central nervous system behaves.” Taken literally, this means that mind is certain peculiarly organized motions of “matter” in space, and is nothing else. The old distinction of subject and object is reinterpreted. The subject is the activity of the organism, the object or content is the parts of the environment “selected” by that organic activity. Behaviorism has something in its favor, else it would not be so widely held….It employs the categories of biological science, which is now in the ascendency….[It] is important to emphasize the sharp line of distinction that must be drawn between extreme behaviorists and believers in consciousness. The failure to be conscious of the distinction is productive of much confusion in recent discussions. Behaviorism has rendered discussion peculiarly difficult; for whatever a behaviorist says must be taken in a Pickwickian sense. He uses the language of consciousness, but refers to the objects of biology. If his theory is correct, he is, of course, justified. But, justified or not, if he means by desire, for instance, a certain tendency or group of tendencies of a physical object, my body, to move in a particular way, he cannot intelligibly use the term in conversation with one who regards it as meaning conative consciousness. The two persons would simply talk past each other. It must gloomily be confessed that most contemporary philosophical discussion consists of a series of mutual misunderstandings; it is all but unprecedented to find a philosopher admitting that his critic has understood him. And lo!—perhaps we are even now misunderstanding Professor Perry and behaviorism.” (Brightman, Neo-Realistic Theories of Value, 34-35) 

“But Professor Perry's own solution remains true to behaviorism. Question: what is the unity of consciousness, the secret of mental action? Answer: it is not a conscious self that acts, nor is it the feeling of “intra-cephalic movements;” but it is “bodily action itself,” to which the question of whether it is “felt” or not is quite accidental and indifferent. “Feeling" still remains, as the last echo of a dying self, but it doesn't explain anything, is utterly unimportant and irrelevant to our understanding of mental unity. The mental unity in listening (to use Professor Perry’s illustration) is not a unity of consciousness, but a unity of bodily action, of “operation of a nervous system.” To this theory our author gives the name of “the immanence of consciousness." His explanation of that term strikes one as perhaps too metaphorical to be exact. It is, he tells us, the theory that “mind and the surrounding world interpenetrate and overlap as the university interpenetrates and overlaps the other systems and groupings from which its components are drawn.” How else than physically, we may inquire, does this occur? How can one, in short, with the best will in the world, avoid regarding this view as materialistic naturalism?” (Brightman, Neo-Realistic Theories of Value, 37-38) 

“The doctrine of “neutral entities” is a more thoroughgoing attempt to avoid naturalism in all its forms. This doctrine may be summarized as follows: If I analyze “consciousness” into elements (such as the quality “blue,” or hardness, or number), I find that I ascribe these same elements to physical nature, and to other minds. The elements of which the universe is made up are themselves neither distinctively “physical” nor distinctively “mental;” they are “neutral.” This theory does, it is true, avoid naturalism; it is dogmatic, not agnostic; metaphysical, not positivistic; and neutral, not materialistic. It attains this result by a double abstraction; for it abstracts not merely from reference to a subject, but also from reference to an object. It asserts “the indifference of the terms of experience not only to their subjective relations, but to their physical relations as well.” In themselves, the neutral entities have no “home,” are not “anywhere.” Each entity apparently exists as it is, eternally unchangeable, with a nature independent of and unaffected by the relations into which it may enter. This perhaps avoids some of the difficulties of naturalism; but whatever we may say of the logic by which this new [neutral stuff] is arrived at, we must say of the entities themselves that they defy conception in their unrelated, individual isolation. Even Professor Perry admits that the minimum cognoscibile may be a complex, that we cannot know any entity by itself, but only in relations. The ultimate neutral terms cannot then be conceived as they “really” are homeless, unrelated, unchangeable. Is this not ground for suspecting that we must regard them as abstractions rather than as reality? To attribute ontological reality to every abstraction arrived at by logical analysis is not merely a return to scholasticism, as it has been called; it is worse than scholasticism.” (Brightman, Neo-Realistic Theories of Value, 40-41) 

“Professor Perry seeks to build up an account of purpose, yet without any appeal to consciousness. He would not impute “causal efficiency to mental states”; he does not find it necessary “to believe that any mysterious psychic force is at work”; indeed, “to explain this process by a reference to what is commonly regarded as consciousness would be to commit the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius.”….Let us make explicit what [R.B. Perry’s] view of purpose means. A physiological organism (quite free from any obscure and mysterious conscious purposes, in the familiar sense) is controlled by something to be done that does not yet exist, or even by a generalized object that never could exist physically, and then both selects and consolidates the means of attaining this something by which it is to be controlled. In our author’s own words, action is “determined by its relation of prospective congruence with a controlling propensity.” One is tempted to inquire, Which language is more obscure: that which speaks of a conscious self as having ideas, forming plans of actions, making choices, or that which employs the terms just cited from Professor Perry and speaks of objects that do not exist in the physical environment as nevertheless stimulating my organism , which is a physical object?....In a moment of exceptional frankness, [Perry] confesses that so simple a purposive activity as looking for a pin “evidently requires an epistemological construction beyond the scope of a strictly physiological behaviorism.” We have found above that modern realism and behaviorism had concluded an alliance; they cried “Peace! Peace!” but there is no peace....Does it not seem more promising to return again to consciousness—yes, to personality itself?” (Brightman, Neo-Realistic Theories of Value, 44-45) 

“That Professor Spaulding is himself not satisfied with his account of consciousness is evidenced by numerous contradictions in his thought on the subject, contradictions that do honor to his love of truth and willingness to face the problems….His argument that, since there can be a relation between consciousness and its “elements” (and other “things”), consciousness itself cannot be merely a relation, not only concedes much to personalism, but also cuts deep into the external theory of relations. [Cf. The New Rationalism, p. 482. Spaulding is here on the verge of the truth that all terms and relations are relative to the purposes of some mind. But this would lead us back to personality as unitary substance, and the forbidden “ego-centric predicament”].” (Brightman, Neo-Realistic Theories of Value, 50-51) 

“The following series of considerations will show some of the grounds for confidence in the personalistic synthesis as opposed to the realistic theories that we have been considering. (1) Professor Perry’s unit of value, “interest,” is distinctly impersonal. As a mere tendency to act for its own self-preservation, it is an entity in the life of the organism, considered by itself, apart from any ideal or obligation or recognition of a unitary personality, with its laws and its claims. (2) Where morality is (as for Professor Perry), a massing of impersonal interests “against a reluctant cosmos,” interest being interpreted behavioristically, morality becomes logically identical with physiological efficiency….(3) A fundamental difficulty with Professor Perry’s view is that “interest” in actual life is (contrary to his theory) not made up by a massing of interest-units….(4) Interest-in-relation-to-object is not (as Professor Perry holds) the unit of intrinsic value….(5) Value…is always relative to an idea of what humanity ought to be, or at least to an ideal of one’s own personality, either implicit or explicit….(6) Value is objective, as well as dependent on consciousness….(7) The personalistic theory is not open to Professor Perry’s criticism of Absolutism….(8) Personalism affords a more rational basis for freedom than does Neo-Realism….(9) Personalism gives a more reasonable account of religious values than does Neo-Realism. Professor Perry with his repudiation of every moral and spiritual ontology, with his universe of neutrals, nevertheless makes “the hazard of faith” to a belief in a “forward movement of life”….but this is “provincial and unimaginative”….Life is after all too much for Professor Perry's rigid scientific method and anti-romanticism….Professor Perry’s explanation, although a consciousness theory, is sub-personal, reducing personality to behavior, and value to interest as a biological unit.” (Brightman, Neo-Realistic Theories of Value, 55-63)  

“What high satisfaction this system affords to my understanding! What order, what firm connexion, what comprehensive supervision does it introduce into the whole fabric of my knowledge! Consciousness is here no longer a stranger in Nature, whose connexion with existence is so incomprehensible—it is native to it and indeed one of its necessary manifestations. Nature herself ascends gradually in the determinate series of her creations. In rude matter she is a simple existence—in organized matter she returns within herself to internal activity—in the plant to produce form—in the animal motion—in man, as her highest masterpiece, she turns inward that she may perceive and contemplate herself—in him she, as it were, doubles herself, and, from being mere existence, becomes existence and consciousness in one. How I am and must be conscious of my own being and of its determinations is in this connexion, easily understood. My being and my knowledge have one common foundation—my own nature. The being within me, even because it is my being, is conscious of itself. Quite as conceivable is my consciousness of corporeal objects existing beyond myself. The powers in whose manifestation my personality consists—formative, self-moving, thinking—are not these same powers as they exist in Nature at large, but only a certain definite portion of them; and that they are but such a portion, is because there are so many other existences beyond me. From the former, I can infer the latter; from the limitation, that which limits. Because I myself am not this or that which yet belongs to the connected system of existence, it must exist beyond me—thus reasons the thinking principle within me. Of my own limitation I am immediately conscious, because it is a part of myself, and only by reason of it do I possess an actual existence; my consciousness of the source of this limitation—of that which I myself am not—is produced by the former, and arises out of it.” (Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 339-340) 

“Away, then, with those pretended influences and operations of outward things upon me, by means of which they are supposed to pour in me a knowledge which is not in themselves and cannot flow forth from them. The ground upon which I assume the existence of something beyond myself, does not lie out of myself, but within me, in the limitation of my own personality. By means of this limitation, the thinking principle of Nature within me proceeds out of itself, and is able to survey itself as a whole, although, in each individual, from a different point of view.” (Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 340-341) 

“In the same way there arises within me the idea of other thinking beings like myself. I, or the thinking power of Nature within me, am conscious of some thoughts which seem to have arisen spontaneously within me as an individual form of Nature; and of others, which seem not to have arisen in the same spontaneous manner. And so it is in reality. The former are my own, peculiar, individual contributions to the general circle of thought in Nature; the latter are deduced from them, as what must surely have a place in that circle; but being only inferences so far as I am concerned, must find that place, not in me, but in other thinking beings:—hence I conclude that there are other thinking beings besides myself. In short, Nature becomes in me conscious of herself as a whole, but only by beginning with my own individual consciousness, and proceeding from thence to the consciousness of universal being by inference founded on the principle of causality—that is, she is conscious of the conditions under which alone such a form, such a motion, such a thought as that in which my personality consists, is possible. The principle of causality is the point of transition from the particular within myself to the universal which lies beyond myself; and the distinguishing characteristic of those two kinds of knowledge is this, that the one is immediate perception, while the other is inference.” (Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 341) 

“In each individual, Nature beholds herself from a particular point of view. I call myself—I, and thee—thou; thou callest thyself—I, and me—thou; I lie beyond thee, as thou beyond me. Of what is without me, I comprehend first those things which touch me most nearly; thou, those which touch thee most nearly—from these points we each proceed onwards to the next proximate; but we describe very different paths, which may here and there intersect each other but never run parallel. There is an infinite variety of possible individuals, and hence also an infinite variety of possible points of outlook of consciousness. This consciousness of all individuals taken together, constitutes the complete consciousness of the universe; and there is no other, for only in the individual is there definite completeness and reality.” (Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 341-342)