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)