Reading Notes: February 28th, 2022

“Every change we observe is the effect of a cause, and that cause, again, is the effect of a preceding cause, and ascending thus by a process of regressive reasoning from effect to cause, we must assume at last an ultimate cause which contains in itself the causes of all effects, because we cannot think that the chain of causes and effects is infinite, nor that the universe is a collection of disconnected effects without a cause. This ultimate cause, which must be, as the schoolmen say, causa sui and causa causarum, is what metaphysicians call the Absolute, or the Unconditioned, or the infinite substance, etc. The Absolute is that which exists, and is what it is by its own nature, and not because of anything else….The Absolute cannot be subject to the conditions of space and time, or it would not be the Unconditioned; it is infinite and eternal….Aristotle has shown the necessity of postulating a primum movens in the Universe. Spinoza, with rigid logic, has given a demonstration of several of the attributes of the Absolute, and Hegel has proved that what Spinoza calls the infinite substance is spiritual, and not material of its nature; that is, that its necessary existence is only accessible to the intellect, and not perceptible to the senses….Far from being a purely negative idea, there is no idea more positive than the Absolute. The Absolute affirms itself, and at the same time everything else that is, or it would not be the Absolute…..The difficulty persons, deficient in sound logical training, feel in thinking the Absolute, arises from their endeavor to form to themselves some kind of representation or image of what the Absolute may be like, which naturally involves them in hopeless contradictions….[The Absolute] is presupposed by all who enter upon the study of metaphysics. If we surrender ourselves implicitly to the guidance of logic, then the Absolute is not only a permissible postulate: it is a necessary thought.” (Russell, On the Absolute, 1-8) [Underlining is mine]

“Every relation implies an identity underlying the manifest difference in the terms…” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 1) 

“Knowledge is the expression of the deep-seated need of the mind for unity. The intellect is an unceasing activity of judgment. Whatever the intellect apprehends it relates, and it apprehends by relating. Its objective, therefore, appears always as the multiplicity rather than as the unity of its object, and the unification implied in the systematic order it imposes seems an external unification, something to which objects submit in virtue of their own intrinsic nature. But the one unity which can effectively satisfy is a unity which includes the subject of knowledge. Science based on a dualistic assumption is foredoomed to failure directly it attempts to rationalize its attainment. As matter of fact, the history of philosophy shows us that the invariable result of such an initial assumption is that ceaseless attempts follow to reduce one of the two terms to nullity. This is the meaning of the controversy between realism and idealism, each strong in its affirmation of what the other denies. The keynote of modern idealism and its strength is the affirmation that reality is concrete. It rejects the abstract only insofar as it is set up as concrete in its abstractness. It rejects the presupposition of an object independent in its existence of the subject for which it is object, nor on the ground of logical inconsistency, not on the basis of a metaphysical ontology which identifies esse and percipi, but purely on the ground of its abstractness. Idealism rejects equally the presupposition of a subject independent, in its existence, of the object…” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 9) [Underlining is mine]

“Philosophy is science but not one of the sciences….It is the attempt to know and to set forth in systematic order full concrete reality…There are two ways in which we may regard the mind. We may, and we commonly do, regard it as belonging to a class among the classes of things of which the universe is composed, as an existence within the universe. We distinguish mental things from physical things, and we make the mental things the subject of special sciences. For example, we have special sciences of anthropology, sociology, criminology, ethnology, and innumerable others, all of which treat the mind as a definite thing or as the definite quality of definite things; and also we have special sciences, like the physical and mathematical sciences—geometry, astronomy, geology, chemistry, mineralogy, and the like—all of which treat their objects as entirely independent of any relation to the mind. Philosophy is not the science of mind when mind is regarded as a particular kind or class of existent objects. We may also regard the mind in another way. It is for each conscious experient the active center of a universe, a center which is not independent of the universe, nor one of the constituents of the universe, but a focal point within it. In this way of regarding mind, our whole universe comes within it, for our mind consists of our knowledge, and our knowledge is the universe, mirrored, as it were, in that active center. When mind is regarded in this way it is the subject-matter of philosophy.” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 15-16) [Underlining is mine]

“Each mind is a universe, a universe reflected into a center, as though into a mirror, and every center is an individual point of view….To a mind, all reality is experience, and to each mind its own experience. All experience is personal experience….The order into which, for each mind, every new experience enters is not atomic but monadic. Everything to which I attend becomes a part of my experience, and an organic part of it. It qualifies the whole and receives its character from the whole which it qualifies….Our mind is an inner which has no outer, and this is equivalent to saying that for mind inner and outer have no meaning.” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 19-21) [Underlining is mine]

“Meanings can be expressed and communicated, but they can only arise within the mind to which they belong and for which they exist; they never pass out nor come in from the outside.” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 31) 

“The monad is the concept of an individual experience as an integral unity in which subject and object are distinct but united in an indissoluble relation. Subject and object are not separate existences held together by an external bond. They are a unity in duality, a duality in unity. Suppress either term or the relation which binds them, there is no remainder, all is dissolved. To separate the subject of experience from the object of experience, or the object experienced from the subject experiencing, is like dividing the circle into center and circumference and supposing that each exists in its own independent right. The monad includes self and not-self, mind and nature, in the unity of an individual experience….[E]xperience is itself an order which is pivoted on and revolves around an active subject. The subject is the center from which activity is directed and controlled and into which the whole universe is reflected. The monad is self-contained and all-inclusive…” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 33-36) [Underlining is mine]

“The body is not the subject for which the universe is object, the body is itself part of the object which exists in and for the subject.” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 38-39) 

“All distinctions fall within the monad and all relations are internal. The ego and the non-ego, the subject of experience, the “I” or “me”, and the object of experience, the world or universe, are not brought together in the monad; they are not two existences united somehow in an act of knowing, they are on existence dissociated in the act of knowing. The relation subject-object is a relation of polarity, the existence of each term depends on relation. Subject and object are not therefore dual existences but a dual relation within one existence.” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 58) [Underlining is mine]

“All that is immediate in experience is in relation, and though we may distinguish the relation from the terms, and the terms from one another, we cannot infer from a distinction in knowledge the separate existence of what we have distinguished. We cannot affirm the independent existence of the terms, for in their independence it is impossible to experience them. When I know anything the object is always object in relation to a subject, and I in knowing an object am subject in relation to object known. Neither subject nor object can be known apart from relation.” (Carr, A Theory of Monads, 88)