Reading Notes: March 2nd, 2022

“As regards the meaning of sensible appearance we have almost an open field, for common-sense and natural science have no clear views on the matter at all….Now I might sum up the work that really matters which has been done on our subject in the last few years in the following way. It starts, in England at any rate, from Dr. Moore’s Refutation of Idealism. I do not think, and I do not suppose Dr. Moore thinks, that that article refuted Idealism. But it did point out the scandalously ambiguous way in which the word “sensation” was used, and led to the distinction being drawn between sensations and sensa. Now, starting from that distinction a great deal of very important work has been done on the following lines. A sensation has been supposed to be an act of direct acquaintance with a sensum. Since the sensum is no longer confused with the sensation, one ground at least for regarding the sensum as mental vanishes. It is embarrassing to say that a state of mind is round or hot or red, but we need not hesitate to ascribe these qualities to sensa. This leads to a definition of sensible appearance. When we say that the physical object X appears to us to be circular, we mean on this theory, that we are aware of a sensum which really is circular, and that this sensum is connected in some peculiarly intimate way with the physical object X. The essence of this theory of appearance is that whenever I judge that something appears to me to have the quality q, there must be an object with which I am acquainted which really does have the quality q. This object is the sensum….Although sensa are not sensations and therefore are not necessarily states of mind, it does not follow that they may not be states of mind.” (Broad, The External World, 387-390) 

“There is a characteristic which the people of Wales and the people of Lowland Scotland, differing profoundly in other respects, appear to possess in common. They are both idealist in their cast of mind. You of Wales have the gift of imagination. It has enabled you to strike out some distinctive lines for yourselves in your higher education and in your religion. You are not easily daunted by difficulties, and you act together with an enthusiasm which penetrates to the humblest classes of the community….We Lowland Scotsmen are also at heart idealist, but our idealism is of a different kind. Our temperament is reflective rather than imaginative. We move easily in the current of abstract discussion, and we are tenacious of intellectual purpose. The Treatise of Human Nature, the Wealth of Nations, and Sartor Resartus are books typical of a characteristic form of Scottish Idealism. Probably no other part of the United Kingdom could have produced writers of this type, and, along with them, men like John Knox, and the Covenanters, and Dr. Chalmers. I think those to whom I have referred are at least as distinctively representative of Scottish habits of mind as are Burns and Scott. For they are the spiritual children of a race which loves abstract speculation as you love music and verse. In the case of both races there is present the spirit of idealism—idealism which when it comes to the surface flows in different channels, but is not the less on that account idealism.” (Haldane, The Soul of a People, 3-5) 

“If there are to be things with the properties we demand of things, they must be more than things. Only by sharing this character of the spiritual nature can they fulfill the general requirements which must be fulfilled in order to constitute a thing. They can only be distinct from their states if they distinguish themselves from their states. They can only be unities if they oppose themselves, as such, to the multiplicity of their states.” (Lotze, Metaphysics, Vol I, §96) 

“Lotze takes it as self-evident that there must be a real within our experience which will explain its phenomenal character….But he will not hold with Herbart’s view that this ultimately real is an unknowable something behind experience. [Lotze maintains] that a thing is what it becomes; that is, a thing is what it manifests itself as being in the manifold of relations in which it finds itself. To be, he maintains, is to stand in relations, and these relations enter into their terms and constitute their being. Here Lotze [makes] the principle of sufficient reason determinant of the nature of the real itself. He also approaches Kant’s position—namely, that the full reality of an object is what that object is as fully and adequately determined. Since all determinations of an object are constitutive of its reality there must be, Lotze maintains, a moment of unity which can hold all determinations within itself so as to constitute it a real object. [Spatio-temporal] position....is [not] adequate to this function of unity. Lotze therefore turns again to the philosophy of Leibniz and finds what he is seeking in Leibniz’s theory that the monad is of the nature of a soul. The Leibnizian monad possessed what the Herbartian real did not possess, namely, the power of holding together plurality in unity; it also possessed the impulse to activity and change, which are quite inexplicable in respect of Herbart’s reals. It was further considered as the subject of states, these states being predicates of the subject….Lotze makes the logical subject identical with a psychological subject, and abandons the principle of non-contradiction as the ruling principle in effecting the unity in plurality that is involved in the relation between the subject and its states. Consciousness itself, he maintains, can and does hold together in unity a plurality, irrespective of contradiction or non-contradictions.” (Thomas, Lotze’s Theory of Reality, xxx-xxxi) 

“[Lotze] maintains that the mutual actions of a many can only result in a many, and not in a unity. It is only when there is already a one in the many that the action of a one can be said to arise in the action of a many.” (Thomas, Lotze’s Theory of Reality, xlix) 

“We will first deal with the view that unity involves consciousness. Lotze maintains that the holding together of a plurality of changing sense contents within the unity of law presupposes something deeper than the mere existence of these sense qualities. He maintains that unity and activity are only possible within the life of a being endowed with consciousness; unity, he tells us, must always be a felt unity, and activity a felt activity; if the actual experience of unity and the actual experience of activity are taken away, then the conceptions of unity and activity are barren. He further tells us that the conception of unity is based upon our own personal experience. We are conscious of the unity of our own being through the fact that our various states are held together in the medium of recollection or memory, and also through the fact that the various changes which take place in ourselves are all referred to ourselves through the activity and feeling of attention. Further, it is in this consciousness of our unity that we really are unity, for our being only exists in the consciousness which it has of itself. The unity which belongs to individual substances, he tells us, is essentially the same and thus requires a self-feeling on the part of each; each substance must feel its own states as belonging to itself, and must contrast itself as one with its states as many.” (Thomas, Lotze’s Theory of Reality, 19-20) 

“Certain considerations, however, make it quite clear that it is impossible to consider the material world as consisting of primary qualities only, and to hold that souls holding within their mental life the secondary qualities stand over against this material world. In the first place, spatial properties are known properties, and belong to the world as known just as much as do the secondary qualities of things, hence spatial properties are not excluded from existing within the life of the soul and as going to the building up of that life. In the second place, the plurality of sense qualities, including both primary and secondary qualities, is not held together in unity in the soul as an entity standing over against the outside world; rather is this plurality held together in unity in the outside world through the medium of a consciousness which takes within itself the actual material world; for instance, the color blue and the coldness to the touch belonging to this piece of stone are held together, not in the being of some soul standing outside of the stone, but in the being of the stone itself, in so far as the stone is experienced or experiences itself, and they are held together there along with the spatial characteristics of size, shape, and so on.” (Thomas, Lotze’s Theory of Reality, 106-107) 

“A mechanical process of itself cannot give to the world that newness of being which renders the world process a real movement towards a preconceived structural whole. Mere mechanism goes round and round in a circle, and if any variety, any plan, any meaning has to be given to that which comes under its sway, this variety and this meaning must be introduced into it from the outside.” (Thomas, Lotze’s Theory of Reality, 117-118) 

“Epistemologists, instead of standing shivering on the bank asking the futile question whether we can know or not, had better make the plunge. There is no way of learning to swim without going into the water. If they want reality to think, they must become Metaphysicians.” (Jones, Idealism and Epistemology, 140) 

“Our idea of a person is then the idea of a consciousness which thinks, which has a certain permanence, which distinguishes itself from its own successive experiences and from all other consciousness—lastly, and most important of all, which acts. A person is a conscious, permanent, self-distinguishing, individual, active being.” (Rashdall, Personal Idealism, 372) 

“The life of reason or consciousness is essentially a life that goes beyond itself, and in which the inward cannot be absolutely fenced off from the outward without itself ceasing to have any meaning or content. It is a life of knowledge, in which we can know ourselves, only as we know the universe of which, as individuals, we form a part. It is a life of action, in which we can realize ourselves, only by becoming the servants of an end which is being realized in the world. Concentrate consciousness entirely upon itself, and its unreflected light will cease to shine. The world without and the world within are not separate worlds, but necessary counterparts of each other; and, just in the extent to which we succeed in withdrawing from the world without, we narrow the world within….The Stoic or Sceptic who bids us concentrate ourselves on our own soul, and the Positivist, who bids us worship humanity, are equally bidding us treat a part, which we can know and only understand as a part, as if it were the whole. They are attempting to break in one place only the indivisible unity of the intelligence and the intelligible world; but if that unity be broken in one place it is wholly destroyed. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. For it is a unity which is not like a particular hypothesis, that may be asserted or denied without detriment to the rest of our knowledge, but it is the hypothesis, if we may so call it, which is implied in all knowledge whatever, the hypothesis which constitutes our rational being.” (Caird, The Problem of Philosophy at the Present Time, 31-33)