Reading Notes: May 12th, 2022

“Now I say that whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments. Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence, I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. But since we have imposed upon them special names, distinct from those of the other and real qualities mentioned previously, we wish to believe that they really exist as actually different from those.” (Galileo, The Assayer, 23) 

“The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever. For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which uses to be simple, and always consonant to itself. We no other way know the extension of bodies than by our senses, nor do these reach it in all bodies; but because we perceive extension in all that are sensible, therefore we ascribe it universally to all others also. That abundance of bodies are hard, we learn by experience; and because the hardness of the whole arises from the hardness of the parts, we therefore justly infer the hardness of the undivided particles not only of the bodies we feel but of all others. That all bodies are impenetrable, we gather not from reason, but from sensation. The bodies which we handle we find impenetrable, and thence conclude impenetrability to be an universal property of all bodies whatsoever. That all bodies are moveable, and endowed with certain powers (which we call the vires inertiae) of persevering in their motion, or in their rest, we only infer from the like properties observed in the bodies which we have seen. The extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and vis inertiae of the whole, result from the extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and vires inertiae of the parts; and thence we conclude the least particles of all bodies to be also all extended, and hard, and impenetrable, and moveable, and endowed with their proper vires inertiae. And this is the foundation of all philosophy.” (Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 384-385) 

“On Bradley’s assumptions the distinction between conditions of being and conditions of being-known is not ultimately valid. Hence, the common method of attacking the experience theorem by citing such a distinction is not an adequate refutation of Bradley’s employment of it, unless these assumptions are undermined or called into question.” (Bedell, Bradley’s Monistic Idealism, 580) 

“Feeling is certainly not “un-differentiated” if that means that it contains no diverse aspects. I would take the opportunity to state that this view as to feeling is so far from being novel that I owe it, certainly in the main, to Hegel’s psychology. In the same way what I have urged as to the Association of Ideas is in principle mainly taken from the same source. It would be interesting to learn from some student of the history of philosophy to what extent and through what channels ideas from German Idealism have filtered unacknowledged into empirical psychology.” (Bradley, The Contrary and the Disparate, 472) 

“Facts and views partial and one-sided, incomplete and so incoherent—things that offer themselves as characters of a Reality which they cannot express, and which present in them moves them to jar with and to pass beyond themselves—in a word appearances are the stuff of which the Universe is made.” (Bradley, The Contrary and the Disparate, 475)