Reading Notes: May 4th, 2022

“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) 

“Let it be assumed then that there is in the body a physical mechanism which produces the conclusions of the understanding and the senses, then we stand face to face with the questions: What is the Body? What is Matter? What is the Physical? And modern physiology, just as much as philosophy, must answer that they are all only our ideas; necessary ideas, ideas resulting according to natural laws, but still never the things themselves. The consistently Materialistic view thus changes round therefore, into a consistently idealistic view….The eye, with which we believe we see, is itself only a product of our ideas; and when we find that our visual images are produced by the structure of the eye, we must never forget that the eye too with its arrangements, the optic nerve with the brain and all the structures which we may yet discover there as causes of thought, are only ideas, which indeed form a self-coherent world, yet a world which points to something beyond itself….The struggle between Body and Mind is ended in favour of the latter, and only thus is guaranteed the true unity of all existence. For while it always remained an insurmountable difficulty for Materialism to explain how conscious sensation could come about from material motion, yet it is, on the other hand, by no means difficult to conceive that our whole representation of matter and its movements is the result of an organization of purely intellectual dispositions to sensation.” (Lange, The History of Materialism, Vol. III, 223-228) 

“We can assign no boundary to our experience without at once extending it in thought, and thought itself involves experience. Hence the phrase, “content of experience,” or “content of consciousness,” is apt to be misleading. The experience of one is not limited by the experience of another as one portion of time or space is limited by another portion of time or space. The continuity of experience is not then determined from without. Experience is rather an organic unity that we always regard as self-maintained.” (Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 403) 

“We ordinarily employ the category of causality to relate one part of experience to another, a change to an antecedent change. Thus in its very form causality presupposes distinction within experience, and accordingly this relativity within experience ceases the very moment that the part coincides with the whole.” (Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 410) 

“Experience is a unity, comprising a duality of subject and object, and we cannot fail to get more and more out of touch with its true inwardness, if we lay stress on one side of it to the exclusion of the other; for all separation of subject from object, though necessary to a certain extent for purposes of analysis, is to that extent artificial.” (Richardson, Spiritual Pluralism, 18) 

“Among the chief categories which are commonly regarded as applicable to experience, is the category of causality….The true meaning which causality has for us is rooted in the realization of our own efficiency, as active individuals. The active individual is the “cause.” The end which his (generally purposive) activity accomplishes is the “effect.” The scientific method, however, takes the sequences which occur in experience as they stand and determines what may truly be said of them per se. In the first place, it finds that sequences continually recur sufficiently similar in nature to admit of a considerable degree of general characterization. Secondly, it follows that a general proposition may be affirmed with regard to each recurring sequence, whereby the occurrence of one event may be inferred from the occurrence of another event. Thirdly, there is no guarantee (except the rather doubtful one of probability) that such propositions will continue to hold in the future. Finally, it is seen that we can go no further than this from the objective standpoint of science. It might also be pointed out that, strictly speaking, the term  “causal law” ought not to be applied at all to such propositions as we have been considering. For, in view of the concrete meaning which “cause” has for us, the word “causal” implies that the sequences to which the propositions refer, have their ground in the activity of individuals.” (Richardson, Spiritual Pluralism, 30-37)