“But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. It can rise to a universality which is not foreign to, but the very inward nature of things in themselves, not the universal of an abstraction from the particular and different, but the unity which is immanent in them and finds in them its own necessary expression; not an arbitrary invention of the observing and classifying mind unifying in its own imagination things which are yet essentially different, but an idea which expresses the inner dialectic, the movement or process towards unity, which exists in and constitutes the being of the objects themselves. This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated ideal or organic universality.” (Caird, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 217–218)
“I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind….[W]hat we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits.” (Pierce, The Law of Mind, 339-350)
“Moore’s critique rests on a conflation between the ontological claim that sensation is a sensation of something, hence of that which is outside spirit, outside experience but given in it through sensation, and the epistemological claim that what is given in sensation is identical with, or the same as, what stands outside experience.” (Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy, 67)
“The demand which rests at the basis of Descartes’ reasonings thus is that what is recognized as true should be able to maintain the position of having the thought therein at home with itself….The second proposition of the Cartesian philosophy is hence the immediate certainty of thought. Certainty is only knowledge as such in is pure form as self-relating, and this is thought; thus then the unyielding understanding makes its way on to the necessity of thought….Descartes begins, just as Fichte did later on, with the “I” as indubitably certain; I know that something is presented in me. By this Philosophy is at one stroke transplanted to quite another field and to quite another standpoint, namely to the sphere of subjectivity. Presuppositions in religion are given up; proof alone is sought for, and not the absolute content which disappears before abstract infinite subjectivity. To consider the content in itself is not the first matter; for I can abstract from all my conceptions, but not from the “I”. We think this and that, and hence it is—is to give the common would-be-wise argument of those incapable of grasping the matter in point; that a determinate content exists is exactly what we are forced to doubt—there is nothing absolutely fixed. Thought is entirely universal, but not merely because I can abstract, but because “I” is thus simple, self-identical. Thought consequently comes first; the next determination arrived at, in direct connection with it, is the determination of Being. The “I think” directly involves my Being; this, says Descartes, is the absolute basis of all Philosophy. The determination of Being is in my “I”; this connection is itself the first matter. Thought as Being and Being as thought—that is my certainty, “I”; in the celebrated Cogito, ergo sum we thus have Thought and Being inseparably bound together.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 226-228)
“The thinking subject as the simple immediacy of being-at-home-with-me is the very same thing as what is called Being; and it is quite easy to perceive this identity. As universal, thought is contained in all that is particular, and thus is pure relation to itself, pure oneness with itself. We must not make the mistake of representing Being to ourselves as a concrete content, and hence it is the same immediate identity which thought likewise is. Immediacy is, however, a one-sided determination; thought does not contain it alone, but also the determination to mediate itself with itself, and thereby—by the mediation being at the same time the abrogation of the mediation—it is immediacy. In thought we thus have Being; Being is, however, a poor determination, it is the abstraction from the concrete of thought.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 229-230)
“In its abstraction [Being] would be really only that return into itself, that simple equality with itself, which constitutes thought.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 257)
“This Idea of Spinoza’s we must allow to be in the main true and well-grounded; absolute substance is the truth, but it is not the whole truth; in order to be this it must also be thought of as in itself active and living, and by that very means it must determine itself as mind. But substance with Spinoza is only the universal and consequently the abstract determination of mind; it may undoubtedly be said that this thought is the foundation of all true views—not, however, as their absolutely fixed and permanent basis, but as the abstract unity which mind is in itself. It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy. For as we saw above, when man begins to philosophize, the soul must commence by bathing in this ether of the One Substance, in which all that man has held as true has disappeared; this negation of all that is particular, to which every philosopher must have come, is the liberation of the mind and its absolute foundation.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 257-258)
“For [the finite—according to Spinoza—comes] to an end, it is not there; what is there is something else. This something else must, however, be of like nature; for those things which are to limit each other must, in order to be able to limit each other, touch each other, and consequently have a relation to each other, that is to say they must be of one nature, stand on a like basis, and have a common sphere.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 259)
“What cannot have a conception formed of it without the aid of something else, is not independent, but is dependent on that something else.” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, 259)
“The great service of [Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism”] is to insist on the truism that when you perceive you perceive something, and that what you do perceive cannot be the same as the perception of it.” (Broad, Perception, Physics, and Reality, 5)
“It just seems to me that no mental act is ever its own object, not even an act of awareness.” (Grossmann, Phenomenology and Existentialism, 53)
“Just as one must distinguish between the perception and that which is perceived, on must distinguish between the introspection and that which is introspected….A mental state cannot be aware of itself, any more than a man can eat himself up….Intentionality…is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience…” (Zahavi and Parnas, Models of the Self, 258-260)
“If I know X, X obviously must be in relation to my mind at the time I know it, and again at any other time also it must bear the relation to my mind of “going to be known by me after such a lapse of time” or “having been known by me so many hours, months, or years ago,” but it does not follow that the relation is essential to X or that X could not exist without being in that relation.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 15)
“Anything that is ever known must always have been such that it could eventually come to be known…It must indeed be admitted that any fact whichever comes to be known must be in that respect related to the knowing of it and the knower…” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 15)
“[W]e can only think an object existing independently of our consciousness by thinking it as it would be if it were present to a mind. For example, if we are really to understand what is meant by talking of the state of the earth prior to man we must imagine some mind as contemplating it at the time…and think it as it would have been for that mind. We can make correct verbal statements about it without doing this, but this is the only way in which we can picture to ourselves what the statements really mean. Similarly, I can only realize other facts by picturing them as they would be for a knowing mind. It may even be contended that the only way in which I can think an a priori universal truth to be necessarily valid is by thinking it as such that any mind must necessarily accept it as true if he understands it.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 21)
“It is sometimes argued that mind can only know what is like itself, namely mind, and that therefore reality must be mental….An argument to this effect might be based on the premise that the presence of a relation implies that its terms have a determinable in common, in respect of determinate values of which the relation holds, (as it seems to be the case with most or, some would say, all relations), and conclude that what knows and what is known must be of the same genus if this condition is to be fulfilled.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 27)
“To know is to know something, and this something cannot be just our knowing it….[K]nowing clearly presupposes an object to be known, and this object is logically prior to and cannot be dependent on or made by the knowing….To say that an object depends for its existence or being on the knowledge of it thus involves a vicious circle, for it must be already if it is to be known.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 27-38)
“We may note also that most of those who reject the view that an object implies consciousness seem to accept the converse proposition, namely, that consciousness implies an object. But anyone who makes such an admission as this is altogether debarred from rejecting the idealist view on the ground that an object is different from the consciousness of it and therefore cannot imply the latter. The fact that A implies B does not necessarily carry with it the conclusion that B implies A….” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 32-33)
“Now we have already found an idealistic element in knowledge in the fact that in order to determine what something is we must first think what it would be for a mind fully and discriminately aware of it….For to think of objects of cognition as they are or would be for a knowing mind is a method necessary if we are to attain any truth at all. By this I do not mean merely the trivial tautology that what I cognize must stand in a relation, namely, the relation of being cognized, to a conscious mind, my own. I mean that to know any fact, X, or form any intelligible opinion about X, I must ultimately think X as it would be for a mind which was consciously aware of it as a present fact, though there may never be or have been such a mind...Thus ultimately we can only think of unperceived physical thinks in terms of a possible observer, in the sense that we must think them as if they were objects of actual present experience or rather conscious perception. A similar contention may be put forward even in regard to “necessary truths.” As far as I can see we can only think universal principles as true a priori by thinking them as in some sense necessary for any mind that accepts the premises on which they are based, by thinking of them as such that any mind which realized their meaning would be bound to accept them as true...The cognitive process…is idealistic…as it always involves thinking facts as they would be for as mind, as if they existed for a mind.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 56-58)
“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)
“If we are to think of the spatial objects to which we usually give the name, physical, as existing unperceived by us…we must think of them…as objects of experience…by thinking of them as standing in the position of images relatively to a non-human experience….In order to think what physical objects are we must think of them as if they were objects of experience….For example, in order to give full intelligibility to propositions about the state of the earth prior to man, we must imagine some mind as contemplating it at the time when no human mind was in fact contemplating it, and think it as it would have been for that mind. We can make correct verbal statements without doing this, but this is the only way in which we can picture to ourselves what the statements really mean. In this sense, it may be true that propositions about material objects can only be interpreted in terms of experience, either actual experience or the imaginary experience of an imaginary observer.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 393-399)
“It is true that we cannot give a meaning to propositions about physical objects except in terms of experience, if experience is used in the wide sense in which it covers characteristics experienced, that is, it is true that the objects must ultimately be interpreted in terms of characteristics which have been on other occasions experienced by human beings.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 397)
“T.H. Green, in order to prove the unthinkability of physical things apart from mind, makes use of an argument from the nature of relations. If A and B are related they are at once separate and together, and for this to be possible “there must be something other than the manifold of things themselves which combines them without effacing their severalty.” Now we can see how this is possible if there is an intelligence which thinks the related things together; we know that, when we think two things, they are distinct and not merged in one, and yet also fall within the same unity of consciousness, and so are together. Such a process as comparison involves at once the difference and union of its objects. They must be different, for otherwise there would be no distinction and therefore no comparison; they must also be united together, for to think first A and then B is not to compare A and B, to compare them we must hold them together. But it is impossible to conceive how related terms could in any other way be thus at once a unity and separate, therefore the fact of relation implies the existence of an intelligence to which both the related terms are present.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 399-400)
“Propositions about physical objects cannot be analyzed in terms of actual and possible sensa of human beings. On the contrary, in such propositions we are normally ascribing at least primary qualities to physical objects existing independently of us in the same sense as we ascribe them to sensa. Hence, unless such independent objects with at least primary qualities exist, most or all of the propositions of “common sense” and science about physical objects are false. (ch. VII).” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 441)
“You cannot think anything at all without adding in thought your Ego as self-conscious; you cannot abstract from your self-consciousness.” (Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 71)
“Even in regard to the realm of thought and knowledge many writers are fond of dwelling upon the idea that each of us lives in a little world of his own, in which things are arranged in a way not quite identical with the mental cosmos of any other individual….Such exaggerations of the subjective aspect of our consciousness have their value, and even their necessity, at particular stages in the life of the individual or the race. But they contain only one side of the truth, and if they tempt us to obliterate the other side, and to entrench ourselves in a theory of subjective idealism (such as is commonly attributed to Berkeley), they become self-contradictory and contain their own refutation. The consciousness of self, it must be again pointed out, is always primarily and immediately a return upon self from objects; and though this return involves a kind of opposition between the self and that from which the return is made upon it, yet it should be remembered that a negative relation is still a relation, and, in this case at least, a necessary relation. If there is no consciousness of the object except in relation to the subject, as little is there a consciousness of the subject which is not mediated by a consciousness of the object….Hence, the idea of a pure consciousness of self, shut up in itself without any knowledge of objects, is the abstraction of one element in our life, which, in losing all relation to the other elements, loses all its own meaning….The conception of the individual subject as at any time alone with himself, conscious of nothing but his own states, and seeking nothing but his own pleasures—or, at best, seeking only the realisation of a purely subjective law—is a fiction which, logically, is as fatal to self-consciousness as it is to the consciousness of the objective world. The Berkeleian Idealism—if this view of the pure subjectivity of consciousness is to be attributed to Berkeley—rests on a confusion between the truth, that all objects are objects for a subject, and the error that the only possible objects are, or at least direct objects, for such a subject are its own states. The truth is that we are conscious of our own states as such only in distinction from, and in relation to, the objects to which we refer them; but neither these states nor anything else can be known except in relation to a subject….And a theory which speaks of inner experience as one thing and outer experience as another and totally different thing, might as well, to employ a homely illustration which Professor Ferrier was fond of using, speak of a stick with one end only. It is as absurd in the realm of spirit as in the realm of matter to suppose that we can have an inside without an outside, or an outside without an inside.” (Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 129-133)
“Book II of [Stout’s God and Nature] continues with a criticism of Russell’s pluralism which Stout regards as based wholly on his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. To know about X, we must have prior knowledge of X. Description involves relations and universals. Acquaintance is with particulars. It is inexpressible and neither true nor false. These particulars, thus directly known, free from all relations, constitute Russell’s pluralistic universe. Stout attacks this epistemology effectively….There is no reason to suppose that the X we know by acquaintance is self-complete, for this presupposes without justification that we know its whole nature by acquaintance. From the fact that a relation is not part of a thing we cannot conclude that this thing could exist not so related. (Relation to the inside of something is not part of the surface, but the surface could not exist without the inside.) Knowledge by acquaintance, as Russell defines it, cannot be knowledge at all; for there can be no knowledge where nothing is known about the object and where there is no truth….Stout thinks that the same dangerous distinction between knowing X and knowing about X led Locke to his puzzles about substance.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 525)
“The only solution for the difficulties both of Locke and Russell is to maintain that all knowledge of X is knowledge about X; and consequently that “X itself” is simply the group of its intrinsic characteristics united in a special form of unity. But this means all its characteristics. The problem then arises how we can claim to have direct awareness of X when we certainly do not know directly all the characteristics of X. It was Russell’s awareness of this problem which drove him to his views that the particulars we know by acquaintance are self-complete and are fully known by acquaintance. Such knowledge, he held, cannot include any knowledge of relations between characteristics which are immediately experienced and those that are not. Stout maintains on the contrary…that we can know a whole without knowing all its parts severally, that what we know directly is known in that very experience to be partial and incomplete, that in knowing some characteristics of X directly we know something about X as a whole, and that in knowing X as a whole we know something about the wider whole to which X belongs. In memory, for example, we have an immediate experience which points beyond itself to the past. The past is not immediately known, nor is it inferred.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 525-526)
“Sensa are continuous with and akin to physical objects and are therefore material not mental in character. They are parts of matter but not parts of physical objects; they are the parts of matter directly presented to mind….Stout holds, in agreement with Berkeley and against Alexander and an early view of Moore, that no sensum could exist unperceived. For some sensa (organic) cannot exist unperceived and no line can easily be drawn between them and the others, especially if we accept Ward’s view that all sensa arise from differentiation of a relatively homogenous presentational-continuum. All sensa then are mind-dependent. But sensa are parts of matter, so matter is mind-dependent also. (This conclusion is fortified by the argument of Mind and Matter that mind cannot be matter-dependent but can be derived only from mind).” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 529)
“The last sections of [Stout’s God and Nature] argue that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe. This is argued first in connection with cognition. The unity of the mind in knowing presupposes the systematic unity of the universe known. This Kantian argument is combined…with the non-Kantian view that the knowing mind does not determine the structure of what is known. The argument is that ignorance is always partial. What we do not know we always to some extent do know as connected with what we know already. If there were two experiences between which there could be no knowable relation this would be equivalent to saying the two experiences must belong to different minds. For experience to be related, their objects must be related too. If I were aware of two universes between which there were no intelligible relations, I should not be a single cognitive self….Thus, for me to have achieved a (relatively) unified cognitive self I must know a (partially) unified universe. And so far as my ignorance itself is, as it must be, the partial awareness of other conditions intelligibly linked with what I know already, I have (potentially) a fully unified cognitive mind, but this potentiality presupposes a fully unified universe.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 533)
“Knowing and being then are essentially and inseparably united aspects of the whole universe. [Stout is here, I think, converting the proposition, which he has so far proved, that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe, and suggesting that the unity of the universe implies a single universal mind. But this conversion is undefended.] It follows that there must always have been knowing minds or mind.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 534)
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