Great Throughts Treasury

"An instinct is an agent which performs blindly and ignorantly a work of intelligence and knowledge."

"Man is not an organism; he is an intelligence served by organs."

"There is a distinction, but no opposition, between theory and practice. Each to a certain extent supposes the other. Theory is dependent on practice; practice must have preceded theory."

"Truth like a torch, the more 'tis shook, it shines."

"The universe may be conceived as a polygon of a thousand or a hundred thousand sides or facets - and each of these sides or facets may be conceived as representing one special mode of existence. Now, of these thousand sides or modes, all may be equally essential, but three or four only may be turned towards us or be analogous to our organs."

"A judgment is the mental act by which one thing is affirmed or denied of another."

"Analysis and synthesis, though commonly treated as two different methods, are, if properly understood, only the two necessary parts of the same method. Each is the relative and correlative of the other."

"As concerns the quantity of what is to be read, there is a single rule,—read much but not many works."

"Ethics is the science of the laws which govern our actions as moral agents."

"Consciousness is thus, on the one hand, the recognition by the mind or “ego” of its acts and affections:—in other words, the self-affirmation that certain modifications are known by me, and that these modifications are mine."

"By a double blunder in philosophy and Greek, ideologic… has in France become the name peculiarly distinctive of that philosophy of mind which exclusively derives our knowledge from sensation."

"Hardly is there a similarity detected between two or three facts, than men hasten to extend it to all others."

"I do not hesitate to maintain, that what we are conscious of is constructed out of what we are not conscious of,-that our whole knowledge, in fact, is made up of the unknown and the incognisable."

"I use the term understanding not for the noetic faculty, intellect proper, or place of principles, but for the dianoetic or discursive faculty in its widest signification, for the faculty of relations or comparisons; and thus in the meaning in which “Verstand” is now employed by the Germans."

"If we consider the mind merely with a view of observing and generalizing the various phenomena it reveals, that is, of analyzing them into capacities or faculties, we have one mental science, or one department of mental science; and this we may call the phenomenology of mind."

"I would employ the word noetic to express all those cognitions which originate in the mind itself."

"Identity is a relation between our cognitions of a thing, not between things themselves."

"If, therefore, mediate knowledge be in propriety a knowledge, consciousness is not co-extensive with knowledge."

"In our natural body every part has a necessary sympathy with every other, and all together form, by their harmonious conspiration, a healthy whole."

"In the philosophy of mind, subjective denotes what is to be referred to the thinking subject, the ego; objective what belongs to the object of thought, the non ego. Philosophy being the essence of knowledge, and the science of knowledge supposing, in its most fundamental and thorough-going analysis, the distinction of the subject and object of knowledge, it is evident that to philosophy the subject of knowledge would be by pre-eminence the subject, and the object of knowledge the object. It was therefore natural that the object and objective, the subject and subjective, should be employed by philosophers as simple terms, compendiously to denote the grand discrimination about which philosophy was constantly employed, and which no others could be found so precisely and promptly to express."

"Knowledges (or cognitions), in common use with Bacon and our English philosophers till after the time of Locke, ought not to be discarded. It is, however, unnoticed by any English lexicographer."

"In the Platonic sense, ideas were the patterns according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world."

"Logic is the science of the laws of thought, as thought,—that is, of the necessary conditions to which thought, considered in itself, is subject."

"Many people have chosen psychotherapy over enlightenment. Someone asked Anagarike Munindra, a great Buddhist meditation master in India, why it was easier for Asians to attain enlightenment. His reply was that, "Westerners are doing psychotherapy.""

"Nirvana is an experience of the Unconditioned which defies any description. Any description of Nirvana is not a description of Nirvana, and that is the most that can be said about Nirvana. There are no reference points in Nirvana on which to base a description."

"Now the science conversant about all such inferences of unknown being from its known manifestations, is called ontology, or metaphysics proper."

"Modes or modifications of mind, in the Cartesian school, mean merely what some recent philosophers express by states of mind."

"Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science or complement of sciences exclusively occupied with mind."

"Paradoxically, as the mind becomes simpler, it can perceive greater complexity."

"Philosophy has been defined:—the science of things divine and human, and the causes in which they are contained;—the science of effects by their causes;—the science of sufficient reasons;—the science of things possible, inasmuch as they are possible;—the science of things evidently deduced from their first principles;—the science of truths sensible and abstract;—the application of reason to its legitimate objects;—the science of the relations of all knowledge to the necessary ends of human reason;—the science of the original form of the ego, or mental self;—the science of science;—the science of the absolute;—the science of the absolute indifference of the ideal and real."

"Philosophical doubt is not an end, but a mean."

"On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind."

"Some associations may revivify it enough to make it flash, after a long oblivion, into consciousness."

"Sentiment, as here and elsewhere employed by Dr. Reid in the meaning of opinion (sententia), is not to be imitated."

"Power is, therefore, a word which we may use both in an active and in a passive signification; and in psychology we may apply it both to the active faculty and to the passive capacity of the mind."

"Practice is exercise of an art, or the application of a science in life, which application is itself an art."

"The highest reach of human science is the recognition of human ignorance."

"The legal brocard, “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,” is a rule not more applicable to other witnesses than to consciousness."

"The word perception is, in the language of philosophers previous to Reid, used in a very extensive signification. By Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibnitz, and others, it is employed in a sense almost as unexclusive as consciousness, in its widest signification. By Reid this word was limited to our faculty acquisitive of knowledge, and to that branch of this faculty whereby, through the senses, we obtain a knowledge of the external world. But his limitation did not stop here. In the act of external perception he distinguished two elements, to which he gave the names of perception and sensation. He ought perhaps to have called these perception proper and sensation proper, when employed in his special meaning."

"This [faculty], to which I give the name of the “elaborative faculty,”—the faculty of relations or comparisons,—constitutes what is properly denominated thought."

"This may enable us to understand how seductive is the influence of example."

"This word is employed by English writers in a very loose and improper sense. It is with them usually convertible into hypothesis, and hypothesis is commonly used as another term for conjecture. The terms theory and theoretical are properly used in opposition to the terms practice and practical. In this sense they were exclusively employed by the ancients; and in this sense they are almost exclusively employed by the continental philosophers."

"To view attention as a special state of intelligence, and to distinguish it from consciousness, is utterly inept."

"The term nature is used sometimes in a wider, sometimes in a narrower extension. When employed in its most extensive meaning, it embraces the two worlds of mind and matter. When employed in its most restricted signification, it is a synonyme for the latter only, and is then used in contradistinction to the former."

"The possibility of morality thus depends on the possibility of liberty; for if man be not a free agent, he is not the author of his actions, and has, therefore, no responsibility - no moral personality at all."