This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The religious concentration of the soul appears in the form of feeling; it nevertheless passes also into reflection; a form of worship is a result of reflection. The second form of the union of the objective and subjective in the human spirit is art. This advances farther into the realm of the actual and sensuous than religion. In its nobles walk it is occupied with representing, not indeed, the spirit of God, but certainly the form of God; and in its secondary aims, that which is divine and spiritual generally. Its office is to render visible the divine; presenting it to the imaginative and intuitive faculty. but the true is the object not only of conception and feeling, as in religion - and of intuition, as in art - but also of the thinking faculty; and this gives us the third form of the union in question - philosophy.
Aims | Art | God | Intuition | Object | Office | Philosophy | Question | Reflection | Religion | Soul | Spirit | Thinking | Worship | Art |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the reunification of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent persona and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type.
Consciousness | Contradiction | Isolation | Knowing | Law | Life | Life | Love | Means | Nothing | Self | Understanding | Unity |
All the soul of man is resolution; which expires never from valiant men, till their last breath; and when with it, like a flame extinguish’d for want of matter; it does not die but rather ceases to live.
Man | Men | Resolution | Soul |
“From the masses to the masses” the most revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited classes: animals, trees, water, air, grasses.
Deep ecology is supported by modern science... but it is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation. When the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual.
Awareness | Change | Consciousness | Individual | Life | Life | Oneness | Perception | Reality | Science | Sense | Spirit | Awareness |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite - Matter. As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom... Matter has its essence outside itself; Spirit is Being-within-itself (self-contained existence). But this, precisely, is Freedom. For if I am dependent, I refer myself to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of Spirit is none other than self-consciousness - consciousness of one’s own being.
Consciousness | Existence | Freedom | Nature | Self | Spirit |
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
You will then see that you can think, feel, act, speak, work without being conscious of it. And if you learn to see in yourselves the moments of consciousness and the long periods of mechanicalness, you will as infallibly see in other people when they are conscious of what they are doing and when they are not.
Consciousness | People | Will | Work | Learn |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.
Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind. Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks; and in truth whoever shall go about to divide his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task.
Abstract | Existence | Ideas | Mind | Nothing | Soul | Spirit | Time | Truth | Will |
Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does not work I the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion.
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood: a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I am free... when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of spirit is none other than self-consciousness, consciousness of one’s own being. Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self consciousness these are merged in one; for spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realize itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially.
Appreciation | Consciousness | Energy | Existence | Nature | Self | Spirit | Appreciation |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways... But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or my self. By which words I do not denote any of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consist in being perceived.
Existence | Ideas | Imagination | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Self | Soul | Spirit | Words |
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
Moments of consciousness are very short and are separated by long intervals of completely unconscious, mechanical living… you can think, feel, act, speak and work without being conscious.
Consciousness | Work |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Religion is moral life rising to think, i.e. becoming aware of the free universality of its concrete essence… the consciousness of “absolute” truth.
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of good.