George Holmes Howison: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Let men of science keep the method of science within the limits of science; let their readers, at all events, beware to do so. Within these limits there is complete compatibility of science with religion, and forever will be.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.54-5

Men , Religion , Science

“We are not to evade, then, the eternity of free beings that is implied in any serious demand for freedom. If the souls of men are really free, they coexist with God in the eternity which God inhabits, and in the governing total of their self-active being they are of the same nature as he, — they too are self-put rational wholes of self-conscious life. As complete reason is his essence, so is reason their essence—their nature in the large—whatever may be the varying conditions under which their selfhood, the required peculiarity of each, may bring it to appear. Each of them has its own ideal of its own being, namely, its own way of fulfilling the character of God; and its self-determining life is just the free pursuit of this ideal, despite all the opposing conditions by which it in part defines its life. Moreover, since this ideal, seen eternally in God, is the chosen goal of every consciousness, it is the final — not the efficient—cause of the whole existing self. All the being of each self has thus the form of a self-supplying, self-operating life; or, in the phraseology of the Schoolmen and Spinoza, each is causa sui. This is what its "eternity" exactly means.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.338-9

Life , Men , God , Way

“The aim, the only ultimate aim, the ideal of a society of minds, is this moral reliance on the inherent moral freedom of all spirits, guided by the contemplation of its perfect fulfilment in the Supreme Soul, or God, and inspired by his boundless love beheld and therefore felt by all.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.251

Love , God , Soul , Freedom

“Our result thus far is, that determinism and freedom, when justly thought out, are in idea entirely reconcilable. Determinism proves to need no fatalistic meaning, but to be, possibly enough, simply the definite order characteristic of intelligence; while so far from freedom's being indeterminism, chance, or caprice, these are seen to be incompatible with it, and freedom proves to be, like determinism, the spontaneous definiteness of active intelligence.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.324

Intelligence , Idea , Freedom , Chance

“For an induction, despite its formal generality, is always in its own value a particular judgment, always comes short of full universality; whereas, to establish the apriority of an element, we must show it to be strictly universal, or, in other words, necessary.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Later German Philosophy, p.176

Universe

“But when we have reached this conclusive conviction that the roots of our experience and our experimental knowledge are parts of our own spontaneous life, we then readily come to see, further, that the system of our several elements of consciousness a priori is precisely what we must really understand by our unifying or enwholing self, — is exactly what we try to express when we say we have a soul, and that this soul possesses real knowledge; that is, a hold upon eternal things. The realm of the eternal, in short, then becomes for us just the realm of our self-active intelligence; and this it is which, if we can show its reality in detail, will prove to be the clue to our immortal being.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.298

Life , Soul , Intelligence , Understanding

“Therefore, further, for a being who involves such a finite world, the condition of his freedom in it, the condition indispensable but at the same time sufficient, is that his world shall indeed be his; shall be of him, not independent of him; shall be embraced under his causal life, not added to it from elsewhere as a constricting condition; shall be, in fine, a world of phenomena, — states of his own conscious being, organised by his spontaneous mental life, — and not a world of "things-in-themselves."”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.323

Life , World , Freedom , Time

“But now we come upon another objection, which I judge will be the last you can raise. You will say, I suspect, that this world of freedom, self-equipped for sin, is indeed a world which "lieth in wickedness," that in truth there is no real hope of good in it: it is a world of inherent and inexpugnable wrong, and not only damnable, but in fact already damned.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.372

Truth , World , Hope , Freedom

“It may take either of two forms, according as the sinking into sense directly involves only the violation of the spirit's own self-reverence or the graver assault upon the sacredness of others. In either case it is dishonour of God. The risk of it lies in the nature of our being, goes back to the conditions of our existence, of our self-definition in freedom; is constituent in our freedom as this is defined against the freedom of God. This risk is therefore "original" in a sense even deeper than that in which traditional theology makes sin to be original,”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.368-9

God , Nature , Sense , Freedom

““For the ultimate and real meaning of the argument is, that a soul or mind or person, purely as such, is itself the fountain of its percipient experience, and so possesses what has been happily named "life in itself." Proof of the presence in us of a priori or spontaneous cognition, then, is proof of just this self-causative life.”

George Holmes Howison

The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument

Life , Soul , Personality

“Mathematics is that form of intelligence in which we bring the objects of the phenomenal world under the control of the conception of quantity. [Provisional definition. ]”

George Holmes Howison

"The Departments of Mathematics, and their Mutual Relations," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 164. Reported in Moritz (1914)
Journals

World , Intelligence , Mathematics

“That is, art is not the cancelling of the actual and imperfect, and the putting in its place of a vague and fanciful perfection that is only an illusory abstraction after all; it is the transfiguring of the actual by the ideal that is actually immanent in it. The actual hides in itself an ideal that is its true reality and destination, and this hidden ideal it is the function of art to reveal.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.183

Art , Reality , Perfection

“When we say that the mind is a function of the brain, we are therefore to understand that in exact scientific truth we can mean nothing more than this: That physical and physiological changes go on, seriatim, side by side with changes in psychic experience; or vice versa, that psychic changes run parallel, pari passu, with physiological changes in the brain and the other neural tissues.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.295

Truth , Understanding , Change

“To the question, What is the right relation between reason and religion, you will now understand me to answer, It is that reason should be the source of which religion is the issue; that reason, when most itself, will unquestionably be religious, but that religion must for just that cause be entirely rational; that reason is the final authority from which religion must derive its warrant, and with which its contents must comply; that all religious doctrines and instrumentalities, all religious practices, all religious institutions, and all records of religion, whether in tradition or in scripture, must alike submit their claims at the bar of general human reason, and that only those approved in that tribunal can be regarded as of weight or of obligation; in short, that the only real basis of religion is our human reason, the only seat of its authority our genuine human nature, the only sufficient witness of God the human soul. Reason, I shall endeavour to show, is not confined to the mastery of the sense-world and the goods of this world only, but does cover all the range of being, and found and rule the world eternal; it is not merely natural, it is also spiritual; it is itself, when come to itself, the true divine revelation.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.224-5

God , World , Religion , Soul

“For genuine omniscience and omnipotence are only to be realised in the control of free beings, and in inducing the divine image in them by moral influences instead of metaphysical and physical agencies: that is, by final instead of efficient causation.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Modern Science and Pantheism, p.65

“As to our real knowledge, he [Lange] has now shown (1) that a bare thing-in-itself, a thing out of all relation to minds, does not exist; (2) that, even as notion, it is a self-contradiction, something whose sphere is solely within consciousness putting itself as if it were beyond it; (3) that, in spite of this, we continue, and must continue, to accept this illusion, which compels us to limit our knowledge to experience and to renounce all claims to its being absolute.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Later German Philosophy, p.168

Knowledge

““But a second afterthought would follow, and I should ask: What must be the nature of this life dissevered from Nature,—bodiless, void of all sense-perception? What would be left in it except the pure elements of reason, the pure elements of perception, the pure formularies of science, and pure imagination? But what are these, altogether, but the common equipment, not of my mind or of some other individual mind, but of the universal human nature? And what is that universal nature but just the nature of the eternal Cosmic Consciousness? Yes, my personality has vanished; and death, in dissolving the tie to Nature under the alluring prospect of an existence for me wholly self-referred and self-sustaining, has resolved me back into the infinite Vague of the Cosmic Mind, as this might, perchance, be fancied to be in itself, apart from Nature and creation,””

George Holmes Howison

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.118-9

Life , Death , Imagination , Nature

“Poetry, finally, is the form of art where not only are the unities of time, place, and action freed from the restrictive bounds of the single instant, the single spot, the single simple transaction, but the medium of embodiment is thought itself, with its completely articulate utterance in language. Here the very source of the ideal view of the world, the very origin of the creative artistic impulse, becomes the material and the instrument of its own purpose, the executor of its own will. The scope of the creative faculty is therefore the utmost conceivable, and poetry rightfully takes the highest place as the art of the greatest possibilities — the art, indeed, of an all-inclusive compass, as at length completely self-supplying and self-directing.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.210

World , Art , Time

“But what I do mean is, that wherever the principle of Authority has entered and operated in historic Christianity, it has interfered with the free expression and development of that teaching and spirit which is most specifically characteristic of Jesus when his mind and work are viewed, as they must be, in the light of the comparative history of religious thought. I mean that so far as the various Christian bodies which adhere to the principle of Authority have succeeded in displaying the spirit of Christ, and unconsciously keeping its inmost secret still alive in the world, they have done so, not because of the doctrine of Authority, but in spite of it”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.242-3

Secret , World , History , Light

“In this fact we have reached the essential form of every spirit or person — the organic union of the particular with the universal, of its private self-activity in the recognition of itself with its public activity in the recognition of all others. That is, self-consciousness is in the last resort a conscience, or the union of each spirit's self-recognition with recognition of all. Its self-definition is therefore definite, in both senses of the word: it is at once integral in its thorough and inconfusible difference from every other, and yet it is integral in terms of the entire whole that includes it with all the rest. Thus in both of its aspects — and both are essential to it — in a commanding sense it excludes alternative, and there is universal determinism, that is, universal and stable definiteness, just because there is universal self-determination, or genuine freedom. But this universal self-defining implies and proclaims the universal reality, the living presence in all, of one unchangeable type of being — the self-conscious intelligence; and this, presented in all really possible forms, or instances, of its one abiding nature.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.353-4

Intelligence , Nature , Reality , Sense