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George Holmes Howison Quotes
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George Holmes Howison was an American philosopher who established the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley and held the position there of Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. He also founded the Philosophical Union, one of the oldest philosophical organizations in the United States.

Howison's philosophy is set forth almost entirely in his volume entitled The Limits of Evolution, and other essays, illustrating the metaphysical theory of personal idealism . Scrutinizing the idea of evolution that had come to the fore, he proved not only that no Person can be wholly "the product of 'continuous creation'", evolution, but went on also to show that, rooted in the very same reason, fulfilled philosophy necessarily ends in the "Vision Beatific", "that universal circle of spirits which, since the time of the stoics, has so pertinently been called the City of God".

Friends and former students of Howison established the Howison Lectures in Philosophy in 1919. Over the years, the lecture series has included talks by distinguished philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky. Wikipedia  

✵ 1834 – 1916
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George Holmes Howison Quotes

“Idealism is constituted by the metaphysical value it sets upon ideals, not by the aesthetic or the ethical, and rather by its method of putting them on the throne of things than by the mere intent to have them there. It is always distinct from mysticism (which at the core is simply emotionalism), and still more so from voluntarism. Its method is, at bottom, to vindicate the human ideals by showing them to be not merely ideals but realities, and to effect this by exhibiting conscious being as the only absolute reality;”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix C: The System vs. The View of the Oxford Essayists, p.407

“The process which has led us to this result, and which might justifiably be called a Critique of all Scepticism, yields also the final impossibility of materialism in a still clearer way than we noticed before. We saw, some distance back, that the actual of sense could by no possibility be the source of consciousness, being, on the contrary, its mere phenomenon — its mere externalised presentation (picture-object) originated from within. But the hypothetical potential of sense, the assumed subsensible substance called matter, we have now seen to be precisely that self-contradiction talked of as the physical thing-in-itself, and it therefore disappears from the real universe along with that illusion. We have, then, a definitive Critique of all Materialism.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Later German Philosophy, p.170-1

“But so long as human nature is what it is, so long as we are by essence prepossessed in favour of our freedom and yearn for a life that may put death itself beneath our feet, and with death imperfection and wrong, so long will our nature reluctate, so long will it even revolt, at the prospect of having to accept the doctrine of pantheism; so long shall we instinctively draw back from that vast and shadowy Being which, be it conscious or unconscious or simply the Unknowable, must for us and our highest hopes be verily the Shadow of Death”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Modern Science and Pantheism, p.77-8

“In fine, a condition of our making freedom possible in a world ordered by the rigour of natural law is that we accept an idealistic philosophy of Nature: the laws of Nature must issue from the free actor himself, and upon a world consisting of states in his own consciousness, a world in so far of his own making.”

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.325

“The infinite of the soul is mightier than the finite in it.”

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.373

“Under such lights as these, which are shed from what the vast majority of thinking men agree is the profoundest and best that is in us, all such systems as we have described display their final moral incompetency. Let us turn now to the new view, the view that abandons both monism and monarchotheism, that abandons creationism in both its forms, takes resort to Final Cause as the primary and only explanatory principle, and holds to an Eternal Pluralism of causal minds, each self-active, though all recognisant of all others, and thus all in their central essence possessed of moral autonomy, the very soul of all really moral being.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix B: The System in its Ethical Necessity and its Practical Bearings, p.399

“To remove the name of God from the clarified and purified conception of the eternal Ideal Type would be to do violence, inexcusable affront, to the deepest and truest element in the historic religious consciousness. I feel the strongest assurance that my new interpretation of the name of God is the genuine fulfilment of the highest and profoundest prescience in the historic religious life. What offends us in the Spinozistic or other monistic appropriations of the name " God" is the evident absence from their Absolute of all the essential moral qualities. In these it is that true Deity lies, and all God's metaphysical attributes must be keyed up to them; not one of these "natural" attributes dare be construed in any way that conflicts with the eternal moral essence. If they have been so construed historically (as indeed they have), genuine theology requires that the conception of God shall be relieved of these errors, in order that God's nature may stand revealed as it is in its own reality.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix E: Reply to Criticisms of Mr. J.M.E. McTaggert, p.430

“Thus the theme of Personal Idealism — of an eternal world of many rational beings, all self-active, all arbiters of their own destiny and so alike morally responsible, yet, in the vast round of their combinative being, all harmonised by their coexistence with God and their native attracting apprehension of God's nature — grows from one to another of the ascending evidences for it, as the book advances from the first essay to the last.”

George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix A: The Essays in their Systematic Connexion, p.387-8

“Arithmetic is the science of the Evaluation of Functions, Algebra is the science of the Transformation of Functions.”

George Holmes Howison

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 175. Reported in: Memorabilia mathematica or, The philomath's quotation-book, by Robert Edouard Moritz. Published 1914
Journals

“Art in its unblemished nature, like religion and the search for truth, is thus literally a sacrament. The artist's calling and genius are sacred, and the men of old spoke with strict accuracy when they called the poet holy, and directed that he be venerated as a prophet.”

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.199-200

“Human finitude as the summary of human powers, with its consequent complete subjection to Divine predestination, is inwrapt in this conception of Divine causation as causation by efficiency; and there can be no way of supplementing this finitude by the infinity (i. e. freedom) required by a moral order, except by dislodging this view of creation and regeneration.”

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.331-2

“Mathematics is the science of the functional laws and transformations which enable us to convert figured extension and rated motion into number.—Howison, G. H.”

George Holmes Howison

"The Departments of Mathematics, and their Mutual Relations," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 170. Reported in Moritz (1914)
Journals

“Who Feel a Deep Concern”

George Holmes Howison

The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Dedication

“The Dignity of the Soul”

George Holmes Howison

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