
“Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.”
Fichte Studies § 651
William James, of Santayana's The Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), in a letter to George H. Palmer (1900), as quoted in George Santayana : A Biography (2003) by John McCormick
Misattributed
“Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.”
Fichte Studies § 651
“Undoubtedly, philosophy caused the Revolution. But what caused philosophy? Theological arrogance.”
Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 57.
Context: I have no perfect panacea for human ills. And even if I had I would not attempt to present a system of philosophy between the soup and fish, but this much I will say: The distinctively modern custom of marital bundling is the doom of chivalry and death of passion. It wears all tender sentiment to a napless warp, and no wonder is it that the novelist, without he has a seared and bitter heart, hesitates to follow the couple beyond the church door. There is no greater reproach to our civilization than the sight of men joking the boy whose heart is pierced by the first rays of a life-giving sun, or of our expecting a girl to blush because she is twice God's child today she was yesterday.
“To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason.”
Works, VII, 17.
Context: The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of Reason (which is synonymous with the Idea) when considered in its own actuality, is to simultaneously enter external existence and emerge with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases — a multiplicity that envelops its essential rational kernel with a motley outer rind with which our ordinary consciousness is earliest at home. It is this rind that the Concept must penetrate before Reason can find its own inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But this infinite variety of circumstances which is formed in this element of externality by the light of the rational essence shining in it — all this infinite material, with its regulatory laws — is not the object of philosophy.... To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason.
“Would you really know what philosophy offers to humanity? Philosophy offers counsel.”
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLVII: On master and slave