“It is well enough to say that we shall be consistent, but consistent with what?... The origins of the rule? The course and tendency of development? With logic or philosophy? With the fundamental conceptions of jurisprudence? All these loyalties are possible. All have sometimes prevailed.”

Page 64
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)

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Benjamin N. Cardozo 52
United States federal judge 1870–1938

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“All books avoid, for they
Are the disgrace of our humanity,
And the assassins of the human race.
Mark well my words : the true
Philosophy consists in growing fat.”

Fuggite i libri; questi
Son la vergogna dell’ umana gente,
Son gli assassin! della vita umana.
Credete a me : la vera
Filosofia è quella d’ingrassare.
Socrate Immaginario, Act I., Sc. XIII. — (Tammaro.). Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 303.

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“It ought to be possible to restore to the word "philosophy" its original meaning: philosophy − the "love of wisdom" − is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which "perceives," and not with reason alone, which "concludes."”

Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: the philosopher is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt. The solution to the problem of knowledge − if there is a problem − could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source − the only one there is − is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such.
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