The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Lectures

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Houghton, Mifflin, 1892 - 519 pages
 

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Page 98 - If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Page 83 - First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them ; and thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities...
Page 377 - SWEET day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky! The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave, Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie, My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die.
Page 83 - Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: — How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless varíerv? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.
Page 84 - This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense.
Page 450 - The jester doffed his cap and bells, And stood the mocking court before; They could not see the bitter smile Behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head, and bent his knee Upon the monarch's silken stool; His pleading voice arose: "O Lord, Be merciful to me, a fool!
Page 62 - The moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on ; nor all your piety nor wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it.
Page 90 - ... all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind ; that their being is to be perceived or known ; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit...
Page 450 - These clumsy feet still in the mire, Go crushing blossoms without end; These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust Among the heartstrings of a friend. "The ill-timed truth we might have kept — Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung? The word we had not sense to say — Who knows how grandly it had rung...
Page 95 - When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connection — any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other.

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