Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

William Fleming

As the passions are the springs of most of our actions, a state of apathy has come to signify a sort of moral inertia, the absence of all activity or energy. According to the Stoics, apathy meant the extinction of the passions by the ascendency of reason.

It is a fine observation of Plato in his Laws that atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of the understanding.

Atheists are confounded with Pantheists, such as Xenophanes among the ancients, or Spinoza and Schelling among the moderns, who, instead of denying God, absorb everything into him.

Beauty charms, sublimity moves us, and is often accompanied with a feeling resembling fear, while beauty rather attracts and draws us towards it.

Common sense is a phrase employed to denote that degree of intelligence, sagacity, and prudence, which is common to all men.

Of late years, and by the best writers, the term conscience, and the phrases “moral faculty,” “moral judgment,” “faculty of moral perception,” “moral sense,” “susceptibility of moral emotion,” have all been applied to that faculty by which we have ideas of right and wrong in reference to actions, and correspondent feelings of approbation and disapprobation.

He who is certain, or presumes to say he knows, is, whether he be mistaken or in the right, a dogmatist.

Moral obligation, being the obligation of a free agent, implies a law, and a law implies a law-giver. The will of God, therefore, is the true ground of all obligation, strictly and properly so called.

The difference between a parable and an apologue is, that the former, being drawn from human life, requires probability in the narration, whereas the apologue, being taken from inanimate things or the inferior animals, is not confined strictly to probability. The fables of Æsop are apologues.

In the philosophy of Locke the archetypes of our ideas are the things really existing out of us.

The principle of deduction is, that things which agree with the same thing agree with one another. The principle of induction is, that in the same circumstances and in the same substances, from the same causes the same effects will follow. The mathematical and metaphysical sciences are founded on deduction; the physical sciences rest on induction.

Paley’s “Horæ Paulinæ,” which consists of gathering together undesigned coincidences, is an example of the consilience of inductions.

The term intellect includes all those powers by which we acquire, retain, and extend our knowledge, as perception, memory, imagination, judgment, &c.

Ferguson states that the history of mankind, in their rudest state, may be considered under two heads, viz., that of the savage, who is not yet acquainted with property, and that of the barbarian, to whom it is, although not ascertained by laws, a principal object of care and desire.

Pantheism, when explained to mean the absorption of the infinite in the finite, of God in nature, is atheism; and the doctrine of Spinosa has been so regarded by many. When explained to mean the absorption of nature in God, of the finite in the infinite, it amounts to an exaggeration of atheism.

The categories of Aristotle are both logical and metaphysical, and apply to things as well as words. Regarded logically, they are reducible to two, substance and attribute; regarded metaphysically, they are reducible to being and accident. The categories of Kant are quantity, quality, relation, and modality.

Man first examines phenomena, but he is not satisfied till he has reduced them to their causes, and when he has done so, he asks to determine the value of the knowledge he has attained. This is philosophy, properly so called, the mother and governing science, the science of sciences.

In the philosophy of Kant our judgments are reduced under the four heads of quantity, quality, relation, and modality…. The category of modality includes possibility and impossibility, existence and non-existence, necessity or contingency.

The first aphorism of Hippocrates is, “Life is short, and the art is long; the occasion fleeting, experience fallacious, and the judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals co-operate.”

Proverbs embody the current and practical philosophy of an age or nation.

Prudence is one of the virtues which were called cardinal by the ancient ethical writers.

Sir William Hamilton has said that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the best ethology extant; meaning that it contains the best account of the passions and feelings of the human heart, and of the means of awakening and interesting them so as to produce persuasion or action.

Science is knowledge certain and evident in itself, or by the principles from which it is deduced or with which it is certainly connected. It is subjective, as existing in the mind; objective, as embodied in truths; speculative, as leading to do something, as in practical science.

The ideal is to be obtained by selecting and assembling in one whole the beauties and perfections which are usually seen in different individuals, excluding everything defective or unseemly, so as to form a type or model of the species. Thus, the Apollo Belvedere is the ideal of the beauty and proportion of the human frame.

The error of Hobbes, and the school of philosophers who maintained that in doing good to others our ultimate end is to do good to ourselves, lay in supposing that there is any antagonism between benevolence and self-love. So long as self-love does not degenerate into selfishness, it is quite compatible with true benevolence.

The term spirit properly denotes a being without a [material] body. A being that never had a [material] body is a pure spirit. A human soul, when it has left the body, is a disembodied spirit. Mind or soul is incorporated spirit.

Every truth has relation to some other. And we should try to write the facts of our knowledge so as to see them in their several bearings. This we do when we frame them into a system. To do so legitimately, we must begin by analysis and end with synthesis.

There is a sublime in nature, as in the ocean or the thunder; in moral action, as in deeds of daring and self-denial; and in art, as in statuary and painting, by which what is sublime in nature and in moral character is represented and idealized.

Virtue implies opposition or struggle. In man, the struggle is between reason and passion, between right and wrong. To hold by the former is virtue, to yield to the latter is vice…. As virtue implies trial or difficulty, it cannot be predicated of God. He is holy.

Wisdom is the right use or exercise of knowledge, and differs from knowledge as the use which is made of a power or faculty differs from the power or faculty itself.