Causation
[W]hen existence is reduced by superficial analysis to a train of phenomena, so that all real genesis or derivation must be denied, the notion that like ought to breed like survives in the fancy, and phenomena are conceived somewhat like swarms of summer flies, subject to habit, and justifying their reappearance by the mere fact that they have often appeared before. But habit and facility in repetition are incongruous with pure essences, as Hume, the master of this method, was quick to see: they reside rather in the human psyche, which (though his phenomenalism forbade him to say so) is a self-sustaining and developing organisation in matter, like the life-cycle of insects, to which repetitions and rhythms are congruous and native.
Causation
[The issue uppermost in the minds of Hume and Mill was] what internal relevance there was between cause and effect, to be the reason for their sequence. . . . . People, in a word, desiderate a dialectical or moral unity in natural sequences, and it was the absence of this desideration that Hume and Mill pointed out.
Ideas
[My theory of essence] dethrones the family idol of British home-philosophy. An essence is an "idea," but an idea lifted out of its immersion in existing objects and in existing feelings; so that when considered in itself and recognised as a pure essence its very clarity seems to strip both objects and feelings of their familiar lights: reality becomes mysterious and appearance becomes unreal: an intolerable thought to pictorial realists and pictorial idealists.
Immediacy of Knowledge?
It was a false step at which Hobbes halted, which Locke took unsuspectingly, and which sent Berkeley and Hume head over heels: the assumption that facts are known immediately.
Liberalism
It is one of the anomalies of the English mind that while in moral sentiment it makes this margin [for the waywardness of individuals] very narrow, especially among strict liberals, in political theory it leaves it immense; for in the doctrine of liberalism, which is an English product, only the province of the police (that is, safety of person and property) stands subject to control and imposes a duty to collaborate; while in everything intellectual or ideal each man should bravely paddle his own canoe.
But nature does not allow this sort of division of labour, because in the actual order of things what is ideal and intellectual is but the free life and expression of what is material. If you organise the state and industry (say, on the immutable basis of universal competition, free trade, and the right of inheritance) with compulsory state education, monogamy, severe laws against libel and slander, and a science in which all men share, accepting one another's discoveries, then it would be perfectly idle for you to leave thought and love and religion free; a bird in the cage is free in the same way to flap its wings.
It is a material social bondage that enslaves the mind, which cannot be otherwise enslaved; and freedom of mind depends on freedom to rearrange material conditions so that, living under them, the mind may flourish effectually.
The political order that a radical liberalism would establish is therefore a Domination and not a rational order. . . . . Liberal society is therefore compelled to form all manner of voluntary private societies to replenish the human vacuity of its political life; but these private societies, being without power or material roots, remain ghostly and artificial. Private busybodies cannot fill the void in the heart of the political animal, hungry for friendship, for action, for distinction, for perilous adventures, and for rare accomplishments to be achieved in common.
Matter
Specific potentialities existing at specific places and times are precisely what substance means. I should adopt that for a definition of matter. This is what Mill ought to have said, putting potentiality, a physical term, in the place of "possibility," an irrelevant logical one; since everything is always possible, but only specific eventual things are grounded in matter; and Mill also ought not to have spoken of 'sensation' as the realisation of that definite and local potency, because sensation almost always is absent in the evolution of matter, that in which the potentiality is developed being all the ensuing events.
Protestant Theology Attenuated
[A]nd there is also, coming from Germany and England, a transcendental idealism or dialectical eschatology, which are simply Protestant theology attenuated. The rightness of private judgment has become absolute inwardness and universal mentality; and the cries of the Hebrew prophets have become a moralistic philosophy of history, always flattering to the nationality or politics of the historian.
Relativity of Knowledge and Judgment
Nothing could therefore be more false, and willfully ignorant, than to maintain with the Greek Sophists and the British empiricists (when both are radical and consistent) that knowledge and judgment refer to nothing and are always equally true and valid, in the sense that each is equally real—as a sensation when it is felt. Their relativity, properly understood, far from making opinions and judgments worthless renders them capable of some degree of truth and justness, since they express the sensibility of a living psyche, according to its endowment and development, to the influences that reach it, and determine its fate, in the natural world.
Dominations '72 at 303 ("Relativity of Knowledge and of Morals").