From Birth of Reason and Other Essays
I cannot understand what satisfaction a philosopher can find in artifices, or in deceiving himself and others. I therefore like to call myself a materialist; but I leave the study and also the worship of matter to others, and my later writings have been devoted to discovering the natural categories of my spontaneous thought, and restating my opinions in those honest terms. It is essentially a literary labour, a form of art; and I do not attempt to drive other people to think as I do. Let them be their own poets.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
[Belief] is not inevitable, if I am willing and able to look passively on the essences that may happen to be given: but [ ] if I consider what they are, and how they appear, I see that this appearance is an accident to them; that the principle of it is a contribution from my side, which I call intuition. The difference between essence and intuition, though men may have discovered it late, then seems to me profound and certain. They belong to two different realms of being.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
Spirit, in a word, is no phenomenon, not sharing the aesthetic sort of reality proper to essences when given, nor that other sort proper to dynamic and material things; its peculiar reality is to be intelligence in act.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
Spirit is a category, not an individual being . . . .
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
[S]pirit is in another realm of being altogether, and needs the being and movement of matter, by its large sweeping harmonies, to generate it, and give it wings.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
This natural faith opens to me various Realms of Being, having very different kinds of reality in themselves and a different status in respect to my knowledge of them.
Scepticism '55 at 309 ("Comparison with Other Criticisms of Knowledge").
From Realms of Being
[Man] seldom has leisure to dwell on essences . . . unless they are significant of facts in the realm of matter, controlling his destiny. I therefore give a special name to this tragic segment of the realm of essence and call it the Realm of Truth.
From Realms of Being
But [the realm of essence] is not the whole of being . . . . Considered in itself, essence is certainly the deepest, the only inevitable, form of reality; but I am here speaking of approaches to it, that is, of considerations drawn from human experience that may enable us to discern that primary reality and to recognise it to be such in contrast to our own form of being. We stand, then, on another plane, the plane of scattered experience, brute fact, contingent existence . . . .
The priority of the realm of essence is therefore not temporal or dynamic. . . .
Realms '72 at 14-15 ("The Realm of Essence: Various Approaches to Essence").
From Realms of Being
But nature, events, space-time, and even evolution . . . are indicative terms, containing no ontological analysis: my problem is precisely to distinguish in this vast flood of existence the planes and qualities of reality which it contains or presupposes. I wish to note the differences and the relations between the animate and the inanimate, the physical and the moral, the psychological and the logical, the temporal and the eternal. It is very true that one and the same flux of events exemplifies now one and now another of these realms of being . . . .
[If I had avoided the word matter, there would have been a sort of treason] to spirit, to truth, to essence, to those trembling immaterial lights and that infinite immutable background which, unless sharply contrasted with the matter which they surround, may be transposed in confused apprehension to the plane of matter, and saddled with material functions. Have not both truth and spirit, not to speak of essence, been represented in our day as things physical, temporal, instrumental, and practical? Ontologically, this attitude is absurd, and a mere failure in discernment . . . .
From Realms of Being
Nevertheless, it is the business of philosophers, in using the categories of common sense—as they must if they are to be consistent and intelligible—incidentally to criticize and to reform them. The category of truth in particular has been lately subjected to rough usage: and those who live in the thick of contemporary controversies, particularly in America, may well ask me, with a certain irritation, what on earth I can mean by truth.
From Realms of Being
But the realms of truth and of essence are in quite another case. . . . They are proposed as conceptual distinctions and categories of logic; as one of many languages in which the nature of things may be described. Anyone who wishes is free to discard these categories and employ others. The only question will be how he will get on; what sort of intellectual dominion and intellectual life he will achieve; also whether he will really be using other categories in his spontaneous and successful contacts with the world, or only a different jargon in his professional philosophy. Professional philosophies, sincere and even impassioned enough in controversy, are often but poor hypocrisies in daily life.
Realms '72 at 453-54 ("The Realm of Truth: Radiation of Truth").
From Realms of Being
Physical life and an animal psyche are not ultimate categories; they are not the primary movements or tensions in the universe. The potentialities of matter far outrun any such temporary tropes. The scale on which the psyche operates is a local scale, and the perceptive organs that she develops are biased selective organs.
From Realms of Being
In general, it would avoid misunderstanding to remember that essence, matter, truth, and spirit are not, in my view, separate cosmological regions, separately substantial, and then juxtaposed. They are summary categories of logic, meant to describe a single natural dynamic process, and to dismiss from organized reflection all unnecessary objects of faith.
From Realms of Being
This analogy between Christian theology and my ontology must not be pressed: the one is a dogma, the other a language: a language based not on inspiration but on analysis, and meant only to render articulate the dumb experience of the soul. I am not concerned in these Realms of Being with alleged separate substances or independent regions. I am endeavouring only to distinguish the types of reality that I encounter; and the lines of cleavage that I discern are moral and logical, not physical chasms. Yet I find this language applicable, and in that sense true.
From Dominations and Powers
By "spirit" I do not understand any separate power, soul, person, or deity persisting through time with an individual character, like a dramatic personage. I understand by "spirit" only the awakened inner attention that suffuses all actual feelings and thoughts, no matter how scattered they may be and how momentary, whether existing in an ephemeral insect or in the eternal omniscience of God. Spirit so conceived is not an individual but a category: it is life in so far as it reaches pure actuality in feeling or in thought.
Dominations '72 at 55 ("Captive Spirit and Its Possible Freedom").
From Physical Order and Moral Liberty
But nature is more than substance; it is a system of movements, forms, and transformations, which have their specific being in the realm of truth. This realm is non-natural in one respect; it is eternal.
Physical Order '69 at 158 ("The Relations of Spirit to Time").