Actuality
This is not to say that the same essence that appears in intuition may not be exemplified also passively in objects.
Actuality
I regard [matter] as the only power [not the only existent], as composing the groundwork or scaffolding on which everything is stretched and supported; but the great characteristic of matter as known to us is its potentiality; an existing potentiality, definite in its possibilities and distribution, so that all its ulterior manifestations give knowledge of it. It determines the character, order, and tempo of all events: but in itself this potentiality, like the pregnancy of any seed, is unpictured and blind. The appearances and the perceptions that it is destined to breed do not pre-exist in it explicitly; yet it would not be the potentiality that it is were those developments not forthcoming on the appropriate occasions. And how should this ultimate phase of explicitness, in which potentiality becomes actuality, be less existent than the primary phase? In animals the ultimate phase is moral. Nature, which was dynamic in matter then becomes actual in spirit; it becomes the sense and the knowledge of its own existence. And how should this moral actualisation of existence be less existent than the physical potentiality of it?
Analytic / Synthetic Judgments
The question does not arise whether mathematical judgments are analytic or synthetic. Psychologically all judgments and all intuitions of the complex are synthetic, because the terms given are distinguished and compared in thought. But if the judgments are necessary, they must be analytical logically, i.e., founded on the nature of the terms.
Realms '72 at 408 note 1 ("The Realm of Truth: There Are No Necessary Truths").
Art
[A]rt proper is that organic or external rearrangement of matter by which a monument or maxim is established in the world, and an element of traditional form is added to culture.
Autobiography / Literature
This is [science's] business, to investigate and to understand the material world better; but if it ceased to investigate things by experiment and lapsed into the description of experience as a drama, it would cease to be science and would become autobiography. Science—I am speaking of natural science, not of mathematics or philology—is the study of nature; the description of experience is literature.
Concepts & Ideals
Intended essences thus acquire, through the machinery of identification, projection, and intent, a certain remoteness and mystery; they become concepts and ideals.
Realms '72 at 116 ("The Realm of Essence: Essences as Terms").
Dialectic
The sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human, Socratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for its basis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician has the gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from the throne of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuous heart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its own interest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it; so that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the world he may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify his mind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and faculties had entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve. Where nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a new method of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forces stealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being that would frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, and free; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embody them at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured life, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.
Dialectic
What is dialectic? Precisely an analysis or construction of ideal forms which abstracts from such animal faith as might be stimulated by their presence, and traces instead the inherent patterns of logical relations of these forms as intuition reveals them.
Realms '72 at 3 ("The Realm of Essence: Various Approaches to Essence").
Dialectic
[T]he dialectician who most resolutely hedges-in his thought in one lane of logic, may go farthest in that direction, and most unerringly. He unveils some integral pattern, perhaps never copied by things, in the realm of essence; the integrity of his pure intent and undivided attention have enabled him to unveil it. He has laid on himself the difficult task of being consistent, of being loyal, not to the realm of essence, which cannot be betrayed, but to his own commitments; he is determined to find and clarify the meaning of his spoken thoughts. Dangers lie to right and left of his path: he may slip into a change in his premises or into forgetfulness of his goal. Fulfilment is moral, even in logic. The mind bears burdens no less than the body, from which indeed the mind borrows them; and the pregnancy and implication of ideas are signs of that vital bias.
Realms '72 at 101 ("The Realm of Essence: The Basis of Dialectic").
Dialectic
There was a third type of reflection, besides myth and science, that prepossessed the Greek thinkers. Their civilization had become dialectical; they were all orators, arguers, disputants. No less than on shapes and stories, they doted on words. Now it was the power of words, over subtle minds familiar with the vocabulary and grammar only of their native language, that led to what seems to me the first false step in Greek philosophy. Their budding natural science was confused with dialectic, which is play with the ambiguously branching meanings of words. Oracular force attributed to these meanings denaturalised myth into revelation.
Birth of Reason '68 at 148 ("On the False Steps of Philosophy").
Dialectic
And what, properly speaking, is dialectic? Only, I think, a play of variations in meaning. It was invented by the Sophists, as a method of confusing and discrediting all received opinions. It was rescued and turned against its inventors by Socrates, without making it into a pure logic: for dialectic had, and has always retained, an element of foresight and malicious intent, which in Socrates became benevolent irony. He employed dialectic in the pursuit of self-knowledge, in the effort to discover, beneath current language and prejudice, what at bottom a man really thought or loved.
Animal Faith '67 at 119 ("Some Developments of Materialism").
Entelechy
The words entelechy and act or actuality, which I have used often to designate consciousness, are borrowed from Aristotle; and indeed I think no other philosopher has conceived the relation of the body to the mind that animates it so fairly and squarely.
Animal Faith '67 at 279 ("Comparison With Other Views of Spirit").
Entelechy
Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second. Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its body.
Entelechy
The contemplation of so much of essence as is relevant to a particular life is what Aristotle called the entelechy or perfect fruition of life.
Form of Eternity
Spinoza has an admirable doctrine, or rather insight, which he calls seeing things under the form of eternity. This faculty is fundamental in the human mind; ordinary perception and memory are cases of it. Therefore, when we use it to deal with ultimate issues, we are not alienated from experience, but, on the contrary, endowed with experience and with its fruits. A thing is seen under the form of eternity when all its parts or stages are conceived in their true relations, and thereby conceived together. The complete biography of Caesar is Caesar seen under the form of eternity.
Form of Eternity
[Spirit] aspires to see each thing clearly and to see all things together, that is to say, under the form of eternity, and as sheer essences given in intuition.
Form of Eternity
It shows life under the form of eternity, which is the form of death.
Realms '72 at 521 ("The Realm of Truth: Love and Hatred of Truth").
Good
Vitally and intrinsically, good is whatsoever life aspires to in any direction; not, as in charity and kindness, the confluence of aspiration in one life with aspiration in another.
Good
A need is not a good. It denotes a condition to be fulfilled before some natural virtue can be exercised and some true good thereby attained. To feel needs is to feel separated from the good by some unfulfilled prerequisite to possessing it.
Happiness
But heathenism ignores happiness, despises it, or thinks it impossible. . . . . [German moralists] think the pursuit of happiness low, materialistic, and selfish. They wish everybody to sacrifice or rather to forget happiness, and to do "deeds."
It is in the nature of things that those who are incapable of happiness should have no idea of it. Happiness is not for wild animals, who can only oscillate between apathy and passion. To be happy, even to conceive of happiness, you must be reasonable or (if Nietzsche prefers the word) you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passions and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy you must be wise. This happiness is sometimes found instinctively, and then the rudest fanatic can hardly fail to see how lovely it is; but sometimes it comes of having learned something by experience (which empirical people never do) and involves some chastening and renunciation; but it is not less sweet for having this touch of holiness about it, and the spirit of it is healthy and beneficent. The nature of happiness, therefore, dawns upon philosophers when their wisdom begins to report the lessons of experience; an a priori philosophy can have no inkling of it.
Happiness is the union of vitality with art, and in so far as vitality is a spiritual thing and not mere restlessness and vehemence, art increases vitality. . . .
Hypostasis
When Descartes, for example, identified matter with extension, he substituted essence for substance . . . . . . . . When he imagined geometrical figures, indistinguishable in scale, parts, or quality, and bounded by merely ideal lines, nevertheless moving in reference to one another, he was substituting a possible pattern of nature for living nature herself. . . . . The only substance remaining in his system—the only being self-existent in all its parts and in actual flux—was accordingly the discourse in which the material world might appear as a picture. Descartes thus became the father of psychologism against his will . . . .
Realms '72 at 159-60 ("The Realm of Essence: Some Kindred Doctrines").
Individual / Universal vs. Particular
Repetition is impossible in the realm of essence . . . . Repetition is possible only among objects which are particular but not individual; that is, when they exist and are distinguished by their external relations, even if internally they should happen to be precisely similar, and should have but one individuality or essence. . . . This possibility of iterating or repeating an essence is what, from the point of view of existence, makes essences seem abstract or general, when in reality they are the only individuals. . . . Every essence is universal not because there are repeated manifestations of it (for there need be no manifestations at all) but because it is individuated internally by its character, not externally by its position in the flux of nature: and no essence is general for the same reason.
Realms '72 at 35-36 ("The Realm of Essence: Adventitious Aspects of Essence").
Literary Psychology
Knowledge of discourse in other people, or of myself at other times, is what I call literary psychology. It is, or may be, in its texture, the most literal and adequate sort of knowledge of which a mind is capable.
Scepticism '55 at 173-74 ("Knowledge is Faith Mediated by Symbols").
Literary Psychology
To read actions in terms of spirit and to divine the thought that doubtless accompanied them is perfectly legitimate in principle although often mistaken in practice. I call it literary psychology and believe that when the mind-reader and the mind read are genetically akin, it may be more literally true than any other kind of knowledge. Yet it is essentially divination, not science. Scientific psychology must be behaviouristic: it can discover, not what spirits feel or think, but what people are likely to say and do under specific conditions.
Logic
Logic is a refined form of grammar.
Realms '72 at 439 ("The Realm of Truth: Psychological Approaches to Truth").
Matter
Specific potentialities existing at specific places and times are precisely what substance means. I should adopt that for a definition of matter.
Morality
Morality—by which I mean the principle of all choices in taste, faith, and allegiance—has a simple natural ground. The living organism is not infinitely elastic; if you stretch it too much, it will snap; and it justifiably cries out against you somewhat before the limit is reached. This animal obstinacy is the backbone of all virtue, though intelligence, convention, and sympathy may very much extend and soften its expression. As the brute unconditionally wills to live, so the man, especially the strong masterful man, unconditionally wills to live after a certain fashion. To be pliant, to be indefinite, seems to him ignominious.
Genteel Tradition at Bay '31 at 54-55 ("Moral Adequacy of Naturalism").
Morality—Virtue; Logic—Wisdom
Dialectic is the conscience of discourse and has the same function as morality elsewhere, namely, to endow the soul with integrity and to perfect it into a monument to its own radical impulse. But as virtue is a wider thing than morality, because it includes natural gifts and genial sympathies, or even heroic sacrifices, so wisdom is a wider thing than logic. To coherence in thought it adds docility to facts, and humility even of intellect, so that the integrity of its system becomes a human virtue, like the perfect use of a single language, without being an insult to the nature of things or a learned madness.
Realms '72 at 100 ("The Realm of Essence: The Basis of Dialectic").
Mysticism
[Mysticism] consists in the surrender of a category of thought on account of the discovery of its relativity. . . . The ideal of mysticism is accordingly exactly contrary to the ideal of reason ; instead of perfecting human nature it seeks to abolish it; instead of building a better world, it would undermine the foundations even of the world we have built already ; instead of developing our mind to greater scope and precision, it would return to the condition of protoplasm to the blessed consciousness of an Unutterable Reality.
Poetry & Religion '00 at 14-15 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
Perception
Perception is definable as a sensation turned into knowledge of its ground, that is, of its present occasion.
Realms '72 at 496 ("The Realm of Truth: Cognition of the Future").
Potentiality
That in the heart of matter there was always a germ of spirit seems to me as much a truism as it would be to say that in a grape-seed lies the potentiality of the vine, the vine-leaves, and the grapes that actually grow out of it. 'Potentiality' does not signify the pre-existence of eventual things; it signifies only the existence of the conditions which, according to the process of nature, will bring those things about. I smile at the acrobatic logic of Leibnitz, who convinced himself that little feelings and ideas must exist in every minutest particle of cosmic substance. Anaxagoras had reasoned in that way in his qualitative atomism, thinking that metamorphosis must be as impossible in nature as in the realm of essence.
Reason
To the ideal function of envisaging the absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and veers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly called reason.
Reason
There is no dilemma in the choice between animal faith and reason, because reason is only a form of animal faith, and utterly unintelligible dialectically, although full of a pleasant alacrity and confidence, like the chirping of birds.
Reason
What from the moral point of view we call the instruments of reason are primarily the ground and cause of reason: and reason can control matter only because reason is matter organised, and assuming a form at once distinctive, plastic, and opportune. Unity of direction is thus imposed on our impulses; the impulses remain and continue to work and to take themselves most seriously; things tempt and hurt us as much as ever. Yet this very synthesis imposed upon the passions has brought steadiness and scope into the mind. The passions seem less absolute than before: we see them in a more tragic or comic light; and we see that even our noble and civilised life of reason is bought at a price. As there were wild animal joys that it has banished, so there may be divine insights that it cannot heed.
Reason
But how should conscience or reason arise in me or gain the least ascendancy over my heart, if I had no natural needs, interests, or affections? These with their truly categorical imperative might then lend reason and conscience some vital force to oppose to a no less natural madness or vice. Rational life could be nothing but natural life becoming harmonious. The principle of harmony itself, if disembodied, is as impotent as any other essence to govern existence or to manifest itself as a prescribed end to a mind not organically directed upon it.
Reason
Reason is a species of insight, by which essential relations are seen to obtain between ideal terms. It therefore cannot arise before animal sensibility has offered such terms to actual attention, and until the stress of anxious life has given the mind time to pause and notice the peculiar character of one given term contrasted with the peculiar character of another: as for instance the difference, when a cloud suddenly hides the sun, between sunshine and shade.
Dominations '72 at 373 ("Representative Government II: Moral Representation in Nature").
Religion
Suppose now we define religion to be the recognition of the Powers on which our destiny truly depends, and the art of propitiating those Powers and of living, as far as the power in us avails, in devout harmony with them. We should not be friends of religion if we confined it to proclaiming imaginary powers, and living under the real ones in ignorance and despair. A religion worth having must recognise true Powers, however poetical the form may be which that religion lends them; and it must tend to establish peace and sanity in the mind, not fanatical madness. That imagination plays a great part in popular religions, and that fanaticism often invades them, cannot be denied by a materialist; but the fanaticism is often inspired by political motives, as fanatical persecution of religion is also; it is a political rather than a religious vice. Asceticism, on the other hand, has religious motives, and becomes a vice when carried too far; but then the wiser religious authorities themselves condemn it. And the same may be said of the riot of fancy and superstition in some religions. Without killing the imagination that bred religious ideas, theology may interpret them philosophically; and in this the materialist may consistently join.
Dominations '72 at 19-20 ("Whether Naturalism is Irreligious").
Spirit
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").
Substance
Substance may be conceived logically, and then it means pure Being; or it may be conceived psychologically, and then it means absorption in the sense of pure Being; or it may be conceived physically as matter, a name for the constant quantities in things that are traceably transformed into one another. Pure Being and the contemplation of pure Being seem at first sight very different from matter; but they may be a dramatic impersonation of matter, viewed from the inside, and felt as blind intensity and solidified ignorance.
Synthetic Unity of Apperception
The psyche is plastic . . . . Scarcely is the impression received, but it merges in the general sensitiveness or responsiveness of the organ affected, modifying its previous way of reacting on some natural object, an object reported not by that impression alone, but by many others: so that the synthetic unity of apperception (that most radical of transcendental principles) obeys a compulsion peculiar to animal economy, which no pure spirit would need to share, the compulsion to use things as materials, to drop them and forge ahead, or to eat and to digest them: for the drinking in of light through the eyes, or of currents from other organs, thereby rearranging the habits of the nervous system, is very like the consumption of food, restoring the vegetative functions. . . . Pure spirit would never need to apperceive at all; this is an animal exigency that distracts it from intuition.
Transcendental
A chief characteristic of pictorial space, which betrays its animal origin, is that it has a centre. This centre is transcendental; that is to say, it is not determined by any distinction in the parts of space itself, as conceived, all of which are equally central. The dignity of being a centre comes to any point of space from the spirit, which some fatality has lodged there, to the exclusion, at least in its own view, of all other places. These other places appear in that view as removed and ranged in concentric spheres at greater and greater distances. The cosmos of Ptolemy is the perfect model of systematisation of pictorial space. The choice of the earth for a centre, although arbitrary geometrically, was not arbitrary historically, because Ptolemy and all other human beings found themselves on the earth, and were natives of it. So the fatality which always lodges spirit at some one point in nature, and makes this its centre, is not arbitrary biologically: for wherever there is a living organism it becomes a centre for dramatic action and reaction, and thereby calls down spirit to assume that station, and makes it a moving vehicle for one phase of its earthly fortunes. Pictorial space therefore reappears, wherever an animal rises to intuition of his environment, and in each case it has its moral or transcendental centre in that animal; a centre which, being transcendental or moral, moves wherever the animal moves, and is repeated without physical contradiction or rivalry in as many places as are ever inhabited by a watchful animal soul.
Realms '72 at 243-44 ("The Realm of Matter: Pictorial Space and Sentimental Time").
Transcendental Method
In inventing the transcendental method, the study of subjective projections and perspectives, [German philosophy] has added a new dimension to human speculation.
Egotism '40 at 12 ("The General Character of German Philosophy").
Will
Primal Will, as I understand it, is not coextensive with the entire automatism in nature. Automatism and Will are indeed akin, and the first always subtends and envelops the second. Will, however, though it does not imply intelligence or premeditation, does imply eagerness to act. For this reason I should not attribute Will to plants, in spite of the precise and persistent order of their growth.
Will
By the word 'Will,' written with a capital, I understand the universal movement of nature, even if quite unconscious, in so far as running through a cycle or trope it precipitates a result that seems to us a consummation. When this Will in man foresees and desires some consummation, perhaps impossible, I call it will in the psychological sense, and write the word with a small letter.