From Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
The environing world can justify itself to the mind only by the free life which it fosters there.
From Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
We may venture to say that among the thinkers of all nations Aristotle was the first to reach the conception of what may fitly be called God [a being spiritual, personal, and perfect, immutable without being abstract, and omnipotent without effort and with out degradation]. . . . The analytic study of Nature (a study which at the same time must be imaginative and sympathetic) could guide us to the conception of her inner needs and tendencies and of what their proper fulfilment would be. We could then see that this fulfilment would lie in intelligence and thought. Growth is for the sake of the fruition of life, and the fruition of life consists in the pursuit and attainment of objects. The moral virtues belong to the pursuit, the intellectual to the attainment. Knowledge is the end of all endeavour, the justification and fulfilment of all growth. Intelligence is the clarification of love.
Poetry & Religion '00 at 70-71 ("The Dissolution of Paganism").
From Reason in Common Sense
Mind is the body's entelechy, a value which accrues to the body when it has reached a certain perfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it should remain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mind perfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.
From Reason in Common Sense
Spirit is useless, being the end of things: but it is not vain, since it alone rescues all else from vanity.
From Soliloquies in England
What happens to exist can take very good care of itself, and is quite indifferent to what people think of it; and as for us, if we possess such cursory knowledge of the nearer parts of existence as is sufficient for our safety, there is no reason why we should attend to it too minutely: there's metal more attractive in discourse and in fiction. Mind, as Hobbes said, is fancy, and it is the things of fancy that greet us first and reward us best. They are far from being more absurd than the facts.
It is only what exists materially that exists without excuse, whereas what the mind creates has some vital justification, and may serve to justify the rest.
From Soliloquies in England
The whole of natural life, then, is an aspiration after the realization and vision of Ideas, and all action is for the sake of contemplation.
From Soliloquies in England
[The psyche] begins to ask itself what it is living for. The answer is not, as an unspiritual philosophy would have it: In order to live on. The true answer is : In order to understand, in order to see the Ideas.
From Soliloquies in England
Spirituality, then, lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely as a vehicle for joy.
From Soliloquies in England
The Ideas were our true friends, our natural companions, and all our safe knowledge was of them; things were only vehicles by which Ideas were conveyed to us, as the copies of a book are vehicles for its sense.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence by virtue of the interest which somebody takes in it, as being the part relevant to his own life. If the organ of this life comes to perfect operation, it will reach intuition of that relevant part of essence. . . . The life of the psyche, which rises to this intuition, determines all the characters of the essence evoked, and among them its moral quality. . . . [P]ure intuition is life at its best . . . .
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
The contemplation of so much of essence as is relevant to a particular life is what Aristotle called the entelechy or perfect fruition of that life.
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
[C]ontact with objects, when at last it becomes safe and pleasant, serves only to fill the mind with images and insights, that is to say, with graphic signs flowering of themselves in the mind.
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
The pure, legitimate, divine offspring of being is seeing, and the ripe fruit of seeing is comprehending. That which biologically is derivative, the Son, becomes morally the crown and fulfilment of the whole cycle: for without the Word that utters and reveals the heart the whole dynamism of the heart would remain barbarous and blind.
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
[T]he motive which prompted theologians to attribute absolute immutability to God and to life in heaven was not love of life but respect for the ideal. They could not, however, express this respect (which they deeply felt, as spirit always must) without employing laudatory rhetorical terms which attribute to it an impossible life and existence.
Christ '46 at 230 ("The Animal Psyche and the Supernatural Soul").
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
Facts thus culminate for the spirit in ideal revelations, in attainments or perfections of form: that is the only ultimate function that passing existence can have.
Christ '46 at 231 ("The Animal Psyche and the Supernatural Soul").
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
[The supernatural] arises in the effort to do justice at once to nature and to the ideal, and to vindicate the superiority, or rather the exclusive ultimate value, of the latter.
Christ '46 at 233 ("The Animal Psyche and the Supernatural Soul").
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
Yet spirit may silently pass on in what might seem the opposite direction when it abandons or despises all this prudential and blind knowledge—blind because it has nothing distinct to offer in the place of the sensuous or poetic images that it transcends—and reverts, now with an enthusiastic worship, to the cult of ideas. For what profit is there in discovering the order of nature or the history of mankind except that we may thereby protect and sweeten the transit of the soul through the world, and chose eternal objects of study and love?
From Dominations and Powers
The complete art of living would therefore be economic in its actions for the sake of being wholly liberal in its enjoyments.
Dominations '72 at 152 ("Economic and Liberal Interests in Religion").
From Physical Order and Moral Liberty
[L]iving beings possess, or may develop, feeling and imagination; in which lies the essence of mind, and the ultimate good of existence.