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Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.

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Now, when we wish to define more strictly the nature of this necessary being, we do not look out for some being the conception of which would enable us to comprehend the necessity of its being--for if we could do this, an empirical presupposition would be unnecessary; no, we try to discover merely the negative condition (conditio sine qua non), without which a being would not be absolutely necessary.

 We shall study freedom under the teleological unity which accords with principles of reason; we shall look upon ourselves as acting in conformity with the divine will only in so far as we hold sacred the moral law which reason teaches us from the nature of actions themselves, and we shall believe that we can obey that will only by promoting the weal of the universe in ourselves and in others. These actions are properly what we call justice; and consequently it is on that virtue that the nature of property depends, and not the virtue on the property. If, on the other hand, we were to ask Priestley--a philosopher who had no taste for transcendental speculation, but was entirely devoted to the principles of empiricism--what his motives were for overturning those two main pillars of religion--the doctrines of the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul (in his view the hope of a future life is but the expectation of the miracle of resurrection)- this philosopher, himself a zealous and pious teacher of religion, could give no other answer than this; I acted in the interest of reason, which always suffers, when certain objects are explained and judged by a reference to other supposed laws than those of material nature--the only laws which we know in a determinate manner. This then is the nature of our abstract ideas and general terms; and it is after this manner we account for the foregoing paradox, THAT SOME IDEAS ARE PARTICULAR IN THEIR NATURE, BUT GENERAL IN THEIR REPRESENTATION. This is more evidently true, where the actions are of quite different natures; since in that case the force of the mind is not only diverted, but even the disposition changed, so as to render us incapable of a sudden transition from one action to the other, and still more of performing both at once. The second part--that of the rational doctrine of nature--may be subdivided into two, physica rationalis* and psychologia rationalis. We may be sure, therefore, whatever contempt may be thrown upon metaphysics by those who judge a science not by its own nature, but according to the accidental effects it may have produced, that it can never be completely abandoned, that we must always return to it as to a beloved one who has been for a time estranged, because the questions with which it is engaged relate to the highest aims of humanity, and reason must always labour either to attain to settled views in regard to these, or to destroy those which others have already established. The philosophy of nature relates to that which is, that of ethics to that which ought to be.