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George Holmes Howison

135 quotes

“Who Feel a Deep Concern”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Dignity of the Soul”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instead of any monism, these essays put forward a Pluralism: they advocate an eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all alike possessing personal initiative, real self-direction, instead of an all-predestinating single Mind that alone has real free-agency.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time and Space, and all that both "contain," owe their entire existence to the essential correlation and coexistence of minds. This coexistence is not to be thought of as either their simultaneity or their contiguity. It is not at all spatial, nor temporal, but must be regarded as simply their logical implication of each other in the self-defining consciousness of each. And this recognition of each other as all alike self-determining, renders their coexistence a moral order.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The members of this Eternal Republic have no origin but their purely logical one of reference to each other, including thus their primary reference to God. That is, in the literal sense of the word, they have no origin at all — no source in time whatever. There is nothing at all, prior to them, out of which their being arises; they are not "things" in the chain of efficient causation. They simply are, and together constitute the eternal order.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus the world of minds, as the sole world of Ends presupposed in all moral responsibility, the world of ultimate and standard Objects, becomes at one and the same stroke the warranting foundation of knowledge and of good-will alike: to refuse good-will is to violate the primary principle of each mind's own existence, and is therefore to convict oneself, in one and the same act, of irrationality and folly as well as of indifference or of ill-will.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The achievement of this task depends on attaining to the true distinction, the real relation, between the two orders of existence which to ordinary and uncritical reflexion — usual common-sense — appear as two substances, so called, or species of substance, and are named "mind" and "matter." What is to be shown is, that this common-sense contrast, read off as a hard-and-fast dualism, is not intelligibly interpretable except as the distinction between two aspects of one and the same total nature in the beings that possess it”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognises others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The agnostic position, the largest historic view of philosophy would say, is an unwarrantable arrest of the philosophic movement of reason; and its unjustifiable character appears in the fact, which can clearly be shown, that it involves at once a petitio and a self-contradiction.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He [Kant] suggested that experience may be not at all simple, but always complex, so that the very possibility of the experience which seems to the empiricist the absolute foundation of knowledge may depend on the presence in it of a factor that will have to be acknowledged as a priori. This factor issues from the nature of the mind that has the experience, and introduces into experience all that distinguishableness, that arrangedness, and that describable form, without which it could not be conceived as apprehensible or intelligible, that is, as an experience at all.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond of their law which in the mood of vague and inaccurate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an effect.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Throughout Nature, as distinguished from idealising mind, there reigns, in fine, no causation but transmission.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plain in the doctrinal firmament of every Christian, clear like the sun in the sky, should shine the warning: Unless there is a real man underived from Nature, unless there is a spiritual or rational man independent of the natural man and legislatively sovereign over entire Nature, then the Eternal is not a person, there is no God, and our faith is vain.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The professed Philosophy of Evolution is not an adult philosophy, but rather a philosophy that in the course of growth has suffered an arrest of development.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fulfilled philosophy vindicates our faith in the Personality of the Eternal Ideal, in the reality of God, by vindicating the reality of man the Mind, and exhibiting his legislative relation to Nature and thence to evolution. It thus secures a stable footing for freedom, and for immortality with worth, and thereby for the existence of the Living God who is Love indeed, because the Inspirer of an endless progress in moral freedom.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let men of science keep the method of science within the limits of science; let their readers, at all events, beware to do so. Within these limits there is complete compatibility of science with religion, and forever will be.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We hear constantly, too, that theism, to be real, must teach that there is a being who is truly God: that the Principle of existence is a Holy Person, who has revealed his nature and his will to his intelligent creatures, and who superintends their lives with a providence which aims to secure their obedience to his will as the only sufficient condition of their blessedness.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus, by mere confusion of thought, or by inability to rise above conceptions couched in terms of space and time, the original theistic formula — which in its contrasting of theism against deism and pantheism is unobjectionable, and correct enough so far as it goes — is brought in the end to contradict its own essential idea.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For genuine omniscience and omnipotence are only to be realised in the control of free beings, and in inducing the divine image in them by moral influences instead of metaphysical and physical agencies: that is, by final instead of efficient causation.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No mind can have an efficient relation to another mind; efficiency is the attribute of every mind toward its own acts and life, or toward the world of mere "things " which forms the theatre of its action; and the causal relation between minds must be that of ideality, simply and purely.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not in its statement of God as the All-in-all, taken by itself, but in its consequent denial of the reality of man — his freedom and immortal growth in goodness — is it that pantheism betrays its insufficiency to meet the needs of the human spirit.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But so long as human nature is what it is, so long as we are by essence prepossessed in favour of our freedom and yearn for a life that may put death itself beneath our feet, and with death imperfection and wrong, so long will our nature reluctate, so long will it even revolt, at the prospect of having to accept the doctrine of pantheism; so long shall we instinctively draw back from that vast and shadowy Being which, be it conscious or unconscious or simply the Unknowable, must for us and our highest hopes be verily the Shadow of Death”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A pantheistic edict of science would only proclaim a deadlock in the system and substance of truth itself, and herald an implacable conflict between the law of Nature and the law written indelibly in the human spirit.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To present universal Nature as the deep in which each soul with its moral hopes is to be engulfed, is to transform existence into a system of radical and irremediable evil, and thus to make genuine religion impossible;”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us not fail to realise that pantheism means, not simply the all-pervasive interblending and interpenetration of God and other life, but the sole causality of God, and so the obliteration of freedom, of moral life, and of any immortality worth the having; in a word, of the true being of God himself.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With regard now, first, to the argument drawn with such apparent force purely from the method of natural science, it will be plain to a more scrutinising reflexion, that shifting from the legitimate disregard of a supersensible Principle — a disregard in which the empirical method is entirely within its right — to the denial or the doubt of it because there is and can be no scientific evidence for it, is in fact an abuse of the scientific method, an unwarrantable extension of it to decisions lying by its own terms beyond its reach.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Natural science must therefore, in truth, be declared silent on this question of pantheism; as indeed it is, and from the nature of the case must be, upon all theories of the supersensible alike — theistic, deistic, atheistic, pantheistic. Natural science has no proper concern with such theories.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the other hand, it would be materially unjust to take leave of Hartmann and Schopenhauer without emphatically acknowledging the service they have both rendered by so completely unveiling the pessimism latent in any theory that represents the Eternal as impersonal.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As to our real knowledge, he [Lange] has now shown (1) that a bare thing-in-itself, a thing out of all relation to minds, does not exist; (2) that, even as notion, it is a self-contradiction, something whose sphere is solely within consciousness putting itself as if it were beyond it; (3) that, in spite of this, we continue, and must continue, to accept this illusion, which compels us to limit our knowledge to experience and to renounce all claims to its being absolute.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Therefore, precisely by the investigation through which Lange has led us, we are now in the position to assure ourselves of the reality, the absoluteness in quality, of our human intelligence.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By the path into which Lange has led us we therefore ascend from the agnostic-critical standpoint to the higher and invigorating one of a thorough, all-sided, and affirmative idealism.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is plain, of course, that any proof of this depends upon the validity of the doctrine of a priori cognition; only by our proved possession of such cognition can there be any evidence that we are self-active realities. It is in this reference noteworthy, therefore, that Lange, as defender of agnosticism, sees he cannot afford to admit the theory upon which alone cognition strictly a priori can be established.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For an induction, despite its formal generality, is always in its own value a particular judgment, always comes short of full universality; whereas, to establish the apriority of an element, we must show it to be strictly universal, or, in other words, necessary.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True is it indeed, that without an Abiding and Active in us the transitory and sensible is impossible. As the case has been forcibly put in a saying that deserves to become classic, "Our unconditioned universality is the ground of our existence," — its ground, that is, at once its necessary condition and its sufficient reason.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As poetry is a species of art, its essential principle must be a specific development of the principle essential to all art; and it will merely remain for us to determine what the specific addition is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's art make to the principle of art in general.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is, art is not the cancelling of the actual and imperfect, and the putting in its place of a vague and fanciful perfection that is only an illusory abstraction after all; it is the transfiguring of the actual by the ideal that is actually immanent in it. The actual hides in itself an ideal that is its true reality and destination, and this hidden ideal it is the function of art to reveal.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only the most experienced judges can recognise a work of the highest order at sight; even to them the proper realisation of its true compass and depth comes only through repeated examination and careful study; while the ordinary examiner finds the first impression of the greatest works ineffective or even disappointing. Work of genius demands for its swift recognition an answering genius in the beholder; in lack of it, there must be a patient teachableness, that awaits the slow self-revelation of greatness.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The doctrine which thus comes to light, that in art man not only shares literally in the creative office of God, but enriches Nature with new members that express its divine Ground in a still higher form, will seem to many overbold — extravagant and irreverent. But its advocates are neither few nor inconsiderable; it is supported by the greatest names.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art in its unblemished nature, like religion and the search for truth, is thus literally a sacrament. The artist's calling and genius are sacred, and the men of old spoke with strict accuracy when they called the poet holy, and directed that he be venerated as a prophet.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art will never get its own, nor do its proper work in the discipline of life, until the sense of its sacred character comes once more into the general judgment, and masses of men look upon it as the few great spirits have looked who have been its true masters and interpreters”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The proper form of science is explanation and argument, and the proper form of religion and morality is exhortation and command; but that of art is simply the directest embodiment of its theme as the theme itself requires. Assured that the theme is compatible with the ideal nature of art, the artist knows that it will justify itself and work its own work, if it can only find expression in its natural embodiment.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, nothing short of the creative principle of imagination gives the fine arts their specific quality—the principle that creates for the sake of creating, for the sake of giving free course to that imagination which is not only an essential but the guiding factor in the supersensible being of man, and which not only founds for him the world of religion and of science, as well as that of art, but is the constructive and developing principle of the universe itself.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To the great Greek teachers, even to Socrates, as it still is practically to us all, this one and only truth of living religion was more or less but a distant thought, summoned into direct consciousness at intervals by a reflective effort, and brought to bear upon conduct amid the clamours of our animal being. To Jesus, on the contrary, it is an ever-present perception, like light to vision, like space to our movements, like time to our projects in life.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All souls are to strive after just that form of life with each other in which none will employ toward another any method of constraint, but will rely upon the moral action of the powers in the others' souls, just as God eternally does.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The aim, the only ultimate aim, the ideal of a society of minds, is this moral reliance on the inherent moral freedom of all spirits, guided by the contemplation of its perfect fulfilment in the Supreme Soul, or God, and inspired by his boundless love beheld and therefore felt by all.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His [Christ’s] point of view, of the literal divine-son ship of every lowliest and most sinful and sinning spirit, committed him logically to the assertion of the implicit equality of all spirits with each other, far as concerns their moral powers and destination no matter what their actual and contingent state; and also of their potential equality with God. His doctrine may well be summarised in the consecrated phrase, usually applied only to himself, "The son of man is the son of God.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The aim of such a religion is not merely to "glorify God"; rather, it is to glorify all souls, as all in the image of God; to glorify them by fulfilling for every one of them its vocation to repeat in a new way the life of universal love that is the life of God, and thus to attain, through the universal greatening, such a real glorification of God as other forms of religion seek after in vain.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Accordingly we may explicate the new doctrine of Jesus into these three truths: (1) That God is the perfect Person, the central member in the universal society actuated by love; (2) that the soul is immortal; (3) that it is free, both in the sense of being the responsible author of all its acts, and in the sense that its fund of ultimate resources is equal to fulfilling its duty to love as God loves.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moral government of God, springing from the Divine Love, is a government by moral agencies purely. It relies utterly on the operation of the powers native to the soul itself; and leaving aside all the juridical enginery of reward and punishment, it lets his sun shine and his rain fall alike on the just and on the unjust, that the cause of God may everywhere win simply upon its merits.”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the core, what Jesus did was to reform the conception of God in the interest of the absolute reality and the moral freedom of men. With this what can be more discordant, what more hostile to it, than the attempt to establish by an appeal to declarative authority doctrines that either contradict the human reason or have no witness from it?”
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source