Introduction to the Study of Philosophy

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A.C. Armstrong & Son, 1884 - 422 pages
 

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Page 202 - Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas is, —the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got; —which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from things without.
Page 264 - The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination ; that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized.
Page 201 - Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.
Page 86 - In short, there are two principles which I cannot render consistent, nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.
Page 179 - Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee, that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled...
Page 218 - The uniformity in the succession of events, otherwise called the law of causation, must be received not as a law of the universe, but of that portion of it only / which is within the range of our means of sure observation, with a V reasonable degree of extension to adjacent cases.
Page 218 - ... imagination has once learnt to entertain the notion, find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one for instance of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, events may succeed one another at random, without any fixed law ; nor can anything in our experience, or in our mental nature, constitute a sufficient, or indeed any, reason for believing that this is nowhere the case.
Page 329 - ... an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life...
Page 354 - I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea -shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Page 143 - ... and illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, " How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness ? " The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually...

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