Consciousness Sentence Examples

consciousness
  • Her eyes drooped and she lost consciousness again.

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  • He had regained consciousness that morning.

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  • He was tormented by the consciousness of his own weakness.

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  • The last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was a rock ledge coming at her.

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  • He was a nobleman, fond of peace and actuated by the consciousness of a great mission.

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  • Religion is consciousness of the infinite.

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  • She drifted in and out of consciousness – which was probably why she thought she was dreaming when she heard the voice calling her name.

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  • Our actual consciousness of freedom is not seriously disputed.

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  • This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from and independent of reason.

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  • She couldn't argue that point, but Alex might regain consciousness and she wanted to be there if he did.

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  • The creature's third sip drove her into the darkness between consciousness and sleep.

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  • Struggling with consciousness, Jackson first noticed the intense burning in his throat.

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  • One thought had been gnawing at her consciousness since the first time she suspected him of being involved in drugs.

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  • She hung, helpless and exhausted, stuck in the in-between place until the pain of her head hitting something hard jarred her into consciousness.

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  • The world faded into shadow and light then into an uncomfortable darkness, not quite sleep but not consciousness either.

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  • By morning he still hadn't regained consciousness and they were starting to use the word coma.

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  • He attacks Hegelianism for its pantheism, its lowering of human personality, and imperfect recognition of the demands of the moral consciousness.

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  • Newman, Frances Power Cobbe, and others, for their more modern speculative belief in God, which, while non-Christian or at least non-orthodox, held to an immanent God, continually revealing himself - in the moral consciousness.

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  • He must have reached an arm across the warmth next to him and her nearly soundless mewl began his slow but steady rise to the surface of consciousness.

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  • He had no idea how long it would take her to regain consciousness, or, if even then, she would be strong enough to free herself, yet he saw no other option.

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  • Fading in and out of consciousness, Claire blinked to try to clear her vision.

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  • A wave of anger came out of nowhere, surging through her veins and washing the resentment to the surface of her consciousness.

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  • As regards their common opposition to the Turk, this appeal led to nothing; but it marked the growth of a new Italian consciousness.

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  • And so the Scotsmen fell back upon the witness of consciousness.

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  • The great critic of scepticism has diverged from idealism toward scepticism again, or has given his idealism a sceptical colour, mitigated - but only mitigated - by faith in the moral consciousness.

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  • Not that a posteriori is denied, or that idealism even in Hegel tries to evolve reality out of the philosopher's inner consciousness.

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  • His reply to Hume was this - Mechanical causation is as real as the unity of consciousness.

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  • All parts of matter have an inward plastic life whereby they can fashion themselves to the best advantage, according to their capability, though not with consciousness.

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  • There is no sign that Tauler, for example, or Ruysbroeck, or Thomas a Kempis had felt the dogmatic teaching of the Church jar in any single point upon their religious consciousness.

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  • Religion therefore is "nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own.

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  • Feuerbach labours under the same difficulty as Fichte; both thinkers strive in vain to reconcile the religious consciousness with subjectivism.

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  • The facts of consciousness are the only facts which, to begin with, we are justified in asserting to exist.

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  • It brings out into clear consciousness certain potentialities in the realization of which man's true good must consist.

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  • More dimly still visions of what the first bird may have been like could be reasonably entertained; and, passing even to a higher antiquity, the reptilian parent whence all birds have sprung was brought within reach of man's consciousness.

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  • In Der Kampf urns Dasein am Himmel von Prel endeavoured to apply the Darwinian doctrine of organic evolution not only to the sphere of consciousness but also even more widely as the philosophical principle of the world.

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  • Their representation of the moral character, the religious consciousness, the teaching of Jesus, inspires confidence.

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  • The ultimate triumph of the good spirit is an ethical demand of the religious consciousness and the quintessence of Zoroaster's religion.

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  • Y of finding and applying a criterion of the presence or absence of consciousness, it is none the less desirable, in the interests of psychology, to state that truly instinctive acts (as defined) are accompanied by consciousness.

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  • This marks them off from such reflex acts as are unconsciously performed, and from the tropisms of plants and other lowly organisms. There remains, however, the difficulty of finding any satisfactory criterion of the presence of consciousness.

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  • The chief interest of the Spanish period lies in the advance of settlement in the western territories of the United States, the international intrigues - British, French and Spanish - involving the future of the valley, the demand of the United States for free navigation on the Mississippi, and the growing consciousness of the supreme importance of the river and New Orleans to the Union.

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  • The soul, as being immaterial, is immortal, and its consciousness does not depend upon its connexion with the body.

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  • This was the 3rd of December 1894; he was gaily talking on the verandah of his house at Vailima when he had a stroke of apoplexy, from which he never recovered consciousness, and passed away painlessly in the course of the evening.

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  • The act of consciousness, according to him, is the basis-.

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  • These acts of consciousness are manifestations of will, which is the motive and creative power of the intellectual life.

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  • Admitting Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious of mental states only, he holds that this consciousness constitutes a knowledge of the "thing-in-itself" - which Kant denies.

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  • Careful experiment and observation, not the inner consciousness, are, he insists, the only foundations of true science.

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  • The king's consciousness of his weakness was combined with a sense of duty, and it was upon these two.

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  • Knowing the almost endless complexity of organic structures, realizing that man himself with all the mystery of his life and consciousness must be included in any explanation of the origin of living things, they preferred to regard living things as something apart from the rest of nature, specially cared for, specially created by a Divine Being.

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  • Reinhold lays greater emphasis than Kant upon the unity and activity of consciousness.

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  • The principle of consciousness tells us that every idea is related both to an object and a subject, and is partly to be distinguished, partly united to both.

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  • But this is a notion which is self-contradictory if consciousness be essentially a relating activity.

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  • Considered apart from the phenomena of consciousness, the phenomena of life are all dependent upon the working of the same physical and chemical forces as those which are active in the rest of the world.

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  • Folk-right is the aggregate of rules, formulated or latent but susceptible of formulation, which can be appealed to as the expression of the juridical consciousness of the people at large or of the communities of which it is composed.

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  • This acted at once and without any consciousness of difference of function, as judiciary, as legislature, in so far as there was any in the feudal period, and as council, and it exercised final supervision and control over revenue and administration.

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  • There is, however, no certain evidence that the Israelites in historical times had any consciousness of the primitive significance of the name.

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  • But he did more than interpret to his age the significance of man's ultimate theistic beliefs, he gave them vitality by reading them through the consciousness of Jesus Christ.

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  • Yet it may be doubted whether the value attached in Japan to the abstract quality, truth, is as high as the value attached to it in England, or whether the consciousness of having told a falsehood weighs as heavily on the heart.

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  • On the one hand, his whole formulation of Evolution in mechanical terms urges him in the direction of materialism, and he attempts to compose the mind out of homogeneous units of consciousness (or" feeling ")" similar in nature to those which we know as nervous shocks; each of which is the correlative of a rhythmical motion of a material unit or group of such units "(§ 62).

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  • And he admits (§ 63) that if we were compelled to choose between translating mental phenomena into physical and its converse, the latter would be preferable, seeing that the ideas of matter and motion, merely symbolic of unknowable realities, are complex states of consciousness built out of units of feeling.

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  • In it, too, the sense of duty will have become otiose and have disappeared, being essentially a relic of the history of the moral consciousness.

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  • The immorality of Roman society not lvew literary only affords abundant material to the satirist, but deepens the consciousness of moral evil in purer and more thoughtful minds.

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  • An early expression of reviving Lithuanian national consciousness was the appearance of the newspaper" Ausra,"which, printed in East Prussia, lived for three years, though even in that short period its editor, banished from Germany, had to take refuge at Prague.

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  • The scryer may let his consciousness play freely, but should not be disturbed by lookers-on.

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  • The writer has no experience of trance, sleep or auto-hypnotization produced in such experiments; scryers have always seemed to retain their full normal consciousness.

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  • We are not concerned with the question whether the earliest forms of recorded religious consciousness such as animism, or totemism, or fetishism, were themselves degradations of a primitive revelation or not.

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  • The special characteristic of its theology is in the first part where it owes most to the teaching of Augustine, who in his striving after self-knowledge analysed the mystery of his own triune personality and illustrated it with psychological images, " I exist and I am conscious that I exist, and I love the existence and the consciousness; and all this independently of any external influence."

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  • But, though this method has been applied in its fullness, and that by the keenest exegetes, there remains a consciousness that it has failed to solve many of the problems of the book.

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  • To the last he maintained the narrow standpoint of Pusey and Keble, in defiance of all the developments of modern thought and modern scholarship; and his latter years were embittered by the consciousness that the younger generation of the disciples of his school were beginning to make friends of the Mammon of scientific unrighteousness.

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  • We must remember, too, that Ignatius was writing under the consciousness of impending martyrdom and evidently felt that this gave him the right to criticize the bishops and churches of Asia.

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  • In 1804 were also delivered the noble lectures entitled Grundziige des gegenwdrtigen Zeitalters (Characteristics of the Present Age, 1804), containing a most admirable analysis of the Aufkltirung, tracing the position of such a movement of thought in the natural evolution of the general human consciousness, pointing out its inherent defects, and indicating as the ultimate goal of progress the life of reason in its highest aspect as a belief in the divine order of the universe.

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  • To Kant the fundamental condition was given in the synthetical unity of consciousness.

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  • But by Kant there was no attempt made to show that the said special conditions were necessary from the very nature of consciousness itself.

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  • So strongly was this doctrine emphasized by Kant, that he seemed to refer the matter of knowledge to the action upon us of a non-ego or Ding-an-sich, absolutely beyond consciousness.

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  • It traces the necessary acts by which the cognitive consciousness comes to be what it is, both in form and in content.

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  • Not that it is a natural history, or even a phenomenology of consciousness; only in the later writings did Fichte adopt even the genetic method of exposition; it is the complete statement of the pure principles of the understanding in their rational or necessary order.

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  • The ego is the ego; such is the first pure act of conscious intelligence, that by which alone consciousness can come to be what it is.

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  • But in consciousness there is equally given a primitive act of op-positing, or contra-positing, formally distinct from the act of position, but materially determined, in so far as what is op-posited must be the negative of that which was posited.

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  • We have spoken of the ego as becoming aware of its own freedom, and have shown how the existence of other egos and of a world in which these egos may act are the necessary conditions of consciousness of freedom.

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  • All that has been expounded follows if the ego comes to consciousness.

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  • They awakened the author himself to a consciousness that his doctrines were after all incompatible with some of the Church's teachings, and led him to consider the nature of the papal power which issued the indulgence.

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  • A thing-in-itself which is not a thing to some consciousness is an entirely unrealizable, because self-contradictory, conception.

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  • It is equally opposed to the doctrine which represents the subject itself and its state and judgments as the single immediate datum of consciousness, and all else, whether the objects of an external world or person other than the individual subject whose states are known to itself, as having a merely problematic existence resting upon analogy or other process of indirect inference.

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  • This being so, not only were physics and mathematics impossible as sciences of necessary objective truth, but our apparent consciousness of a permanent self and object alike must be delusive.

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  • It was these paradoxes that Kant sought to rebut by a more thoroughgoing criticism of the basis of knowledge the substance of which is summed up in his celebrated Refuta tion of Idealism,' wherein he sought to undermine Hume's scepticism by carrying it one step further and demonstrating that not only is all knowledge of self or object excluded, but the consciousness of any series of impressions and ideas is itself impossible except in relation to some external permanent and universally accepted world of objects.

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  • In coming, as at a certain point in its development it does, to the consciousness of an object, the mind does not find itself in the presence of an opponent, or of anything essentially alien to itself but of that which gives content and stability to its own existence.

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  • Ordinary consciousness ignores these " latent fires "; ordinary discussion brings them to light and divides men into factions and parties over them; philosophy not because it denies but because it acknowledges the law of non-contradiction as supreme is pledged to seek a point of view from which they may be seen to be in essential harmony with one another as different sides of the same truth.

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  • If what is real in things is ultimately nothing but their relations, and if relations are inconceivable apart from the relating mind, what is this but the dissolution of the solid ground of external reality which my consciousness seems to assure me underlies and eludes all the conceptual network by which I try to bring one part of my experience into connexion with another ?

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  • The expectation of a Messianic restoration to the Holy Land has always been strong, if often latent, in the Jewish consciousness.

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  • Thus the recent defenders of the apostolic authorship, the Unitarian James Drummond (1903), the Anglican William Sanday (1905), the Roman Catholic Theodore Calmes (1904), can tell us, the first, that " the evangelist did not aim at an illustrative picture of what was most characteristic of Jesus "; the second, that " the author sank into his own consciousness and at last brought to light what he found there "; the third, that " the Gospel contains an entire theological system," " history is seen through the intervening dogmatic development," " the Samaritan woman is.

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  • There is a want of depth in Christian experience, in the power of realizing relative spiritual values in the light of the master principle involved in the distinctively Christian consciousness, such as could raise Clement above a verbal eclecticism, rather than comprehensiveness, in the use of Apostolic language.

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  • Firstly, it suggests the supernormal level to which the Apostolic consciousness was raised at a bound by the direct influence of the Founder of Christianity, and justifies the marking-off of the Apostolic writings as a Canon, or body of Christian classics of unique religious authority.

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  • Secondly, it means that the actual development of ecclesiastical doctrine began, not from the Apostolic consciousness itself, but from a far lower level, that of the inadequate consciousness of the subapostolic Church, even when face to face with their written words.

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  • Consciousness is entirely unaffected by physostigmine, there being apparently no action on any part of the brain above the medulla oblongata.

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  • It will have asserted the evolution of man and his consciousness out of the phenomena of his consciousness.

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  • Herbart and Lotze, both deeply affected by the Leibnitzian hypothesis of indivisible monads, supposed that man's soul is seated at a central point in the brain; and Lotze supposed that this supposition is necessary to explain the unity of consciousness.

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  • The destruction of an obsolete political system, begun by Pombal, was completed by the Peninsular War; while French invaders and British governors together quickened among the Portuguese a new consciousness of their nationality, and a new desire for political rights, which rendered inevitable the change to constitutional monarchy.

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  • He may regard it as an illusion, and attempt to prove the incompatibility of our consciousness of freedom with the facts of existence and the nature of the world.

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  • Is it possible to hold that determinist arguments are of so convincing a character as to enable us to perceive at the moment of action the untrustworthy nature of our consciousness that we are free to choose between alternatives and to grasp beneath the appearance the underlying necessity which rules our wills ?

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  • On the other hand we have no such immediate consciousness of the necessity which is said to control our wills.

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  • And until the determinist can successfully explain to us how in a world obeying throughout its history necessary laws and limited in its nature to the exhibition of causal sequences the consciousness of freedom could ever have arisen, we may be content to trust the immediate affirmation of our moral selves.

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  • And experiments in morality (apart from the inconvenient practical consequences likely to ensue) are useless for purposes of ethics, because the moral consciousness would itself at one and the same time be required to make the experiment and to provide the subject upon which the experiment is performed.

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  • In logic and metaphysics it investigates either the process of apprehension itself, or conceptions such as cause, substance, space, time, which the ordinary scientific consciousness never criticizes.

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  • In moral philosophy the place of the body of sciences, which philosophy as the theory of knowledge investigates, is taken by the developed moral consciousness, which already pronounces moral judgment without hesitation, and claims authority to subject to continual criticism the institutions and forms of social life which it has itself helped to create.

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  • It is in those two functions that the real life of the ego is manifested, but behind them is self-consciousness permanently present, which is always both subjective and objective - consciousness of ourselves and of the non-ego.

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  • Aesthetic, moral and religious feelings are respectively produced by the reception into consciousness of large ideas - nature, mankind and the world; those feelings are the sense of being one with these vast objects.

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  • In his Christian Ethics he dealt with the subject from the basis of the Christian consciousness instead of from that of reason generally; the ethical phenomena dealt with are the same in both systems, and they throw light on each other, while the Christian system treats more at length and less aphoristically the principal ethical realities - church, state, family, art, science and society.

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  • Feeling in this higher sense (as distinguished from "organic" sensibility, Empfindung), which is the minimum of distinct antithetic consciousness, the cessation of the antithesis of subject and object, constitutes likewise the unity of our being, in which the opposite functions of cognition and volition have their fundamental and permanent background of personality and their transitional link.

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  • In his earlier days he called it a feeling or intuition of the universe, consciousness of the unity of reason and nature, of the infinite and the eternal within the finite and the temporal.

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  • In later life he described it as the feeling of absolute dependence, or, as meaning the same thing, the consciousness of being in relation to God.

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  • In our consciousness of the world the feelings of relative dependence and relative independence are found; we are acted upon, but we also react.

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  • In our religious consciousness the latter element is excluded, and everything within anti without us is referred to its absolute cause, that is, God.

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  • This feeling of absolute dependence can arise only in combination with other forms of consciousness.

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  • As immediate knowledge, however, it is no more than the consciousness of the unity of the world, a unity which can never be reached by human inquiry.

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  • It is the religion of mediatorial salvation, and, as Schleiermacher emphatically taught in his riper works, of salvation through the mediation of Christ; that is, its possessors are conscious of having been delivered by Jesus of Nazareth from a condition in which their religious consciousness was overridden by the sense-consciousness of the world and put into one in which it dominates, and everything is subordinated to it.

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  • The consciousness of being saved in this sense is now transmitted and mediated by the Christian church, but in the case of Jesus, its originator, it was an entirely new and original factor in the process of religious development, and in so far, like every new and higher stage of being, a supernatural revelation.

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  • As regards Christian theology, it is not its business to formulate and establish a system of objective truth, but simply to present in a clear and connected form a given body of Christian faith as the contents of the Christian consciousness.

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  • The non-ego - not, be it noticed, the world as we know it - is op-posed in consciousness to the ego.

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  • His life was also happy, for he had pleasure in his work, he loved and was loved by his wife and children; he had a strong constitution, and retained his bodily and mental powers to the last; his faith in the religion of his youth was unshaken to the end; and he lived throughout his long life with the consciousness of rectitude.

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  • It is doubtful whether this root meant originally to " cover " or " wipe out "; but probably it is used as a technical term without any consciousness of its etymology.

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  • Christ lived on earth the life of man, and without questioning the equally genuine Divine element laid stress on this genuine human consciousness.

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  • By the healthy spirit of patriotism breathed in all his works Jirasek contributed not a little to maintaining among the masses of the people a national consciousness and faith in a better national future.

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  • What have been designated faculties are, upon his view, merely classified facts or phenomena of consciousness.

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  • But, as complete inactivity would have been synonymous with death, it appears to have been admitted that the sceptic, while retaining his consciousness of the complete uncertainty enveloping every step, might follow custom in the ordinary affairs of life.

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  • It is an ultimate mode of consciousness, strictly the presentation (through sensation or otherwise) of an object to consciousness; in its complete form, however, it seems to involve a judgment, i.e.

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  • This consciousness receives perhaps its strongest expression in the Apocalypse.

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  • We have seen that the ultimate cause was the consciousness on the part of the Church that the first age of its own history was characterized by spiritual workings more intense than other times.

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  • Never before in Greek or in Roman speculation had the consciousness of man's dignity and superiority to nature found such adequate expression; never before had real science and pure knowledge been so undervalued and despised by the leaders of culture as they were by the Neoplatonists.

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  • The Stoics had taught them to overstep the political boundaries of states and nationalities, and rise from the Hellenic to a universal human consciousness.

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  • Yet the influence of Neoplatonism on the history of our ethical culture is immeasurable, above all because it begot the consciousness that the only blessedness which can satisfy the heart must be sought higher even than the sphere of reason.

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  • Since about 1866, spurred on by the consciousness that one of their own race, Benito Juarez, had risen to the highest positions in the gift of the country, they have taken greater interest in public affairs and are.

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  • Just as nature exhibits to us the series of dynamical stages of processes by which spirit struggles towards consciousness of itself, so the world of intelligence and practice, the world of mind, exhibits the series of stages through which self-consciousness with its inevitable oppositions and reconciliations develops in its ideal form.

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  • The same theory has since been applied to man, with this difference that, accompanying the mechanical phenomena of action, and entirely disconnected with it, are the phenomena of consciousness.

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  • Motor Automatism, on the other hand, is a non-reflex movement of a voluntary muscle, executed in the waking state but not controlled by the ordinary waking consciousness.

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  • Beck maintains that the real meaning of Kant's theory is idealism; that of objects outside the domain of consciousness, knowledge is impossible, and hence that nothing positive remains when we have removed the subjective element.

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  • These foreign elements have been assimilated more slowly than in the United States, but the process is being hastened by the growth of a national consciousness.

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  • We find here the consciousness of creative thought focused in a new principle which is to revolutionize speculative science.

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  • He maintained that visual consciousness is merely a system of arbitrary signs which symbolize for us certain actual or possible tactual experience - in other words a purely conventional language.

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  • The contents of the visual and the tactual consciousness have no element in common.

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  • It was evident that a similar analysis might have been applied to tactual consciousness which does not give externality in its deepest significance any more than the visual; but with deliberate purpose Berkeley at first drew out only one side of his argument.

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  • Before we deduce results from such abstract ideas as cause, substance, matter, we must ask what in reality do these mean - what is the actual content of consciousness which corresponds to these words?

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  • The essence of the answer is that the universe is inconceivable apart from mind - that existence, as such, denotes conscious spirits and the objects of consciousness.

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  • Matter and external things, in so far as they are thought to have an existence beyond the circle of consciousness, are impossible, inconceivable.

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  • It is impossible to overstep the limits of self-consciousness; whatever words I use, whatever notions I have, must refer to and find their meaning in facts of consciousness.

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  • It might appear, therefore, that sensible things had an objective existence in the mind of God; that an idea so soon as it passes out of our consciousness passes into that of God.

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  • Sunt Cogitationes has been regarded by thinkers who profess themselves Berkeleians as the one proposition warranted by consciousness; the empiricism of his philosophy has been eagerly welcomed, while the spiritual intuition, without which the whole is to Berkeley meaningless, has been cast aside.

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  • The deeper spiritual intuition, present from the first, was only brought into clear relief in order to meet difficulties in the earlier statements, and the extension of the intuition itself beyond the limits of our own consciousness, which completely removes his position from mere subjectivism, rests on foundations uncritically assumed, and at first sight irreconcilable with certain positions of his system.

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  • It was suppressed in an hour's time by the tsar's troops, of whom only one man was mortally wounded; and the horrible vengeance (September - October 1698) which Peter on his return to Russia wreaked upon the captive musketeers was due not to any actual fear of these antiquated warriors, but to his consciousness that behind them stood the reactionary majority of the nation who secretly sympathized with, though they durst not assist, the rebels.

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  • He finally arrived at the conclusion that Condillac's notion of passive receptivity as the one source of conscious experience was not only an error in fact but an error of method - in short, that the mechanical mode of viewing consciousness as formed by external influence was fallacious and deceptive.

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  • The strength of materialism consists in recognizing nature without explaining it away, its weakness in its utter inability to explain consciousness either in its nature or in its origin.

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  • There are in reality two species of substances, or entirely distinct things, those which are impenetrably resisting, and those which are conscious substances; and it is impossible to reduce bodies and souls to one another, because resistance is incompatible with the attributes of spirit, and consciousness inexplicable by the attributes of body.

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  • Passing from Moleschott to Lyell's view of the evolution of the earth's crust and later to Darwin's theory of natural selection and environment, he reached the general inference that, not God but evolution of matter, is the cause of the order of the world; that life is a combination of matter which in favourable circumstances is spontaneously generated; that there is no vital principle, because all forces, non-vital and vital, are movements; that movement and evolution proceed from life to consciousness; that it is foolish for man to believe that the earth was made for him, in the face of the difficulties he encounters in inhabiting it; that there is no God, no final cause, no immortality, no freedom, no substance of the soul; and that mind, like light or heat, electricity or magnetism, or any other physical fact, is a movement of matter.

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  • Consciousness, according to his own admission, is not found even in all animals, although it.

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  • He holds indeed that, in accordance with the law of substance, consciousness must be evolved from unconsciousness with the development of sense organs and a central nervous organ.

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  • At the same time he admits, firstly, that to mark the barrier between unconscious and conscious is difficult; secondly, that it is impossible to trace the first beginning of consciousness in the lower animals; and, thirdly, that " however certain we are of the fact of this natural evolution of consciousness, we are, unfortunately, not yet in a position to enter more deeply into the question " (Riddle of the Universe, 191).

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  • Thus in presence of the problem which is the crux of materialism, the origin of consciousness, he first propounds a gratuitous hypothesis that everything has mind, and then gives up the origin of conscious mind after all.

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  • He himself identifies phenomenon, appearance, effect or impression produced on consciousness through any of the senses.

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  • He holds that all the time, space, motion, matter known to us are phenomena; and that force, the ultimate of ultimates, is, as known to us, a phenomenon, " an affection of consciousness."

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  • If so, then all we know is these phenomena, affections of consciousness, subjective affections, but produced by an unknown power.

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  • Next, he supposes that mind obeys the same law of evolution, and exemplifies integration by generalization, differentiation by the development of the five senses, and determination by the development of the order of consciousness.

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  • He holds that we pass without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life, that consciousness arises in the course of the living being's adaptation to its environment, and that there is a continuous evolution from reflex action through instinct and memory up to reason.

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  • Now, Spencer has clearly, though unconsciously, changed the meaning of the term " phenomenon " from subjective affection of consciousness to any fact of nature, in regarding all this evolution, cosmic, organic, mental, social and ethical, as an evolution of phenomena.

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  • The greater part of the process is a change in the facts of nature before consciousness; and in all that part, at all events, the phenomena evolved must mean physical facts which are not conscious affections, but, as they develop, are causes which gradually produce life and consciousness.

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  • However, with all the author's disclaimers, the general effect left on the reader's mind is that throughout the universe there is an unceasing change of matter and motion, that evolution is always such a change, that it begins with phenomena in the sense of physical facts, gradually issues in life and consciousness, and ends with phenomena in the sense of subjective affections of consciousness.

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  • Similarly, both in First Principles and in the Principles of Psychology, he assigns to us, in addition to our definite consciousness of our subjective affections, an indefinite consciousness of something out of consciousness, of something which resists, of objective existence.

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  • Lastly, when a theory of the world supposes a noumenal power, a resistent and persistent force, which results in an evolution, defined as an integration of matter and a dissipation of motion, which having resulted in inorganic nature and organic nature, further results without break in consciousness, reason, society and morals, then such a theory will be construed as materialistically as that of Haeckel by the reader, whatever the intention of the author.

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  • It may be urged in reply that the synthetic philosophy could be made consistent by transferring the knowable resistance and persistence of the unknowable noumenon to knowable phenomena on the one hand, and on the other hand by maintaining that all phenomena from the original nebula to the rise of consciousness are only ` 0 impressions produced on consciousness through any of the senses," after all.

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  • He regarded everything known as evolved from matter, and reduced consciousness to a mere collateral product (` ` epiphenomenon ") of cerebral operations without any power of influencing them.

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  • Matter, according to him, impresses the afferent nervous system, this the brain, this the efferent nervous system, while consciousness remains a mere spectator.

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  • But, in spite of these materialistic tendencies, he followed Hume in reducing matter and everything knowable to phenomena of consciousness; and, supposing that nothing is knowable beyond phenomena, concluded that we can neither affirm nor deny that anything exists beyond, but ought to take up an attitude which the ancient sceptics called Aphasia, but he dubbed by the new name of Agnosticism.

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  • Thus Huxley first reduced consciousness to a product of matter, and then matter to a phenomenon of consciousness.

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  • By combining materialism with idealism he made consciousness a product of itself.

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  • It seems hopeless to expect that natural science, even with the aid of evolution, can explain by mere body the origin and nature of this fact of consciousness.

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  • Such mentally endowed substances might be called souls; but, as he distinguished between perception and apperception or consciousness, and considered that perceptions are often unconscious, he preferred to divide monads into unconscious entelechies of inorganic bodies, sentient souls of animals, and rational souls, or spirits, of men; while he further concluded that all these are derivative monads created by God, the monad of monads.

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  • As to the origin of knowledge, Kant's position is that sense, outer and inner, affected by things in themselves, receives mere sensations or sensible ideas (Vorstellungen) as the matter which sense itself places in the a priori forms of space and time; that thereupon understanding, by means of the synthetic unity of apperception, " I think " - an act of spontaneity beyond sense, in all consciousness one and the same, and combining all my ideas as mine in one universal consciousness - and under a priori categories, or fundamental notions, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, &c., unites groups of sensations or sensible ideas into objects and events, e.g.

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  • According to him, the Ego posits first itself (thesis); secondly, the non-Ego, the other, opposite to itself (antithesis); and, thirdly, this non-Ego within itself (synthesis), so that all reality is in consciousness.

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  • Kant had said that the synthetic unity " I think " is in all consciousness one and the same, meaning that I am always present to all my ideas.

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  • Fichte transformed this unity of the conscious self into a unity of all conscious selves, or a common consciousness; and this change enabled him to explain the unity of anything produced by the Ego by contending that it is not the different objects of different thinkers, but the one object of a pure Ego or consciousness common to them all.

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  • According to Kant, the ob j ective is valid for all consciousnesses; according to Fichte it is valid for one consciousness.

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  • Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego.

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  • Having, however, in consequence, lost his professorship at Jena, he gradually altered his views, until at length he decided that God is not mere moral order, but also reason and will, yet without consciousness and personality; that not mankind but God is the absolute; that we are only its direct manifestations, free but finite spirits destined by God to posit in ourselves Nature as the material of duty, but blessed when we relapse into the absolute; that Nature, therefore, is the direct manifestation of man, and only the indirect manifestation of God; and, finally, that being is the divine idea or life, which is the reality behind appearances.

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  • By changing the meaning of "noumenon " from the thing apprehended (voouµevov) to the thought (vOnya), and in the hypothesis of a common consciousness, he started the view that a thing is not yours or my thought, but a common thought of all mankind, and led to the wider view of Schelling and Hegel that the world is an absolute thought of infinite mind.

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  • As he resolved one force after another into lower and lower grades of will he was obliged to divest will of all consciousness.

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  • Indeed, Fichte had previously characterized the life of the Absolute by reason and will without consciousness; and, before Fichte, Leibnitz had asserted that the elements of Nature are monads with unconscious perception and appetition.

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  • Our souls he tried his best to endow with a quasiexistence, arguing that the unity of consciousness requires an indivisible subject, which is distinct from the plurality of the body but interacting with it, is in a way a centre of independent activities, and is so far a substance, or rather able to produce the appearance of a substance.

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  • His final view was that certain actions of the divine substance are during consciousness gifted with knowledge of themselves as active centres, but during unconsciousness are non-existent.

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  • Fechner's supposition was that the unity of consciousness belongs to the unity of the whole body; that the seat of the soul is the living body; that the soul changes its place as in different parts a process rises above the " threshold of consciousness "; and that soul is not substance but the single psychical life which has its physical manifestation in the single bodily life.

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  • Huxley, it will be remembered, in similar circumstances, answered this question by degrading consciousness to an epiphenomenon, or bye-product of the physical process.

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  • In point of fact, many stimuli are beneath the " threshold " of a man's consciousness.

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  • Proceeding on this suggestion, and misled by the mathematical expression which he had given to Weber's law, Fechner held that a conscious sensation, like its stimulus, consists of units, or elements, by summation and increments of which conscious sensations and their differences are produced; so that consciousness, according to this unnecessary assumption, emerges from an integration of unconscious shocks or tremors.

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  • But by the hypothesis of the inclusion of spirit in spirit, he was further able to hold that what is unconscious in one spirit is conscious in a higher spirit, while everything whatever is in the consciousness of the highest spirit of God, who is the whole of reality of which the spirits are parts, while the so-called physical world is merely outer appearance of one spirit to another.

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  • He perceived that Darwinism attributed too much to accident, and was also powerless to explain the origin of life and of consciousness.

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  • The world, as he thought, on its physical side, always was a living body; and on its psychical side God always was its conscious spirit; and, so far from life arising from the lifeless, and consciousness from unconsciousness, the life and consciousness of the whole world are the origin of the lifeless and the unconscious in parts of it, by a kind of secondary automatism, while we ourselves are developed from our own mother-earth by differentiation.

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  • The " day-view " (Fechner's) is the view that God is the psychophysical all-embracing being, the law and consciousness of the world.

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  • But it does not, like theirs, sacrifice our personality; because, according to Fechner, the one divine consciousness includes us as a larger circle includes smaller circles.

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  • He admits, indeed, Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious only of mental states, but he contends that this very consciousness is a knowledge of a thing in itself.

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  • He accepts the Kantian positions that unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori synthesis, and that therefore all that natural science knows about matter moving in space is merely phenomena of outer sense; and he agrees with Kant that from these data we could not infer things in themselves by reason.

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  • Further, holding that, " like every other perception, the perception of a human body immediately involves the existence of that body," and, like Fichte, believing in a " common consciousness," he concludes that the evidence of sense is verined by " common consciousness " of the external world as objective in the Kantian sense of universally valid.

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  • He agrees with Fechner that physical process of nerve and psychical process of mind are really the same psychophysical process as appearing on the one hand to an observer and on the other hand to one's own consciousness; and that physical phenomena only produce physical phenomena, so that those materialists and realists are wrong who say that physical stimuli produce sensations.

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  • For what does it matter to metaphysics whether by association sensations suggest ideas, and so give rise to ideas of substance and causation a posteriori, or synthetic unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori notions of substance and causation into objects which are merely mental phenomena of experience, when it is at once allowed by the followers of Hume and Kant alike that reason in any logical use has no power of inferring things beyond the experience of the reasoner?

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  • Immanent Philosophy is the hypothesis that the world is not transcendent, but immanent in consciousness.

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  • Schuppe, who, in his Erkenntnistheoretische Logik (1878), and in his shorter Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie and Logik (1894), gives the view a wider scope by the contention that the real world is the common content or object of common consciousness, which, according to him, as according to Fichte, is one and the same in all individual men.

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  • Different individual consciousnesses plainly differ in having each its own content, in which Schuppe includes each individual's body as well as the rest of the things which come within the consciousness of each; but they also as plainly agree, e.g.

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  • Now, the point of Schuppe is that, so far as they agree, individual consciousnesses are not merely similar, but the same in essence; and this supposed one and the same essence of consciousness in different individuals is what he calls consciousness in general (Bewusstsein iiberhaupt).

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  • He supposes that the conscious content is partly a posteriori, or consisting of given data of sense, and partly a priori, or consisting of categories of understanding, which, being valid for all objects, are contributed by the common consciousness.

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  • Hence he strictly confines true judgment and knowledge to the consciousness of the identity or difference, and the causal relations of the given content of the common consciousness.

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  • The whole known world, then according to him, is the perceived and the perceptible content of common consciousness.

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  • At the same time Schuppe's hypothesis of one common consciousness uniting the given by a priori categories could hardly be accepted by Avenarius as pure experience, or as a natural view of the world.

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  • He has a special relation to Fichte in developing the Kantian activity of consciousness into will and substituting activity for substantiality as the essence of soul, as well as in breaking down the antithesis between phenomena and things in themselves.

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  • Leibnitz, by way of distinction from unconscious perception, gave the name " apperception " to consciousness.

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  • He does not, however, think with Schuppe that there is one common consciousness, but only that there is a collective consciousness and a collective will; not perceiving that then the sun - in his view a mere object in the experience of every member of the collection - would be only a collective sun.

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  • It is Wundt's own statement of his solution of the epistemological problem " that on the one hand the whole outer world exists for us only in our ideas, and that on the other hand a consciousness without objects of idea is an empty abstraction which possesses no actuality " (System, 212 -213).

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  • If knowledge is experience of ideas distinguished by inner will of apperception into subject and object in inseparable connexion, if the starting-point is ideas, if judgment is analysis of an aggregate idea, if inference is a mediate reference of the members of an aggregate of ideas to one another, then, as Wundt says, all we can know, and all reason can logically infer from such data, is in our ideas, and consciousness without an object of idea is an abstraction; so that reason, in transcending experience, can show the necessity of ideas and " ideals," but infer no corresponding reality beyond, whether in nature, or in Man, or in God.

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  • It is not to be idealism which resolves everything into spirit, but realism which gives the spiritual and the material each its own place in harmony with scientific consciousness.

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  • But natural realism, as finally interpreted by Hamilton, was too dogmatic, too unsystematic, and too confused with elements derived from Kantian idealism to withstand the brilliant criticism of Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), a work which for a time almost persuaded us that Nature as we know it from sensations is nothing but permanent possibilities of sensation, and oneself only a series of states of consciousness.

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  • What Kant never said and what his whole philosophy prevented his saying, was that a single thing is a single thought of a single consciousness; either of men, as in Fichte's philosophy, or of God and man, as in Hegel's.

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  • It is, according to him, something more than sensation, but less than perception; it is common to us with lower animals such as dogs; its operation consists in co-ordinating sensations into an aggregate which the subject throws back into space, and thereby has a consciousness of a total object outside itself, e.g.

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  • He thinks that " attuition " gives us consciousness of an object, but without knowledge, and that knowledge begins with reason.

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  • In working out this process he supposes that reason throws into consciousness a priori categories, synthetic predicates a priori, or, as he also calls them, " dialectic percepts."

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  • The difference is that Clifford considers " mind-stuff " to be unconscious, and denies that there is any evidence of consciousness apart from a nervous system.

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  • But, in opposition to Wundt and in common with Schuppe, he believes that experience is (1) experience of the individual, and (2) experience of the race, which is but an extension of individual experience, and is variously called, in the course of the discussion, universal, collective, conceptual, rational experience, consciousness in general, absolute consciousness, intelligence, and even, after Caird, " a perfect intelligence."

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  • This is the unequivocal testimony of consciousness."

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  • It is difficult to see exactly where he begins to differ from Hegel; but at any rate he believes in different self-conscious persons; he does not accept the dialectical method, but believes in beginning from the personal experience of one's own self-consciousness; and, though he is not very clear on the subject, he would have to admit that a thing, such as the sun, is a different object in each person's consciousness.

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  • Not by my consciousness, but by knowing the bodies of others - of babies on the one hand, and of old men on the other hand.

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  • The truth is that not the unity of consciousness but the fact of its existence is the important point.

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  • The existence of my consciousness is my evidence for my soul.

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  • He must ask what are known things, and especially what has been discovered in the sciences; in mechanics, in order to find the essence of bodies which is neglected by idealism; in mental science, in order to understand consciousness which is neglected by materialism.

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  • The chief results we have found against materialism are that bodies evolving account neither for the origin of themselves, their nature, and their fundamental order of resemblance and difference, nor for the nature and origin of consciousness, nor even as yet for their becoming good for conscious beings.

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  • We have also the inner sense of consciousness which is inexplicable by body alone.

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  • By combining, moreover, our knowledge of Nature with our consciousness of our own works, we can infer that Nature is a work of God.

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  • Weber, whose Metaphysik, completed in 1891, starting from the ego and the analysis of consciousness, aims at arriving at the distinction between spirit and nature, and at rising to the spirit of God the Creator.

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  • But Cousin's psychological method of proceeding from consciousness outwards, and the emphasis laid by him on spirit in comparison with body, prevented a real revival of realism.

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  • We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes.

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  • Starting from consciousness, he argues that all known things are phenomena of consciousness.

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  • In his later work, La Nouvelle monadologie (1899), he maintains that each monad is a simple substance, endowed with representation, which is consciousness in form, phenomenon in matter as represented.

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  • He vacillated a great deal about our mode of perceiving the external world; but his final view (edition of Reid's works, note D*) consisted in supposing that (1) sensation is an apprehension of secondary qualities purely as affections of the organism viewed as ego; (2) perception in general is an apprehension of primary qualities as relations of sensations in the organism viewed as non-ego; while (3) a special perception of a so-called " secundo-primary " quality consists in " the consciousness of a resisting something external to our organism."

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  • He avers that this " metaphysic of experience " is not idealism, or the tenet that consciousness is the only reality.

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  • Hence Descartes began the reform of psychology not only by the appeal to consciousness, " I think," but also by opposing body and soul, no longer as matter and form, but as different substances.

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  • Be this as it may, the epistle is of great historical importance, as reflecting a crisis inevitable in the development of the JewishChristian consciousness,when a definite choice between the old and the new form of Israel's religion had to be made, both for internal and external reasons.

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  • In Tacitus's time, however, when the area occupied by the Teutonic peoples was, of course, considerably less than now, a consciousness of their relationship to one another was fully retained.

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  • In full consciousness of his high-priestly dignity he set his face against these and all similar attempts; and his zeal and firmness in defending the authority and rights of the Holy See against the attacks of the conciliar and national parties within the Church deserve double recognition, in view of the eminently difficult circumstances of that period.

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  • He was drifting about with no higher aim than a " hand-to-mouth " policy, whilst the Holy See could feel the superiority with which the consciousness of centuries of tradition had endowed it, and took full advantage of the mistakes of its opponent.

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  • Owing to the lack of a corporate Silesian consciousness and the feebleness of their local institutions, the people soon became reconciled to their change of rulers.

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  • Its modern extension to all forms of impression supposed to convey information as to the future is justified on the assumption that such intimations commonly originate in the subliminal consciousness of the percipient and are thence transferred to the ordinary consciousness.

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  • Its doctrine of salvation was a guide to, if not absolute non-existence, yet cessation of all consciousness of existence (Nirvana).

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  • Again in 1731 the Moravians (q.v.) illustrated in a signal degree the growing consciousness of obligation towards the heathen.

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  • Mary received the announcement with majestic tranquillity, expressing in dignified terms her readiness to die, her consciousness that she was a martyr for her religion, and her total ignorance of any conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth.

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  • Prussia, however, refused to approve of any coup d'etat; the parliament, chastened by the consciousness that its life depended on the goodwill of the king, moderated its tone; and Maximilian ruled till his death as a model constitutional monarch.

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  • It was left for Hume to approach the theory of knowledge with full consciousness from the psychological point of view, and to work out the final consequences of that view so far as cognition is concerned.

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  • He has not offered even a plausible explanation of the mode by which a consciousness made up of isolated momentary impressions and ideas can be aware of coexistence and number, or succession.

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  • But as each perception is in consciousness only as a contingent fact, which might not be or might be other than it is, we must admit that the mind can conceive no necessary relations or connexions among the several portions of its experience.

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  • While it is evident that some such conclusion must follow from the attempt to regard the cognitive consciousness as made up of disconnected feelings, it is equally clear, not only that the result is selfcontradictory, but that it involves certain assumptions not in any way deducible from the fundamental view with which Hume starts.

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  • For a past impression is purely transitory, and, as Hume occasionally points out, can have no connexion of fact with the present consciousness.

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  • Modern philosophers seem inclined to think that personal identity arises from consciousness, and consciousness is nothing but a reflected thought or perception.

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  • But all my hopes vanish when I come to explain the principles that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness.

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  • Demea, who is willing to give up his abstract proof, brings forward the ordinary theological topic, man's consciousness of his own imperfection, misery and dependent condition.

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  • Since, however, the evidence of ordinary consciousness almost always goes to prove that the individual, especially in relation to future acts, regards himself as being free within certain limitations to make his own choice of alternatives, many determinists go so far as to admit that there may be in any action which is neither reflex nor determined by external causes solely an element of freedom.

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  • Paul's heresy lay principally in his insistence on the genuine humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, in contrast with the rising orthodoxy which merged his human consciousness in the divine Logos.

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  • Epicureanism generally was content to affirm that whatever we effectively feel in consciousness is real; in which sense they allow reality to the fancies of the insane, the dreams of a sleeper, and those feelings by which we imagine the existence of beings of perfect blessedness and endless life.

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  • Similarly, just because fear, hope and remembrance add to the intensity of consciousness, the Epicurean can hold that bodily pain and pleasure is a less durable and important thing than pain and pleasure of mind.

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  • Like Hamilton, Mansel maintained the purely formal character of logic, the duality of consciousness as testifying to both self and the external world, and the limitation of knowledge to the finite and "conditioned."

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  • Consciousness, he held - agreeing thus with the doctrine of "natural realism" which Hamilton developed from Reid - implies knowledge both of self and of the external world.

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  • The latter Mansel's psychology reduces to consciousness of our organism as extended; with the former is given consciousness of free will and moral obligation.

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  • There are signs that during Ottos reign they began to have a distinct consciousness of national life, their use of the word deutsch to indicate the whole people being one of these symptoms. Their common sufferings, struggles and triumphs, however, account far more readily for this feeling than the supposition that they were elated by their king undertaking obligations which took him for years together away from his native land.

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  • Its growth coincided with the introduction of railways, and enabled the nation to derive from them the full benefit; so that, in spite of the confusion of political powers, material prosperity increased, together with the consciousness of national unity and a tendency to look to Berlin rather than to Vienna as the centre of this unity.

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  • After an analysis of the religious consciousness, which yields the doctrine of an absolute personal and spiritual God, Rothe proceeds to deduce from his idea of God the process and history of creative development, which is eternally proceeding and bringing forth, as its unending purpose, worlds of spirits, partially self-creative and sharing the absolute personality of the Creator.

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  • As a preparation for this salvation supernatural revelation was required for the purifying and revivification of the religious consciousness, and the Saviour Himself had to appear in human history as a fresh miraculous creation, born of a woman but not begotten by a man.

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  • It has been suggested that the gradual cumulative result of the activity of the nerve cells during the waking day is to load the brain tissue with "fatigue-substances" Theories of which clog the action of the cells, and thus periodi cally produce that loss of consciousness, &c., which is sleep. Such a drugging of tissue by its own excreta is known in muscular fatigue, but the fact that the depth of sleep progressively increases for an hour and more after its onset prevents complete explanation of sleep on similar lines.

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  • The effect of thus reducing the excitant action of the environment is to give consciousness over more to mere revivals by memory, and gradually consciousness lapses.

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  • To take one's watch from the pocket and look at it when from a familiar clock-tower a familiar bell strikes a familiar hour, is an instance of a habitual action initiated by a sense perception outside attentive consciousness.

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  • But the king was determined by a terrible example to wake Frederick once for all to a consciousness of the heavy responsibility of his position.

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  • Being a keen judge of character, he filled the public offices with faithful, capable, energetic men, who were kept up to a high standard of duty by the consciousness that their work might at any time come under his strict supervision.

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  • The congress, of course, had no power to decide or to legislate for the Church, its main value being in drawing its scattered members closer together, in bringing the newer and more isolated branches into consciousness of their contact with the parent stem, and in opening the eyes of the Church of England to the point of view and the peculiar problems of the daughter-churches.

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  • The same consciousness of independent authority and strength still survives among the ulema.

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  • Bulgarian, for nearly four centuries, ceased to be a written language except in a few monasteries; a literary revival, which began about the middle of the 18th century, was the first symptom of returning national consciousness.

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  • Nor can it be said that the first works of a more extensive and deliberate character show any consciousness of pure art as we find it in contemporary writings in England, though the fact that they are translations has some prospective significance.

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  • It is quite in accordance with the keener consciousness of sin, which prevailed in the middle ages, that the expiatory pilgrimage took its place side by side with the pilgrimage to the glory of God.

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  • In the Buddhist adaptation of this theory no soul, no consciousness, no memory, goes over from one body to the other.

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  • Accordingly Fries, like the Scotch school, places psychology or analysis of consciousness at the foundation of philosophy, and called his criticism of knowledge an anthropological critique.

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  • The combination was, however, of an artificial character, and the consciousness that Ishtar was in reality an independent goddess never entirely died out.

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  • The argument is a strange one to have been used by a man who had maintained so strongly that "we have the testimony of all history to prove the extreme fallibility of consciousness."

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  • Yet the writer who in a few pages presents us with so remarkable a representation shows no consciousness at all of artistic treatment.

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  • In the introductory lectures on the philosophy of religion he gives a rationale of the difference between the modes of consciousness in religion and philosophy (between Vorstellung and Begriff).

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  • It therefore to some extent assumes from the first the position which it proposes ultimately to reach, and gives, not a proof of that position, but an account of the experience (Erfahrung) by which consciousness is forced from one position to another till it finds rest in Absolutes Wissen.

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  • It treats of the attitudes of consciousness towards reality under the six heads of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason (Vernunft), spirit (Geist), religion and absolute knowledge.

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  • If consciousness cannot detect a permanent object outside it, so self-consciousness cannot find a permanent subject in itself.

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  • It may, like the Stoic, assert freedom by holding aloof from the entanglements of real life, or like the sceptic regard the world as a delusion, or finally, as the " unhappy consciousness " (Ungliickliches Bewusstseyn), may be a recurrent falling short of a perfection which it has placed above it in the heavens.

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  • So far we have seen consciousness on one hand and the real world on the other.

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  • The stage of Geist reveals the consciousness no longer as critical and antagonistic but as the indwelling spirit of a community, as no longer isolated from its surroundings but the union of the single and real consciousness with the vital feeling that animates the community.

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  • This is the lowest stage of concrete consciousness - life, and not knowledge; the spirit inspires, but does not reflect.

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  • It is impossible, beginning with the natural world, to explain the mind by any process of distillation or development, unless consciousness or its potentiality has been there from the first.

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  • Reality, independent of the individual consciousness, there must be; reality, independent of all mind, is an impossibility.

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  • But the thought thus regarded as the basis of all existence is not consciousness with its distinction of ego and non-ego.

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  • It only appears in consciousness as the crowning development of the mind.

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  • In the Phenomenology consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are dealt with.

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  • Still it remains a great point to have even attempted some system in the dark anomalies which lie under the normal consciousness, and to have traced the genesis of the intellectua4 faculties from animal sensitivity.

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  • Material forces are, by hypothesis, capable of feeling; matter also must have been from the first endowed with consciousness.

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  • For consciousness exists, and could not have been developed out of nothing.

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  • That which is object of thought cannot be outside consciousness; just as in mathematics -V - is an unreal quantity, so "things-in-themselves" are ex hypothesi outside consciousness, i.e.

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  • The casual concept, as given by experience, expresses not a necessary objective order of things, but an ordered scheme of perception; it is subjective and cannot be postulated as a concrete law apart from consciousness.

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  • In philosophy his method was psychological; he attempted to explain the Ego by examining the nature of its reflection upon the facts of consciousness.

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  • Being is known to us only through its presentation in consciousness; consciousness only in its relation to Being.

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  • Both Being and Consciousness, however, are immediately known to us, as also the relation existing between them.

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  • But when men set themselves to cultivate skill in disputation, regarding the matter discussed not as a serious issue, but as a thesis upon which to practise their powers of controversy, they learn to pursue, not truth, but victory; and, their criterion of excellence having been thus perverted, they presently prefer ingenious fallacy to solid reasoning and the applause of bystanders to the consciousness of honest effort.

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  • And thus, although we are not responsible for the ideas that present themselves to our consciousness, we are absolutely and without any modification responsible for the way in which we use them.

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  • Sense, then, outer and inner, or sensation and consciousness, is the origin of sensory judgments which are true categorical beliefs in the existence of sensible things; and primary judgments are such true categorical sensory beliefs that things exist, and neither require conception nor are combinations of conceptions.

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  • Psychologists, seeing that inference is a mental operation, often extemporize a theory of inference to the neglect of logic. But we have a double consciousness of inference.

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  • The fact is that our primary consciousness of all mental operations is hardly equal to our secondary consciousness of the processes of the one operation of inference from premises to conclusions permeating long trains and pervading whole sciences.

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  • This elaborate consciousness of inferential process is the justification of logic as a distinct science, and is the first step in its method.

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  • Nor are consciousness and linguistic analysis all the instruments of the logician.

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  • It is consciousness concerning the objective validity of a subjective combination of ideas, i.e.

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  • Judgment is consciousness of the identity or difference and of the causal relations of the given; naming the actual combinations of the data, but also requiring a priori categories of the understanding, the notions of identity, difference and causality, as principles of thought or laws, to combine the plurality of the given into a unity (Schuppe).

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  • At any rate, even when we have learnt to speak, we do not express all we think, as we may see not only from the fewness of words known to a child, but also from our own adult consciousness.

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  • For example, as I am weary and am conscious of being weary, my judgment and proposition that I am weary are true because they signify what I am and know myself to be by direct consciousness; and my being weary is ambiguously said to be true because it is so signified.

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  • There must be convergence in a unitary principle, soul or consciousness, which is that which really functions in perception, the senses and their organs being merely its instruments.

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  • Logic is their word, and consciousness, impression and other technical words come to us, at least as technical words, from Roman Stoicism.

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  • Locke, when Cartesianism had raised the problem of the contents of consciousness, and the spirit of Baconian positivism could not accept of anything that bore the ill-omened name of innate ideas, elaborated a theory of knowledge which is psychological in the sense that its problem is how the simple data with which the individual is in contact in sensation are worked up into a system.

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  • This is manifestly, when all is said, a particular psychological event, a collective fact of the associative consciousness.

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  • His free use of relating concepts, that of sameness, for instance, bears no impress of his theory of the general notion, and it is possible to put out of sight the fact that, taken in conjunction with his nominalism, it raises the whole issue of the possibility of the equivocal generation of formative principles from the given contents of the individual consciousness, in any manipulation of which they are already implied.

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  • He appeals to the direct testimony of consciousness in the sense in which the appeal involves a fallacy.

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  • In Boehme's spirit, Schelling defended his idea of God as the only way of vindicating for God the consciousness which naturalism denies, and which ordinary theism emptily asserts.

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  • It may be said to be a process of unification, whereby the centres of volition, consciousness and active memory are systematically shifted upwards from the lower to the higher "principles" until they have become firmly established in the "Buddhi," or "sixth principle."

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  • Not in proofs by formal logic but in the reality of consciousness was the certainty of God.

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  • As in Jesus the whole prophetic line culminates, so does its consciousness.

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  • The earlier group of disciples, it is true, did not appreciate the universality of the teaching of Jesus, and they continued zealous for the older forms, but St Paul through his prophetic consciousness grasped the fundamental fact and became Jesus' true interpreter.

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  • Primitive man seldom connects sacrifice with notions of propitiation, indeed only in highly ethicized religions is the consciousness of sin or of guilt pre-eminent.

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  • Our religious consciousness is simply our ordinary consciousness obeying its laws.

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  • During a last moment of returning consciousness, and by the advice of the whole council, who had been joined on their own initiative by the Whig dukes Argyll and Somerset, she placed the lord treasurer's staff in the hands of the Whig duke of Shrewsbury, and measures were immediately taken for assuring the succession of the elector.

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  • Its separation was due to growing consciousness of the Gospels as a unit of sacred records, to which Acts stood as a sort of appendix.

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  • Yet none the less was the new learning, through the open spirit of inquiry it nourished, its vindication of the private reason, its enthusiasm for republican antiquity, and its proud assertion of the rights of human independence, linked by a strong and subtle chain to that turbid revolt of the individual consciousness against spiritual despotism draped in fallacies and throned upon abuses.

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  • Consciousness, it is held, is of two main kinds, sensation and reason.

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  • He never really establishes a relation between pure reason and things-in-themselves (Dinge an sick), but rather seeks refuge in a dualism within consciousness, the transcendental and the empirical.

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  • Since Kant there are, therefore, two streams of dualism, dealing, one with the radical problem of the relation between mind and matter, the other with the relation between the pure rational and the empirical elements within consciousness.

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  • The influence of dissent also acted along with the rapidly rising religious fervour of the age in quickening in the church that sense of a divine mission, and of the right and power to carry out that mission without obstruction from any worldly authority, which belongs to the essential consciousness of the Christian church.

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  • Although it must be admitted that the Baconian method is fairly open to the above-mentioned objections, it is curious and significant that Bacon was not thoroughly ignorant of them, but with deliberate consciousness preferred his own method.

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  • In the sphere of morals, the ultimate and only authority which the mind can recognize is the law which emerges from the pure moral consciousness.

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  • Meanwhile philosophy was at work on the problem of the religious consciousness.

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  • If some, and not the least essential, of these aspects are quasi-negative, it must be remembered that negations - witness the Unseen, the Unknown, the Infinite of a more advanced theology - are well adapted to supply that mystery on which the religious consciousness feeds with the slight basis of conceptual support it needs.

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  • Indeed, as the history of the higher religions shows, religion tends in the end to break away from secular government with its aristocratic traditions, and to revert to the more democratic spirit of the primitive age, having by now obtained a clearer consciousness of its purpose, yet nevertheless clinging to the inveterate forms of human ritual as still adequate to symbolize the consecration of life - the quickening of the will to face life earnestly.

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  • They embody for the time being a vague consciousness of the divine, which is concentrated for some single act into an outward object, like a warrior's spear or the thunderbolt, 2 or the last sheaf of corn into which the Corn-Mother has been driven.

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  • Between 1811 and 1813 the lectures of Fichte (subsequently published from his notes in his Nachgelassene Werke) dealt with what he called the "facts of consciousness" and the "theory of science," and struggled to present his final conception of philosophy.

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  • But he agrees with Schopenhauer in basing consciousness, in all its forms of reason, feeling or will, upon "automatic movement - psychical change," from which consciousness emerges and in which it disappears.

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  • It is in this sense of will - of will without motives, but not without consciousness of some sort - that reality is revealed.

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  • It is thus that Fechner in his "day-view" of things sees in plants and planets the same fundamental "soul" as in us - that is, "one simple being which appears to none but itself, in us as elsewhere wherever it occurs self-luminous, dark for every other eye, at the least connecting sensations in itself, upon which, as the grade of soul mounts higher and higher, there is constructed the consciousness of higher and still higher relations."

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  • The great god Ahuramazda, whom king and people alike acknowledge, has given them dominion over this earth afar, over many peoples and tongues; and the consciousness is strong in them that they are masters of the world.

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  • This idea of universal conquest was with him a conception much stronger developed than that which had inspired the Achaemenid rulers, and he entered on the project with full consciousness in the strictest sense of the phrase.

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  • In his endeavours to realize this aim he had to contend with the new spirit of national consciousness animating the Boers, which found expression in the formation of the Afrikander Bond.

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  • Butler could strengthen his argument only by bringing forward prominently the absolute requirements of the ethical consciousness, in which case he would have approximated to Kant's position with regard to this very problem.

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  • The religious consciousness does not receive from him the slightest consideration.

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  • And to this a religious sanction may be added, for "consciousness of a rule or guide of action, in creatures capable of considering it as given them by their Maker, not only raises immediately a sense of duty, but also a sense of security in following it, and a sense of danger in deviating from it."

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  • The prime fact in philosophy was to him, as to Augustine and Descartes, the certainty of individual consciousness.

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  • To this consciousness he assigned a threefold content, power, will and knowledge.

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  • Bagehot seems right in believing that Ricardo himself had no consciousness of the limitations to which his doctrines are subject.

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  • Consciousness of such personal pre-eminence has left its marks on the lists of the Twelve in the New Testament.

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  • The poet shows as deep a consciousness as any modern historian that the grandest achievement of Rome was the spread of law.

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  • He presents himself as an altogether human person, brave enough in the field, and, at least when young, capable of extravagant devotion to an ideal, provided the ideal was fashionable, but having at bottom a sufficient respect for his own skin and a full consciousness of the side on which his bread is buttered.

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  • But, if this ever-present consciousness often gives dignity and elevation to his narrative, it is also responsible for some of its defects.

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  • Matter and the sensible universe are the relations between particular organisms, that is, mind organized into consciousness, and the rest of the world.

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  • The history of religions supplies us with many examples of the High God losing his hold on the people's consciousness and love.

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  • The consciousness of these great services even reconciled him to the loss of much of his popularity; for there can be no doubt that a large part of the Hungarian nation regarded the Composition of 1867 as a sort of surrender and blamed Deak as the author of it.

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  • In the true philosophical sense, however, the conception of the ego is still further narrowed down to the individual consciousness as opposed to all that is outside it, i.e.

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  • The most satisfactory and also the most general view is that consciousness is complex and unanalysable.

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  • Even modern architecture, notably in America, reflects the consciousness of change.

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  • Thus our whole society not only bears the marks of its evolution, but shows its growing consciousness of the fact in the most evident of its arts.

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  • In Kantian terminology apperception is (1) transcendental - the perception of an object as involving the consciousness of the pure self as subject, and (2) empirical, - the cognition of the self in its concrete existence.

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  • These conditions are the conditions of knowledge as such, or, as it may be put, of objective consciousness - of a self-consciousness of a world of objects and through them conscious of itself.

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  • The inquiry is, therefore, logical or transcendental in its nature, and does not entangle us in any decision as to the conditions of the genesis of such consciousness in the individual.

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  • Speaking of this transcendental consciousness, Kant goes so far as to say that it is not of the slightest consequence "whether the idea of it be clear or obscure (in empirical consciousness), no, not even whether it really exists or not.

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  • History is thus represented by Hegel, for example, as the realization of the idea of freedom, or rather as the reconciliation of individual freedom and the play of cultured interests with the stable objectivity of law and an abiding consciousness of the greater whole in which we move.

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  • The philosophy of religion, on the other hand, investigates the nature of the religious consciousness and the value of its pronouncements on human life and man's relation to the ground of things.

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  • In the midst of the peasants themselves there lived a consciousness of their special claims as to tenant right, claims which sometimes assumed the shape of the quaint saying, "The land is ours, though we are yours."

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  • Whether it is regarded as in any sense possessed, of intelligence and consciousness is a question variously answered.

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  • About the year 1774 it first - becomes possible to trace the progress of these ality Danubian Principalities in a single narrative, owing to the uniform system of administration adopted by the Turkish authorities, and the rapid contemporary growth of a national consciousness among the Vlachs.

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  • He told his story in his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (18J7) with straightforward simplicity, and with no effort after literary style, and no apparent consciousness that he had done anything extraordinary.

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  • No better time could be found for establishing the Bond than the present, when the consciousness of nationality has been thoroughly aroused by the Transvaal war."..

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  • This is done, not always with any deliberate consciousness of fraud (although it must be clearly recognized that truth is not one of the "natural virtues," and that the sense of the obligations of truthfulness was far from strong), but rather to emphasize the importance of what was written, and the fact that it was no new invention of the writer's.

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  • If, then, there is objective truth at all, the existence of real facts must be made known to us otherwise than through the logical faculty of thought; and, as the regress from conclusion to premises must depend upon something not itself capable of logical grounding, mediate thought implies the consciousness of immediate truth.

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  • It therefore arises in one or other of two ways, according as the unit or the number exists first in consciousness.

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  • He taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the fact of voluntary activity, that activity in which our personality is truly revealed.

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  • This is indeed advanced as an illustration or confirmation of the truth of his system, - as a proof that the facts of history correspond to his analysis of consciousness.

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  • He insists that this is the true method of philosophy as applied to consciousness, in which alone the facts of experience appear.

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  • But the proper condition of the application of the method is that it shall not through prejudice of system omit a single fact of consciousness.

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  • If the authority of consciousness is good in one instance, it is good in all.

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  • The observational method applied to consciousness gives us the science of psychology.

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  • What Cousin finds psychologically in the individual consciousness, he finds also spontaneously expressed in the common sense or universal experience of humanity.

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  • These three facts are different in character, but are not found apart in consciousness.

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  • Voluntary facts alone are marked in the eyes of consciousness with the characters of imputability and personality.

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  • The me is the centre of the intellectual sphere without which consciousness is impossible.

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  • Consciousness, then, is composed of these three integrant and inseparable elements.

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  • But Reason is the immediate ground of knowledge and of consciousness itself.

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  • The reason given to us by psychological observation, the reason of our consciousness, is impersonal in its nature.

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  • This was the point which Kant missed in his analysis, and this is the fundamental truth which Cousin thinks he has restored to the integrity of philosophy by the method of the observation of consciousness.

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  • But this test of necessity is a wholly secondary one; these laws are not thus guaranteed to us; they are each and all given to us, given to our consciousness, in an act of spontaneous apperception or apprehension, immediately, instantaneously, in a sphere above the reflective consciousness, yet within the reach of knowledge.

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  • In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.

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  • These laws are inextricably mixed in consciousness with the data of volition and sensation, with free activity and fatal action or impression, and they guide us in rising to a personal being, a self or free cause, and to an impersonal reality, a not-me - nature, the world of force - lying out of us, and modifying us.

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  • He acts freely but not arbitrarily, and with the consciousness of being able to choose the opposite part.

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  • The elements found in consciousness are also to be found in the history of humanity and in the history of philosophy.

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  • Confronting the various systems co-ordinated as sensualism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, with the facts of consciousness, the Elects= sm ?

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  • The intellectual intuition either falls under the eye of consciousness, or it does not.

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  • The intellectual intuition of Schelling, as above consciousness, the pure being of Hegel, as an empty abstraction, unvindicated, illegitimately assumed, and arbitrarily developed, are equally useless as bases of metaphysics.

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  • This led Cousin, still holding by essential knowledge of being, to ground it in an analysis of consciousness, - in psychology.

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  • The absolute or infinite - the unconditioned ground and source of all reality - is yet apprehended by us as an immediate datum or reality; and it is apprehended in consciousness - under its condition, that, to wit, of distinguishing subject and object, knower and known.

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  • But if these three correlative facts are immediately given, it seems to be thought possible by Cousin to vindicate them in reflective consciousness.

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  • The self is found to be a cause of force, free in its action, on the ground that we are obliged to relate the volition of consciousness to the self as its cause, and its ultimate cause.

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  • Causality might tell us that a cause there is of sensation somewhere and of some sort; but that this cause is a force or sum of forces, existing in space, independently of us, and corresponding to our sensations, it could never tell us, for the simple reason that such a notion is not supposed to exist in our consciousness.

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  • And indeed such a supposition is, with the principle of causality at work, within the limits of probability, as we are already supposed to know such a reality - a will - in our own consciousness.

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  • But it is open to the objection of assuming that a particular analysis of consciousness has reached all the possible elements in humanity and in history, and all their combinations.

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  • It may be asked, Can history have that which is not in the individual consciousness?

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  • History is as likely to reveal to us in the first place true and original elements, and combinations of elements in man, as a study of consciousness.

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  • Besides, the tendency of applying a formula of this sort to history is to assume that the elements are developed in a certain regular or necessary order, whereas this may not at all be the case; but we may find at any epoch the whole mixed, either crossing or co-operative, as in the consciousness of the individual himself.

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  • Further, the question as to how these elements may possibly have grown up in the general consciousness of mankind is assumed to be nonexistent or impossible.

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  • This is necessarily the case, especially in the application to history of all formulas supposed to be derived either from an analysis of consciousness, or from an abstraction called pure thought.

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  • Probably the consciousness that his dominions would be broken up among his sons after his death had a disheartening effect upon him.

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  • And there are not wanting signs of a revival in recent years of the earlier tendency of philosophical speculation to subordinate the necessities of metaphysical, scientific and even psychological inquiries to the prima facie demands of the moral consciousness.

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  • But the subsequent speculations of Aristotle upon the extent to which ignorance invalidates responsibility, though they seem to assume man's immediate consciousness of freedom, do not in reality amount to very much more than an analysis of the conditions ordinarily held sufficient to constitute voluntary or involuntary action.

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  • He affirms the priority of will to knowledge and the dependence of consciousness upon physical attention.

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  • But it was inevitable that the enormous advances made by the physical and other sciences in modern times should bring with them a reasoned attempt to bring the phenomena of consciousness within the sphere controlled by physical laws and natural necessity.

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  • And the determinism of modern science no longer consists in a crude denial of the reality of conscious processes, or an attempt to explain them as only a sublimated form of matter and its movements; it is content to admit the relative independence of the world of consciousness, while it maintains that laws and hypotheses sufficient to explain material processes may be extended to and will be discovered to be valid of the changing sequences of conscious states of mind.

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  • It is not enough merely to repel the incursions of physiological science, armed with hypotheses and theories valid enough in their own sphere, upon the domain of consciousness.

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  • Of this necessity there is a growing consciousness in recent years, and no more notable exposition of it has been published than is contained in James Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism.

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  • It has been maintained, on the one hand, that any theory which presupposes a direct correspondence between the molecular movements of the brain, and the states of consciousness which accompany them must make the freedom of the will impossible.

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  • As regards the first of these two main contentions, it must suffice here to point out the main difficulties in which a determinist and especially materialist account of the relation between consciousness and the organic processes which accompany it appears to be involved.

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  • No kind of evidence can be adduced sufficient to prove that consciousness is a secretion of the brain, an effect or even a consequent of material processes or modes of motion.

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  • No direct causal relationship between a molecular movement and a state of consciousness has ever been established.

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  • For if consciousness be looked upon as simply an epiphenomenon, an unaccountable appearance accompanying the succession of material changes, the possibility either of active interference by human volition at any point within the physical series or of any controlling or directing efficacy of consciousness over the whole set of material changes which accompany its activity becomes unthinkable.

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  • But more convincing than most of the philosophical arguments by which the theories of psychophysical parallelism have been assailed is the fact that it runs counter to the plain evidence of the ordinary consciousness.

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  • Consciousness and especially self-consciousness, can never be explained upon hypotheses adequate only to explain the blind working of the unconscious world.

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  • But the insistence of idealist writers upon the relation of the world of nature to conscious intelligence, and especially to a universal consciousness realizing itself throughout the history of individuals, rendered it alike impossible to deny altogether some influence of environment upon character, and to regard the history of individual willing selves as consisting in isolated and unconnected acts of.

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  • And no account of the psychology of human action which regards conduct as due to self-determination, but leaves open the question whether the self is free to choose is, so it is argued, capable of providing an adequate theory of the admitted facts of moral consciousness.

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  • If a coherent theory capable of giving an explanation of the ordinary facts of morality and not involving too violent a breach with the meaning of moral terms in their accepted usage were all that need be required of determinists in order to m reconcile the defenders of the moral consciousness to the loss of their belief in the will's freedom, it would follow without question that the determinists have proved their case.

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  • Moreover, the belief that the justice of punishment depends upon the responsibility of the criminal for his past offences and the admission of the moral consciousness that his previous wrong-doing was freely chosen carries with it, so it is argued, consequences which the libertarian moralist might be willing to accept with reluctance.

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  • Such feelings follow the committal of acts of a certain character in a consciousness sufficiently moralized as inevitably as pain in the natural world follows upon the violation of one of nature's laws.

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  • But the real strength of the libertarian position is to be found in the fact that consciousness is capable of distinguishing ends at all.

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  • And the existence of penitence and remorse is not merely a sign of the emergence in consciousness of elements in character nobler than and opposed to those tendencies which once held sway.

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  • The unsophisticated moral consciousness will still consider it unjust to punish a man for deeds of which he could not avoid the performance, and regard the alleged desire to produce in his future life consequences favourable to himself or society as beside the mark and irrelevant to the question at issue.

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  • This immediate consciousness of freedom persists upon another occasion even though subsequent reflection upon conduct should lead the individual to regard himself as determined at the very moment when he was aware of himself as free.

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  • It is this immediate consciousness of the power of choosing between alternatives which the determinist finds so difficult to explain.

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  • The problems of the moral consciousness at the time at which it first becomes reflective are not strictly speaking philosophical problems at all.

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  • And the ever-recurring problem of the moral consciousness, " What ought to be done ?"

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  • Nevertheless there is a sense in which moral philosophy may be said to originate out of difficulties inherent in the nature of morality itself, although it remains true that the questions which ethics attempts to answer are never questions with which the moral consciousness as such is confronted.

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  • The fact that men give different answers to moral problems which seem similar in character, or even the mere fact that men disregard, when they act immorally, the dictates and implicit principles of the moral consciousness is certain sooner or later to produce the desire either, on the one hand, to justify immoral action by casting doubt upon the authority of the moral consciousness and the validity of its principles, or, on the other hand, to justify particular moral judgments either by (the only valid method) an analysis of the moral principle involved in the judgment and a demonstration of its universal acceptation, or by some attempted proof that the particular moral judgment is arrived at by a process of inference from some universal conception of the Supreme Good or the Final End from which all particular duties or virtues may be deduced.

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  • It may be that criticism of morality first originates with a criticism of existing moral institutions or codes of ethics; such a criticism may be due to the spontaneous activity of the moral consciousness itself.

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  • But when such criticism passes into the attempt to find a universal criterion of morality - such an attempt being in effect an effort to make morality scientific - and especially when the attempt is seen, as it must in the end be seen, to fail (the moral consciousness being superior to all standards of morality and realizing itself wholly in particular judgments), then ethics as a process of reflection upon the nature of the moral consciousness may be said to begin.

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  • If this be true it follows that one of the chief function of ethics must be criticism of mistaken attempts to find a criterion of morality superior to the pronouncements of the moral consciousness itself.

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  • The ultimate superiority of the moral consciousness over all other standards is recognized, even by those who impugn its authority, whenever they claim that all men ought to recognize the superior value of the standards which they themselves wish to substitute.

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  • None of these originates out of conflicting statements of the moral consciousness, i.e.

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  • Sometimes, again, whole theories of ethics have been formulated which can be seen in the end to be efforts to subordinate moral conceptions to conceptions belonging properly to institutions or departments of human thought and activity which the moral consciousness has itself originated.

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  • Law, for instance, depends, or at least ought to depend, upon men's need for and consciousness of justice.

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  • And such institutions as the family and the state are created by the social consciousness, which is the moral consciousness from another aspect.

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  • The unreflective moral consciousness never finds it difficult to distinguish between a man's power of willing and all the forces of circumstance, heredity and the like, which combine to form the temptations to which he may yield or bid defiance; and such facts as " remorse " and " penitence " are a continual testimony to man's sense of freedom.

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  • But so soon as men perceive upon reflection an apparent discrepancy between the utterances of their moral consciousness and certain conclusions to which theological speculation (or at a later period metaphysical and scientific inquiries) seems inevitably to lead them, they will not rest satisfied until the belief in the will's freedom (hitherto unquestioned) is upon further reflection justified or condemned.

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  • The pre-eminent wisdom which the Delphic oracle attributed to him was held by himself to consist in a unique consciousness of ignorance.

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  • This yearning, he held, springs - like more sensual impulses - from a sense of want of something formerly possessed, of which there remains a latent memory in the soul, strong in proportion to its philosophic capacity; hence it is that in learning any abstract truth by scientific demonstration we merely make explicit what we already implicitly know; we bring into clear consciousness hidden memories of a state in which the soul looked upon Reality and Good face to face, before the lapse that imprisoned her in an alien body and mingled her true nature with fleshly feelings and impulses.

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  • On this triple division of the soul he founded a systematic view of the four kinds of goodness recognized by the common moral consciousness of Greece, and in later times known as the Cardinal Virtues.

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  • In expounding these, he gives throughout the pure result of analytical observation of the common moral consciousness of his age.

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  • Partly, no doubt, the limited influence of his disciples, the Peripatetics, is to be attributed to that exaltation of the purely speculative life which distinguished the Aristotelian ethics from other later systems, and which was too alien from the common moral consciousness to find much acceptance in an age in which the ethical aims of philosophy had again become paramount.

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  • The conflict between these two elements of Common Sense was too profound to be compromised; and the moral consciousness of mankind demanded a more trenchant partisanship than Aristotle's.

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  • The latter system gave the simplest and most obvious answer to the inquiry after ultimate good for man; but besides being liable, when developed consistently, to offend the common moral consciousness, it conspicuously failed to provide the " completeness " and " security " which, as Aristotle says, " one divines to belong to man's true 'Good."

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  • He must be an essential unity prior to this duality, a Being wholly without difference or determination; and, accordingly, the highest mode of human existence, in which the soul apprehends this absolute, must be one in which all definite thought is transcended, and all consciousness of self lost in the absorbing ecstasy.

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  • But however Oriental may have been the cast of mind that welcomed this theosophic asceticism, the forms of thought by which these views were philosophically reached are essentially Greek; and it is by a thoroughly intelligible process of natural development, in which the intensification of the moral consciousness represented by Stoicism plays an important part, that the Hellenic pursuit of knowledge culminates in a preparation for ecstasy, and the Hellenic idealization of man's natural life ends in a settled antipathy to the body and its works.

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  • Before, however, we take a brief survey of the progress of systematic ethics from Ambrose to Thomas Aquinas, it may be well to examine the chief features of the new moral consciousness that had spread through Graeco-Roman civilization, and was awaiting philosophic synthesis.

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  • And though such antinomianism has always been sternly repudiated by the moral consciousness of Christendom, it has never been forgotten that " inwardness," rightness of heart or spirit, is the preeminent characteristic of Christian goodness.

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  • But in early Christianity this latter antithesis was as yet undeveloped; faith means simply force in clinging to moral and religious conviction, whatever their rational grounds may be; this force, in the Christian consciousness, being inseparably bound up with personal loyalty and trust towards Christ, the leader in the battle with evil, the ruler of the kingdom to be realized.

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  • Here faith means more than loyal acceptance of the divine law and reverent trust in the lawgiver; it implies a consciousness, at once continually present and continually transcended, of the radical imperfection of all human obedience to the law, and at the same time of the irremissible condemnation which this imperfection entails.

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  • The Stoic doctrine of the worthlessness of ordinary human virtue, and the stern paradox that all offenders are equally, in so far as all are absolutely, guilty, find their counterparts in Christianity; but the latter (maintaining this ideal severity in the moral standard, with an emotional consciousness of what is involved in it quite unlike that of the Stoic) overcomes its practical exclusiveness through faith.

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  • Of these views the former is the more catholic, more universally present in the Christian consciousness; the latter more deeply penetrates the mystery of the Atonement, as expounded in the Pauline epistles.

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  • Lactantius (circa 300 A.D.), for example, roundly declares that Plato and Aristotle, referring everything to this earthly life, " made virtue mere folly "; though himself maintaining, with pardonable inconsistency, that man's highest good did not consist in mere pleasure, but in the consciousness of the filial relation of the soul to God.

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  • In discussing this he distinguishes, with well-applied subtlety, between the pleasurableness of the benevolent emotions themselves, the sympathetic enjoyment of the happiness of others, and the pleasure arising from a consciousness of their love and esteem.

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  • But even if we consider the moral consciousness merely as a particular kind of pleasurable emotion, there is an obvious question suggested by Hume's theory, to which he gives no adequate answer.

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  • By means of this primary element, compounded in various ways, Adam Smith explains all the phenomena of the moral consciousness.

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  • Secondly, the emotional element of the moral consciousness, on which attention had been concentrated by Shaftesbury and his followers, though distinctly recognized as accompanying the intellectual intuition, is carefully subordinated to it.

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  • But since the reaction, led by Price and Reid, against the manner of philosophizing that had culminated in Hume, free-will has been generally maintained by the intuitional school to be an essential point of ethics; and, in fact, it is naturally connected with the judgment of good and ill desert which these writers give as an essential element in their analysis of the moral consciousness.

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  • He holds that it is through our moral consciousness that we know that we are free; in the cognition that I ought to do what is right because it is right and not because I like it, it is implied that this purely rational volition is possible; that my action can be determined, not " mechanically," through the necessary operation of the natural stimuli of pleasurable and painful feelings, but in accordance with the laws of my true, reasonable self.

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  • What is of lasting importance is the re-affirmation upon metaphysical grounds of the right of the moral consciousness to state and solve its own difficulties, and the successful repulsion of the claims of particular sciences such as biology to include the sphere of conduct within their scope and methods.

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  • To this revolt, and to the general tendency to find the principle of morality in an ideal good present to the consciousness of all persons capable of acting morally, the widespread recognition of reason as the ultimate court of appeal alike in religion or politics, and latterly in economics also, has no doubt contributed largely.

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  • In the main the appeal to reason has followed the traditional course of such movements in ethics, and has reaffirmed in the light of fuller reflection the moral principles implicit in the ordinary moral consciousness.

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  • The argument, for instance, that intuitive and a priori beliefs gain their absolute character from the fact that they are the result of continued transmission and accumulation of past nervous modifications in the history of the race would, if taken seriously, lead us to the belief that ultimate ethical sanctions are to be sought, not by an appeal to the moral consciousness, but by the investigation of brain tissue and the relation of man's bodily organism to its environment.

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  • Yet such a view would be totally at variance with much that Spencer says (especially in his treatment of justice) concerning the trustworthiness and inevitable character of men's constant appeal to the intuitions of their moral consciousness.

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  • In fact, no acceptable scientific criterion emerges, and the outcome of Spencer's attempt to ascertain the laws of life and the conditions of existence is either a restatement of the dictates of the moral consciousness in vague and cumbrous quasi-scientific phraseology, or the substitution of the meaningless test of " survivability " as a standard of perfection for the usual and intelligible standards of " good " and " right."

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  • For such knowledge implies the existence of a knowing consciousness as a relating and uniting intelligence capable of distinguishing itself from the objects to which it relates.

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  • And more particularly the existence of the moral consciousness implies " the transition from mere want to consciousness of wanted object, from impulse to satisfy the want to effort for the realization of the wanted objects, implies the presence of the want to a subject which distinguishes itself from it."

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  • Consequently the facts of moral development imply with the emergence of human consciousness the appearance of something qualitatively different from the facts with which physiology for instance deals, imply a stratum as it were in development which no examination of animal tissues, no calculation of consequences with regard to the preservation of the species can ever satisfactorily explain.

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  • However far back we go in the history of humanity, if the presence of consciousness be admitted at all, it will be necessary to admit also the presence to consciousness of an ideal which can be accepted or rejected, of a power of looking before and after, and aiming at a future which is not yet fully realized.

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  • Similarly the conception of the self as a moral unity arises`naturally out of the impossibility of finding the summum bonum in a succession of transient states of consciousness such as hedonism for example postulates.

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  • Nothing could be farther from Green's teaching than the belief that constructive metaphysics could, unaided by the intuitions of the moral consciousness, discover laws for the regulation of conduct.

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  • But although Green's loyalty to the primary facts of the moral consciousness prevented him from constructing a rationalistic system of morals based solely upon the conclusions of metaphysics, it was perhaps inevitable that the revival of interest in metaphysics so prominent in his own speculations should lead to a more daring criticism of ethical first principles in other writers.

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  • Hence it appears difficult to reconcile what is in effect a belief in the validity of the judgments of the moral consciousness with a belief that the real source and justification of that consciousness are to be found in the very sentiments and vague mass of floating feelings upon which it pronounces.

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  • Taylor's polemic against metaphysical systems of ethics is based throughout upon an alleged discrepancy and separation between the facts of moral " experience," the judgments of the moral consciousness, and theories as to the nature of these which the philosophers whom he attacks would by no means accept.

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  • There is no doubt a distinction between morality as a form of consciousness and reflection upon that morality.

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  • But in his exposition of the fundamental contradiction involved in morality elaborated with much care and illustrative argument he appeals for the most part to facts familiar to the unphilosophical moral consciousness.

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  • But when they present themselves to the individual moral consciousness it may be safely asserted (1) that there can be only one moral choice possible, i.e.

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  • It will be clear from the foregoing account of Taylor's work that the tendency of his thought, as of that of Bradley, is by no means directed to the confirmation or re-establishment of those principles of conduct recognized by the ordinary moral consciousness.

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  • Nevertheless there have been few moral philosophers who have, apart from the idiosyncrasies of their special prepossessions, set forth with clearer insight or with greater nobility of language the essential nature of the moral consciousness.

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  • Such aspects as concern ethics include, for example, the limited indeterminism involved in the theory, the attitude of the religious consciousness expressed by William James (Will to Believe and Pragmatism), and the pragmatic conception of the good.

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  • In it he chiefly dwells upon the evidence from Scripture in favour of the belief that the soul retains its intelligent consciousness after its separation from the body - passing by questions of philosophical speculation, as tending on such a subject only to minister to an idle curiosity.

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  • Consciousness itself involves the union of the antithetic elements, and prior to moral action nature is found organized and reason manifested or symbolized therein.

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  • It is above all the substance of religious feeling, which is the immediate consciousness of the unity of the world, of the absolute oneness behind the infinite multiplicity of contrasts; indeed, it is the religious conviction of the unity which is the best guarantee of the truth of the suppositions of philosophy.

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  • It is "the religious consciousness of the unity of the intellectual and physical world in God" which is to overcome the scepticism of the critical philosophy.

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  • Though He may not be conceived as the absolute cause of the world, the idea of absolute causality as symbolized in it may be taken as the best approximate expression of the contents of the religious consciousness.

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  • The one general function of the ego, thought, becomes in relation to the non-ego either receptive or spontaneous action, and in both forms of action its organic, or sense, and its intellectual energies co-operate; and in relation to man, nature and the universe the ego gradually finds its true individuality by becoming a part of them, "every extension of consciousness being higher life."

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  • His constant endeavour is to render the contents of the Christian consciousness clear to reason, and to develop the intelligible truths interwoven with the Christian belief.

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