Metaphysical Sentence Examples

He was a metaphysical puzzle to me.

As he grew older his metaphysical optimism waned.

These three stages are the Theological, the Metaphysical and the Positive.

Metaphysical realism is the intermediate view that everything known is either body or soul, neither of which alone exhausts the universe of being.

This metaphysical method, which we have already seen attempted by Lotze, is the true method, for we know more about things than about the beginnings of our knowledge.

Hamilton, having gone thus far, proceeded to evolve these results from a characteristic train of a priori or metaphysical reasoning.

The pre-eminence was not to be of rank and glory but of service and again made prominent though not yet supreme, and the metaphysical problems are so close at hand that their discussion is imperative.

They were not given to metaphysical speculation, nor long insistent in their inquiries as to the meaning and origin of things.

It is not primarily ethical nor even religious, but it is metaphysical.

In this they differed from the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans who thought in the abstract, and explained knowledge and existence in metaphysical terminology.

The term plays an important part in metaphysical, ethical and theological speculation.

While British philosophizing up to a recent date has been notably lacking in width of metaphysical outlook, it has taken a very high place in its handling of the more practical problems of conduct.

That idea is fundamental in the philosophy of religion, which therefore can be written only from the standpoint of a constructive metaphysical theory.

But this empirical tendency as regards science never modified his metaphysical outlook.

In the same year appeared his two great metaphysical works, De la Causa,Principio, ed Uno, and De l'Infinito, Universo, e Mondi; in the year following the Eroici Furori and Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo.

In 1591 he was at Frankfort, and published three important metaphysical works, De Triplici Minimo et Mensura; De Monade, Numero, et Figura; De Immenso et Innumerabilibus.

The second part of the book is taken up with a number of metaphysical arguments to prove the impossibility of an external world.

In his Discourse on the "Residual Analysis," he proposes to avoid the metaphysical difficulties of the method of fluxions by a purely algebraical method.

He took Greek metaphysical theories, and, by the allegorical method, interpreted them in accordance with the Jewish Revelation.

When the authority of Aristotle was again invoked, it was its dualistic and formal, not its idealistic and metaphysical, side that was in harmony with the spirit of the age.

In Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), he uses " dogma " of affirmations, whether supported by reasoning or merely asserted, if they claim " metaphysical " value, metaphysics being defined as " the systematic study of the ultimate nature of reality."

In the second place, and most usually, it is applied to a purely intellectual, metaphysical disbelief in the existence of any god, or of anything supernatural.

In the mind of Erasmus there was no metaphysical inclination; he was a man of letters, with a general tendency to rational views on every subject which came under his pen.

He is at his weakest in defending free will against Luther, and indeed he can hardly he said to enter on the metaphysical question.

But besides these high metaphysical necessities for a medium, there were more mundane uses to be fulfilled by aethers.

The psychological theory of cognition takes for granted the dualism of the mind that knows and the object known; it takes no account of the metaphysical problem as to the possibility of a relation between the ego and the non-ego, but assumes that such a relation does exist.

It might seem, indeed, that Stoicism indicates a falling off from Plato and Aristotle towards materialism, but the ethical dualism, which was the ruling tendency of the Stoa, could not long endure its materialistic physics, and took refuge in the metaphysical dualism of the Platonists.

Outside the boundaries of the solar system, the metaphysical side of his genius, no longer held in check by experience, fully asserted itself.

All these inspiring metaphysical and moral doctrines the pupil accepted from his master's dialogues, and throughout his life adhered to the general spirit of realism without materialism pervading the Platonic philosophy.

This deep metaphysical divergence was the prime cause of the transition from Platonism to Aristotelianism.

Both works arrive at it from the classification of categories, which is the same in both; except that in the former the categories are treated rather as a logical classification of names signifying things, in the latter rather as a metaphysical classification of things.

There is therefore a history of Aristotle's metaphysical views, corresponding to his gradual method of composition.

The truth is that the Metaphysics both precedes and follows the Physics, because it had been all along occupying Aristotle ever since he began to differ from Plato's metaphysical views and indeed forms a kind of presupposed basis of his whole system.

Such is Aristotle's natural realism, pervading his metaphysical and physical writings.

Platonism preceded it, and was the metaphysical doctrine that all things are supernatural - forms, gods, souls.

Idealism has since followed it, and is the metaphysical doctrine that all things are mind and states of mind.

Aristotelianism intervenes between ancient Platonism and modern Idealism, and is the metaphysical doctrine that all things are substances, natural and supernatural and human.

He once for all lifted the problem of metaphysics to a higher level, and, in conjunction with his successor, Hume, determined the form into which later metaphysical questions have been thrown.

In the hands of Baha the aims of the sect became much more practical and ethical, and the wilder pantheistic tendencies and metaphysical hair-splittings of the early Balls almost disappeared.

Altogether Biran's work presents a very remarkable specimen of deep metaphysical thinking directed by preference to the psychological aspect of experience.

Metaphysical idealism is the view that everything known is mind, or some mental state or other, which some idealists suppose to require a substantial soul, others not; while all agree that body has no different being apart from mind.

Aristotle, the founder of metaphysics as a distinct science, was also the founder of metaphysical realism, and still remains its main authority.

But a term so equivocal, leading to an antithesis so misleading as that between monism and dualism, can never represent the real difference between metaphysical schools.

In France, again, positivism is not materialism, but rather the refusal to frame a metaphysical theory.

He was a psychological idealist and a metaphysical realist.

Spinozism, however, though it tramples down the barrier between body and soul, is not yet metaphysical idealism, because it does not reduce extension to thought, but only says that the same substance is at once extended and thinking - a position more akin to materialism.

Up to this point, then, Leibnitz opened one of the chief avenues to metaphysical idealism, the resolution of the material into the immaterial, the analysis of bodies into mental elements.

According to this alternative, then, there is nothing but mental monads and mental phenomena; and Leibnitz is a metaphysical idealist.

According to this alternative, these organic bodies are compound or corporeal substances, between monads and phenomena; and Leibnitz is a metaphysical realist.

We cannot, therefore, agree with many recent idealists who regard Leibnitz as one of themselves, though it is true that, when stripped of its realism, his metaphysics easily passed into the metaphysical idealisms of Lotze and of Fechner.

Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant's inconsistencies and relics of realism.

Here he was for the first time grappling with a fundamental difficulty in metaphysical idealism which is absent from realism, namely, the difficulty of explaining the identity of a thing, e.g.

But as soon as the thing in itself is converted into something mental, metaphysical idealists must either say that there are as many suns as minds, or that there is one mind and therefore one sun.

In this extension of metaphysical idealism he was influenced by his disciple, Schelling.

Fichte completed the process from psychological and epistemological to metaphysical idealism, which it has been necessary to recall from its beginnings in France, England and Germany, in order to understand modern idealism.

He carried metaphysical idealism to its height, by not only resolving the bodily into the mental, but also elevating the action of mind into absolute mental construction; not inferring things in themselves beyond, but originating things from within, mind itself.

This was the starting-point of their metaphysical idealism.

The crux of all metaphysical idealism is the difficulty of reconciling the unity of the object with the plurality of subjects.

This hypothesis of an acquired perception of a space mentally constructed by " local signs " supplied Lotze and many succeeding idealists, including Wundt, with a new argument for metaphysical idealism.

At the very outset he started with his previous metaphysical hypothesis of parallelistic identity without interaction.

Most stop here, but some go with Fechner to the full length of his metaphysical parallelism of the physical and psychical, as psychophysical, throughout the whole world.

But this modification made no difference to the Kantian and Neo-Kantian deduction from the epistemological to the metaphysical.

Riehl elaborates this bare suggestion into the metaphysical theory that the single basis of physical and psychical phenomena is neither bodily nor mental, nor yet space and motion.

He constructs his system on the Kantian order - sense, understanding, reason - and exhibits most clearly the necessary consequence from psychological to metaphysical idealism.

They are positions also which deeply affect, not only the psychological, but also the metaphysical idealisms of our time, in Germany, and in the whole civilized world.

His metaphysical deduction from this psychological view is that all we know is mental phenomena, " the whole outer world exists for us only in our ideas," and all that our reason can logically do beyond these phenomena is to frame transcendent " ideals."

To understand noumenal idealism in Germany and the rise of metaphysical idealism in modern times is to discover that psychological is the origin of all metaphysical idealism.

The success, therefore, of the works of Green and Caird must stand or fall by their Hegelianism, which has indeed secured many adherents, partly metaphysical and partly theological.

Bradley is right to go straight to reality, and right also to inquire for the absolute, in order to take care that his metaphysical view is comprehensive enough to be true of the world as a whole.

Howison, published The Limits of Evolution, and other Essays illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (1901).

This is the method which, as we have seen, has led from psychological to metaphysical idealism, by the argument that what we begin by perceiving is mental, and, therefore, what we end by knowing is mental.

Hence, to proceed from psychology to metaphysics is to proceed from the less to the more known; and the paradoxes of psychological have caused those of metaphysical idealism.

At the same time, while the independence of metaphysics leads us to metaphysical realism, this is not to deny the value of psychology, still less of logic. Besides the duty of determining what we know, there is the duty of determining how we know it.

Their position was so illogical that it was easily turned into metaphysical idealism.

But, with these modifications he accepted the general physics of Aristotle, the metaphysical dualism of matter and form, and the psychology founded upon it.

The Thomism, therefore, of our day is wrong, from a metaphysical point of view, so far as it elevates Aristotelianism, as seriously modified but not fundamentally corrected by Aquinas, into an authoritative orthodoxy in metaphysics.

He died on the 13th of October 1715; his end was said to have been hastened by a metaphysical argument into which he had been drawn in the course of an interview with Bishop Berkeley.

It is apparent, even from the brief summary just given, that the importance of Hume in the history of philosophy consists in the vigour and logical exactness with which he develops a particular metaphysical view.

Some of his writings, from their metaphysical subtilty, will always puzzle the learned; but he could write to the level of the common heart without loss of dignity or pointedness.

He was appointed reader in moral and metaphysical philosophy at Magdalen College in 1855, and Waynflete professor in 1859.

To arbitrary and unverifiable metaphysical speculation, and to forms of "absolutism" which have lost touch with human interests, this humanism is particularly destructive.

But he differed from Kant both as regards the foundation for this criticism and as regards the metaphysical results yielded by it.

Truly perceiving that the ultimate metaphysical problem is, here as ever, the relation of the One and the Many, McTaggart starts with a definition of the ideal in which our thought upon it can come to rest.

He had finished the Organon and was about to deal with the metaphysical and physical treatises when he died on the 18th of June 1871, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Upon this it bases a theory of predication, which, however, is compatible with more than one reading of the metaphysical import of the ideas.

Enough has been said to justify the great place assigned to Aristotle in the history of logic. Without pressing metaphysical formulae in logic proper, he analysed formal;implica tion, grounded implication as a mode of knowledge Summary.

Logical forms have for him neither psychological nor metaphysical reference.

For at the basis of Herbart's speculation there lies a conception of identity foreign to the thought of Kant with his stress on synthesis, in his thoroughgoing metaphysical use of which Herbart goes back not merely to Wolff but to Leibnitz.

Accordingly, though he regards logic as formal, its forms come into relation to objectivity in some sort even within the logical field itself, while when taken in the setting of his system as a whole, its formal character is not of a kind that ultimately excludes psychological and metaphysical reference, at least speculatively.

Hegel's logic, 3 though it involves inquiries which custom regards as metaphysical, is not to be characterized as a meta.

The position of the search for truth, for which knowledge is a growing organism in which thought needs, so to speak, to feed on something other than itself, is conditioned in the view of logic wholly metaphysical.

By this recognition of the necessary correlation of Being and Not-being, Heraclitus is in a very real sense the father of metaphysical and scientific speculation, and in him the Ionian school of philosophy reached, its highest point.

Metaphysical dualism postulates the eternal coexistence of mind and matter, as opposed to monism both idealistic and materialistic. Two forms of this dualism are held.

The birth of modern physical science on the other hand in the investigations of Bacon and Descartes obscured the metaphysical issue by the predominance of the mechanical principles of natural philosophy.

The research into abstract qualities, the fundamental problem of physics, comes near to the metaphysical study of forms, which indeed differs from the first only in being more general, and in having as its results a form strictly so called, i.e.

It is curious and significant that in the domain of the moral and metaphysical sciences his influence has been perhaps more powerful, and his authority has been more frequently appealed to, than in that of the physical.

At the request of his friends he devoted a fortnight to applying the same method to the first or metaphysical part of Descartes's philosophy, and the sketch was published in 1663, with an appendix entitled Cogitata metaphysica, still written from a Cartesian standpoint (defending, for example, the freedom of the will), but containing hints of his own doctrine.

The abstractions which it preaches are not products of metaphysical speculation, as in India, but rather the ethical forces which dominate human life.

Its motive was not cosmological or metaphysical, but religious and historical.

Following Duns Scotus, he adopted the Platonic theory of ideas, and denied that Aristotle had made any contribution to metaphysical speculation.

From Schelling, whom he praised as having developed Kant where Fichte failed to do so, he borrowed much and often, not only in the metaphysical sections of the Biographia but in his aesthetic lectures, and further in the cosmic speculations of the posthumous Theory of Life.

Clarke answered his unknown opponent with a gravity and care that showed his high opinion of the metaphysical acuteness displayed in the objections, and published the correspondence in later editions'of the Demonstration.

In the same year he was appointed clerk of the closet to the queen, and had to take part in the metaphysical conversation parties which she loved to gather round her.

He became a favourite disciple of Bossuet, and at the bishop's instance undertook to refute certain metaphysical errors of Father Malebranche.

The analogues therefore of metaphysical problems must be sought in physics; particularly that problem of the causes of things for which the Platonic idea and the Peripatetic " constitutive form " had been, each in its turn, received solutions.

In Heraclitus the constant flux is a metaphysical notion replaced by the interchange of material elements which Chrysippus stated as a simple proposition of physics.

Anthero de Quental, the chief of the Coimbrans, enshrined his metaphysical neo-Buddhistic ideas overshadowed by extreme pessimism, and marked the stages of his mental evolution, in a sequence of finely-wrought sonnets.

The term "deism" not only is used to signify the main body of the deists' teaching, or the tendency they represent, but has come into use as a technical term for one specific metaphysical doctrine as to the relation of God to the universe, assumed to have been characteristic of the deists, and to have distinguished them from atheists, pantheists and theists, - the belief, namely, that the first cause of the universe is a personal God, who is, however, not only distinct from the world but apart from it and its concerns.

The ethical and metaphysical ideas most conspicuous in the doctrines of Lamaism are not confined to the highlands of central Asia, they are accepted in great measure also in Japan and China.

Each new creation, each new step in the theory, demanded another, until the whole sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and simpler lessons of the founder of the religion were hidden beneath the glittering stream of metaphysical subtleties.

In the variety of his knowledge, and in the importance of his influence on both Greek and modern speculation he was the Aristotle of the 5th century, while the sanity of his metaphysical theory has led many to regard him as the equal, if not the superior, of Plato.

Such a theory seems alone able to satisfy the practical instincts of the West, which did not concern itself with the metaphysical aspect of the Trinity, but with Godhead in its relation to redeemed humanity.

The former symbolizes his metaphysical conception, which was suggested to him by his reading of Spinoza.

But the theory must, as a metaphysical theory, be reckoned on the idealist side.

Thus Kant distinguished the two selves as rational and empirical, just as he distinguished the two egos as the noumenal or real and the phenomenal from the metaphysical standpoint.

Much might be written about the peculiar position held by Petrarch between the metaphysical lyrists of Tuscany and the more realistic amorists of succeeding generations.

The metaphysical & roplac of Theophrastus which have come down to us show that he was fully alive to the difficulties that beset many of the Aristotelian definitions.

The fundamental metaphysical postulate that being and God are ultimately identical remained, however, the philosophical basis of all his thinking, and reverence for this being as the supreme good remained the fundamental disposition of his mind.

To the odd terminology of Donne's poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of "metaphysics," and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the "metaphysical school" to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.

It may be said, therefore, to involve a complete metaphysical theory.

But there is no warrant for restricting the term to any special mode of approaching the problems indicated; and as these form the central subject of metaphysical inquiry, no valid distinction can be drawn between natural theology and general metaphysics.

We also possess in fragments a History of Physics, a treatise On Stones, and a work On Sensation, and certain metaphysical 'Airopiac, which probably once formed part of a systematic treatise.

Adopting the Kantian standpoint that we can know nothing but phenomena, Lange maintains that neither materialism nor any other metaphysical system has a valid claim to ultimate truth.

Xenocrates, however, failing, as it would seem, to grasp the idealism which was the metaphysical foundation of Plato's theory of natural kinds, took for his principles arithmetical unity and plurality, and accordingly identified ideal numbers with arithmetical numbers.

Having accepted the Platonic metaphysical doctrine, he applied to it the Neo-Pythagorean principles and the Oriental doctrine of Emanation.

For the time, however, he tranquilly pursued his studies, writing those notes on Vieta which establish his proficiency in mathematics, and a metaphysical treatise now lost, which, if Foscarini's account of it may be relied upon, anticipated the sensationalism of Locke.

The second volume was chiefly by Enfantin, who along with Bazard stood at the head of the society, but who was superior in metaphysical power, and was prone to push his deductions to extremities.

The God I plead for is neither the deity of Pantheism, nor the absolute unity of the Eleatics, a being divorced from all possibility of creation or plurality, a mere metaphysical abstraction.

The Buddha's philosophy forms a system based on a few fundamental ideas, whilst that of Maha-vira scarcely forms a system, but is merely a sum of opinions (pannattis) on various subjects, no fundamental ideas being there to uphold the mass of metaphysical matter.

The American leaders were impregnated with the metaphysical ideas of rights which had come to them from the rising revolutionary school in France.

The last chapter, its author says, is taken up with "Mr Papillon's banishment under the Alien Act, from a ministerial misconception of a metaphysical sonnet."

This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, the Metaphysical Society.

Hutton, who in 1881 wrote that the word "was suggested by Huxley at a meeting held previous to the formation of the now defunct Metaphysical Society at Mr Knowles's house on Clapham Common in 1869, in my hearing.

Wycliffe was a metaphysician and a theologian, and had to invent a metaphysical theory - the theory of Dominium - to enable him to transfer, in a way satisfactory to himself, the powers and privileges of the church to his company of poor Christians; but his followers were content to allege that a church which held large landed possessions, collected tithes greedily and took money from starving peasants for baptizing, burying and praying, could not be the church of Christ and his apostles.

The metaphysical works of Descartes had appeared a few years before he went to Oxford, and the Human Nature and Leviathan of Hobbes during his undergraduate years.

John Norris, the metaphysical rector of Bemerton and English disciple of Malebranche,, criticized it in 1690.

In the autumn of 1696, Stillingfleet, an argumentative ecclesiastic more than a religious philosopher, in his Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, charged Locke with disallowing mystery in human knowledge, especially in his account of the metaphysical idea of " substance.

He had no objection to a national establishment of religion, provided that it was comprehensive enough, and was really the nation organized to promote goodness; not to protect the metaphysical subtleties of sectarian theologians.

In the main, no doubt, the problem is a metaphysical problem, and has its origin in the effort to reconcile that belief in man's freedom which is regarded by the unsophisticated moral consciousness as indisputable, with a belief in a universe governed by rational and necessary laws.

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.

The modern treatment of the problem from Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibnitz down to Kant is too much inwoven into the metaphysical systems of individual great philoso phers to afford the possibility of detailed treatment in the present article.

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.

In the case of Pythagoras, conspicuous among pre-Socratic philosophers as the founder not merely of a school, but of a sect or order bound by a common rule of life, there is a closer connexion between moral and metaphysical speculation.

The natural reaction against the metaphysical and ethical dogmatism of the earlyg Y thinkers had reached its climax in the Sophists.

By Plato, however, this conclusion could have been held only before he had accomplished the movement of thought by which he carried the Socratic method beyond the range of human conduct and developed it into a metaphysical system.

Even Socrates, in spite of his aversion to physics, was led by pious reflection to expound a teleological view of the physical world, as ordered in all its parts by divine wisdom for the realization of some divine end; and, in the metaphysical turn which Plato gave to this view, he was probably anticipated by Euclid of Megara, who held that the one real being is " that which we call by many names, Good, Wisdom, Reason or God," to which Plato, raising to a loftier significance the Socratic identification of the beautiful with the useful, added the further name of Absolute Beauty, explaining how man's love of the beautiful finally reveals itself as the yearning for the end and essence of being.

When a student passes from Plato to Aristotle, he is so forcibly impressed by the contrast between the habits of mind of the two authors, and the literary manners of the two philosophers, that it is easy to under stand how their systems have come to be popularly conceived as diametrically opposed to each other; and the uncompromising polemic which Aristotle, both in his ethical and in his metaphysical treatises, directs against Plato and the platonists, has tended strongly to confirm this view.

But in spite of the intense conviction with which he thus identified metaphysical speculation and practical wisdom, we find in his writings no serious attempt to deduce the particulars of human well-being from his knowledge of absolute good, still less to unfold from it the particular cognitions of the special arts and sciences.

No doubt, too, Aristotle's attribution of pleasure to the Divine Existence shows a profound metaphysical divergence from Plato; but it is a divergence which has no practical importance.

The sense of the gap between theory and fact gives to the religious element of Stoicism a new force; the soul, conscious of its weakness, leans on the thought of God, and in the philosopher's attitude towards external events, pious resignation preponderates over self-poised indifference; the old self-reliance of the reason, looking down on man's natural life as a mere field for its exercise, makes room for a positive aversion to the flesh as an alien element imprisoning the spirit; the body has come to be a " corpse which the soul sustains," 1 and life a " sojourn in a strange land "; 2 in short, the ethical idealism of Zeno has begun to borrow from the metaphysical idealism of Plato.

The alterations, however, in the metaphysical position of the Academics had little effect on their ethical teach ing, as, even during the period of Scepticism, they appear to have presented as probable the same general view of human good which Antiochus afterwards dogmatically announced as a revival of the common doctrine of Plato and Aristotle.

At the same time it cannot be broadly said that Christianity took a decisive side in the metaphysical controversy on free-will and necessity; since, just as in Greek philosophy the need of maintaining freedom as the ground of responsibility clashes with the conviction that no one deliberately chooses his own harm, so in Christian ethics it clashes with the attribution of all true human virtue to supernatural grace, as well as with the belief in divine foreknowledge.

Even in Clarke's system, where Indeterminism is no doubt a cardinal notion, its importance is metaphysical It may be observed that in the view of Kant and others (2) and (3) are somewhat confusingly blended.

The physics and psychology of Descartes were much studied in England, and his metaphysical system was certainly the most important antecedent of Locke's; but Descartes hardly touched ethics proper.

So again the controversy that Clarke conducted with Spinoza, and afterwards with Leibnitz, was entirely confined to the metaphysical region.

Before the ethics of Kant had begun to be seriously studied in England, the rapid and remarkable development of metaphysical view and method of which the three chief stages are represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel respectively had already taken place; and the system of the latter was occupying the most prominent position in the philosophical thought of Germany.

But metaphysical systems of ethics are no novelty even in England, and, while the increased interest in ultimate issues of philosophy has enormously deepened and widened men's appreciation of moral problems and the issues involved in conduct, the actual advance in ethical theory produced by such speculations has been comparatively slight.

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.

And it is perhaps unfortunate that metaphysical doctrines enunciated chiefly for the purposes of criticism not in themselves vitally necessary to the theory of morality propounded should have been.

What has not been adequately realized is that the metaphysical basis of his system of ethics - the argument, for example, contained in the introduction to the Prolegomena - is unfairly treated if divorced from his treatment of morals as a whole, and that it can be justly estimated only if interpreted as much as the conclusion as the starting-point of moral theory.

It would be quite possible to accept his criticisms of naturalism and hedonism while rejecting many of the metaphysical inferences which he draws.

It is curious, in the first place, to find the independence of moral philosophy upon metaphysics supported by metaphysical arguments.

For whatever may be the real character of the interrelation of moral and metaphysical first principles it is obvious that Taylor's own dissatisfaction with current moral principles arises from an inability to believe in their ultimate rationality, i.e.

But further, it is becoming increasingly apparent that psychology (upon which Taylor would base morality) itself involves metaphysical assumptions; its position in fact cannot be stated except as a metaphysical position, whether that of subjective idealism or any other.

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.

He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, and was a member of the Metaphysical Society.

The more metaphysical Tacullies of British Columbia say that in the beginning nought existed but water and a musk-rat.

Coming to races more advanced in civilization, we find the New Zealanders in possession of ancient hymns in which the origin of things is traced back to nothing, to darkness, and to a metaphysical process from nothing to something, from being to becoming.

It has been suggested that these hymns bear traces of Buddhist and Indian influence; in any case, they are rather metaphysical than mystical.

In the South Sea Islands, generally, the fable of the union and separation of Heaven and Earth is current; other forms will be found in Gill's Myths and Songs from the South Pacific. The cosmogonic myths of the Aryans of India are peculiarly interesting, as we find in the Vedas and Brahmanas and Puranas almost every fiction familiar to savages side by side with the most abstract metaphysical speculations.

As regards the former the Church adopted a course midway between metaphysical explanations and historical traditions, and reconciled the more extreme theories; while with the admission of pagans a great deal of paganism itself was introduced.

In fact, whilst in the Eastern Church the metaphysical ardour of the Greeks was spending itself in terrible combats in the oecumenical councils over the interpretation of the Nicene Creed, the clergy of Gaul, more simple and strict in their faith, abjured these theological logomachies; from the first they had preferred action to criticism and had taken no part in the great controversy on free-will raised by Pelagius.

It inaugurated its legislative tion of the labors by a metaphysical declaration of the Rights rights of of Man and of the Citizen (October 2, 1789).

According to Comte human thought passes through three stages - theological, metaphysical and positive.

In this way, by a theory which, according to Averroes, involves the negation of science, the Moslem theologians believed that they had exalted God beyond the limits of the metaphysical and scientific conceptions of law, form and matter; whilst they at the same time stood aloof from the vulgar doctrines, attributing a causality to things.

The form animal, e.g., is an abstract intelligible or metaphysical idea.

He assails them on twenty points of their mixed physical and metaphysical peripateticism, from the statement of which, in spite of his pretended scepticism, we can deduce some very positive metaphysical opinions of his own.

These criticisms disclose nothing like a sceptical state of mind, but rather a reversion from the metaphysical to the theological stage of thought.

Averroes maintains that a return must be made to the words and teaching of the prophet; that science must not expend itself in dogmatizing on the metaphysical consequences of fragments of doctrine for popular acceptance, but must proceed to reflect upon and examine the existing things of the world.

It is in man that the physical or sensible passes most evidently into the metaphysical and rational.

The metaphysical supplementing is also fundamentally as before.

The immanence doctrine has arisen from two main causes, the one metaphysical, the other religious.

In support of such a view are adduced not only the metaphysical difficulty of postulating any relationship between the infinite and the purely finite, but also the ethical 1 P. G., tom.

With the Cartesian movement as a whole he shows little acquaintance and no sympathy, and his own philosophic conception is never brought into relation with the systematic treatment of metaphysical problems characteristic of the Cartesian method.

This second inquiry is specifically metaphysical in bearing, and the kind of answer furnished to it by Leibnitz on the one hand, by Berkeley on the other, is in fact prescribed or determined beforehand by the fundamental conception of the individualist method with which both begin their investigations.

The metaphysical conception of the monads, each of which is the universe in nuce, presents insuperable difficulties when the connexion or interdependence of the monads is in question, and these difficulties obtrude themselves when the attempt is made to work out a consistent doctrine of cognition.

To inquire how synthetic a priori j udgments are possible, or how far cognition extends, or what worth attaches to metaphysical propositions, is simply to ask, in a specific form, what elements are necessarily involved in experience of which the subject is conscious.

The three inquiries correspond to the subjects of the three ancient metaphysical sciences, rational psychology, rational cosmology, rational theology.

They have not, therefore, like the categories, any constitutive value, and all attempts at metaphysical construction with the notions or categories of science must be resigned as of necessity hopeless.

Cynics of today regard this as metaphysical bunkum, yet it might be pragmatic realism tomorrow.

This process has a metaphysical goal, a mystical approach, even a scientific exactitude.

In the language of philosophy, this is known as a purely metaphysical outlook which operates with immutable, non-historical, dogmatic concepts.

On one side, pure science leads us away from nature toward a notional, almost metaphysical realm of particles.

The seven souls of man were not metaphysical " concepts " at any time in the past.

Thus, Parry is ' saying the Spencer thing but in very metaphysical terms ' .

Being both absolute and changeable, remote and immediate, physical but also metaphysical, the sky engages dynamically with the poet's solitude.

Here, Pierre Jacob addresses the question raised by his accepting methodological naturalism, not metaphysical naturalism.

Of these there are even some who openly proclaim their refusal to discuss or admit any metaphysical concept.

He may not believe even in God, may not ask what his soul is, nor think of any metaphysical speculation.

There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word " damn " than in the word " degeneration.

Any conception of truth not relevant to making human life wholesome and good would simply be metaphysical and therefore unedifying.

His interest in theology was profound, and he brought to it a spirituality of outlook and an aptitude for metaphysical inquiry and exposition which added a singular attraction to his writings.

He was an original member of the Metaphysical Society (1869).

His Recherche de la verite, in 1674, was the baptism of the system into a theistic religion which borrowed its imagery from Augustine; it brought into prominence the metaphysical base which Louis Delaforge, Jacques Rohault and Regis had neither cared for nor understood.

The fundamental principle of his philosophy was that truth must be sought not in metaphysical or a priori abstractions but in psychological investigation, and further that this investigation cannot confine itself successfully to the individual consciousness, but must be devoted primarily to society as a whole.

The imagination that death will destroy these powers is unfounded, because (1) " this supposes we are compounded, and so discerptible, but the contrary is probable " on metaphysical grounds (the indivisibility of the subject in which consciousness as indivisible inheres, and its distinction from the body) and also experimental (the persistence of the living being in spite of changes in the body or even losses of parts of the body); (2) this also assumes that " our present living powers of reflection " must be affected in the same way by death " as those of sensation," but this is disproved by their relative independence even in this life; (3) " even the suspension of our present powers of reflection " is not involved in " the idea of death, which is simply dissolution of the body," and which may even " be like birth, a continuation and perfecting of our powers."

The pre-Socratics may be classed as naïve materialists in this sense; though, as at that early period the contrast between matter and spirit had not been' fully realized and matter was credited with properties that belong to life, it is usual to apply the term hylozoism to the earliest stage of Greek metaphysical theory.

Or a philosopher like Hegel, armed with a metaphysical theory, may descend upon the facts of religion and interpret them in its light, till they almost lose their original significance, which we might provisionally define as consisting in this, that the believer in any religion finds himself helped or (as he claims) saved by it.

There is no chance for the moral consciousness to claim a decisive vote if a metaphysical system like Hegel's demonstrates all realities in every region, and if its janissaries crush out every movement of rebellion against the tyranny of abstract thought.

In the 19th century the doctrine of evolution received new biological contents and became transformed from a vague, partly metaphysical theory to the dominant modern conception.

Buffier's aversion to scholastic refinements has given to his writings an appearance of shallowness and want of metaphysical insight, and unquestionably he failed entirely even to indicate the nature of that universality and necessity which he ascribed to his "eternal verities"; he was, however, one of the earliest to recognize the psychological as distinguished from the metaphysical side of Descartes's principle, and to use it, with no inconsiderable skill, as the basis of an analysis of the human mind, similar to that enjoined by Locke.

Thus Candide attacks religious and philosophical optimism, L'Homme aux quarante ecus certain social and political ways of the time, Zadig and others the received forms of moral and metaphysical orthodoxy, while some are mere lampoons on the Bible, the unfailing source of Voltaire's wit.

In the metaphysical state of mind, then, to retain our instance, political authority was based on the sovereignty of the people, and social facts were explained by the figment of a falling away from a state of nature.

The difference between the two theories does not consist in any difference of emphasis on the objective side of knowledge, but in the standard by which the nature of the object is to be tested - the difference is logical not metaphysical - it concerns the definition of truth or falsity in the knowledge of the reality which both admit.

Moreover, even in the Categories as names signifying distinct things they imply distinct things; and hence the Categories, as well as the Metaphysics, draws the metaphysical conclusion that individual substances are the things without which there is nothing else, and thereby lays the positive foundation of the philosophy running through all the extant Aristotelian writings.

Psychological idealism assumes without proof that we perceive nothing but mental objects, and metaphysical idealism draws the logical but hypothetical conclusion that all we can know from these mental objects of sense is mental objects of knowledge.

Berkeley saw the inconsistency of this position, and, in asserting that all we perceive and all we know is nothing but ideas in " mind, spirit, soul, or myself," has the merit of having made, as Paulsen remarks, " epistemological idealism the basis of metaphysical idealism."

He borrows from Kant's "rationalism " the hypothesis of a spontaneous activity of the subject with the deduction that knowledge begins from sense, but arises from understanding; and he accepts from Kant's metaphysical idealism the consequence that everything we perceive, experience and know about physical nature, and the bodies of which it consists, is phenomena, and not bodily things in themselves.

From this epistemology he derives the metaphysical conclusion that the things we know are indeed independent of my consciousness and of yours, taken individually, or, to use a new phrase, are " transsubjective "; but, so far from being independent of the common consciousness, one and the same in all of us, they are simply its contents in the inseparable relation of subject and object.

Towards the middle of the 5th century, however, Protagoras of Abdera, taking account of the teaching of the first, and possibly of the second, of the physical successions, and Gorgias of Leontini, starting from the teaching of the metaphysical succession of Elea, drew that sceptical inference from which the philosophers had shrunk.

These definitions being thus various, the Eleate notes that the sophist, in consideration of a fee, disputes, and teaches others to dispute, about things divine, cosmical, metaphysical, legal, political, technical - in fact, about everything - not having knowledge of them, because universal knowledge is unattainable; after which he is in a position to define the sophist (7) as a conscious impostor who, in private, by discontinuous discourse, compels his interlocutor to contradict himself, in opposition to the Sn,uoXoyucos, who, in public, by continuous discourse, imposes upon crowds.

But we are most of all indebted to Herbart for the enormous advance psychology has been enabled to make, thanks to his fruitful treatment of it, albeit as yet but few among the many who have appropriated and improved his materials have ventured to adopt his metaphysical and mathematical foundations.

Eclectic furniture could also possess a New Age, mystical or metaphysical look.

Even today, moonstone is used for metaphysical purposes.

Even today, moonstone is commonly used in metaphysical healing therapies.

People who buy Soo Chow jade for metaphysical reasons are usually interested in the serpentine symbolism.

Check out small stores on college campuses that sell folk jewelry, symbolic jewelry or metaphysical items.

Many triple moon goddess jewelry incorporates moonstone and amethyst because of the gem stones' symbolism and metaphysical properties.

However, the triple moon goddess and feminine power moon necklaces are metaphysical or spiritual jewelry.

Metaphysical stores are a great resource for finding spiritually focused moon necklaces.

The metaphysical shopper will find many ways to express her spirituality through variations of the powerful triple moon goddess symbol.

However, there are some metaphysical websites that also sell versions of the Chalice Well pendant.

The symbolism of pearls is still factored into metaphysical jewelry.

Another type of meaning is metaphysical that ascribes certain healing or beneficial properties to the stone.

Its metaphysical meaning is preservation.

The metaphysical properties are believed to be very beneficial and offer healing and protection.

It's used as a metaphysical healer for the heart and circulation.

Some people may take a spiritual or metaphysical approach, while others are more science-minded toward dreams and sleep.

This is a bit more of a metaphysical "personalization," but at the same time it is also more personal in that it shows that you not only care for him or her but you are paying attention to the person's wants and needs.

If you can't find one listed in your local directory, try checking out the closest metaphysical book store.

The metaphysical book store is the tarot enthusiast's best friend.

Some people are said to be truly insightful when it comes to interpreting palms, numbers, natal charts and other areas of the metaphysical arts.

The goal at LoveToKnow Paranormal is to bring you entertaining and informative articles on all aspects of paranormal activity, from classic hauntings to metaphysical phenomena such as clairvoyance and extrasensory perception, aka ESP.

By 1923, Cayce met a friend that had an interest in metaphysical philosophy and suggested Cayce use his trance to find answers to the deeper questions about life and the universe.

Fairies, Gothic or otherwise, are a group of spiritual beings that belong to the metaphysical world.

Different types of wood have subtly different metaphysical properties (that is, they're better for some types of magic than others), but that's getting kind of advanced.

The strain of the next three years' continuous work undermined his health and his eyesight, and he was compelled to retire from his professorship. During these years he had published works on Plato and Socrates and a history of philosophy (1875); but after his retirement he further developed his philosophical position, a speculative eclecticism through which he endeavoured to reconcile metaphysical idealism with the naturalistic and mechanical standpoint of science.

The full implications of the group of ideas require, and are likely to receive, much attention in the immediate future of biological investigation, but it is enough at present to point out that until the more obvious lines of inquiry have been opened out much more fully, we cannot be in a position to guess at the existence of a residuum, for which such a metaphysical conception as bathmism would serve even as a convenient disguise for ignorance.

Fragments of his ethical and metaphysical writings are quoted by Stobaeus, Simplicius and others.

It was on this field that he most vehemently attacked the prevailing atomistic and materialistic views of the methodic school, and his conception of the pneuma became in some respects half metaphysical.

Here he " woke up to the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations."

He had a wide metaphysical and philosophical knowledge which he applied to the history of theology.

The province of reverent theology is to aid accurate thinking by the use of metaphysical or psychological terms. Its definitions are no more an end in themselves than an analysis of good drinking water, which by itself leaves us thirsty but encourages us to drink.

His views on the problems of Arianism, and his attempt to reconcile it with orthodox theology, are contained in A Specimen of True Philosophy (1730, reprinted in Metaphysical Tracts, 1837) and Logology, or a Treatise on the Logos in Seven Sermons on John i.

The defect of English empiricism from the outset had been the uncritical acceptance of the metaphysical dogma of a pure unadulterated sense-experience as the criterion of truth.

John has a metaphysical prologue; Matthew and Luke have historical prologues; and Mark is without any prologue.

He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works,, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician.

His purpose was, as Otto Pfleiderer says, "to connect the metaphysical ideas, which had been arrived at by means of philosophical dialectic, directly with the persons and events of the Gospel narratives, thus raising these above the region of ordinary experience into that of the supernatural, and regarding the most absurd assertions as philosophically justified.

The metaphysical or ontological part of psychology is in Wundt's view the actual part, and with this the science of nature and the science of mind are to be brought into relation, and thus constituted as far as possible philosophical sciences.

But with the decline of dogmatic belief and the spread of religious doubt - as the special sciences also grow more general, and the natural sciences become more speculative about matter and force, evolution and teleology - men begin to wonder again about the nature and origin of things, just as it was the decay of polytheism in Greek religion and his own discoveries in natural science which impelled Aristotle to metaphysical questions.

Metaphysical materialism is the view that everything known is body or matter; but while according to ancient materialists soul is only another body, according to modern materialists mind without soul is only an attribute or function of body.

Leibnitz, again, having become equally dissatisfied with Cartesianism, Spinozism and the Epicurean realism of Gassendi, in the latter part of his life came still nearer than Spinoza to metaphysical idealism in his monadology, or half-Pythagorean,half-Brunistic analysis of bodies into monads, or units, or simple substances, indivisible and unextended, but endowed with perception and appetite.

This second position is a new form of metaphysical idealism, containing the supposition, which lies at the foundation of later German philosophy, that since understanding shapes the objects out of sensations, and since nature, as we know it, consists of such objects, " understanding, though it does not make, shapes nature," as well as our knowledge.

This third position isarelic of ancient metaphysical realism; although it must be remembered that Kant does not go to the length of Descartes and Locke, who supposed that from mere ideas we could know bodies and souls, but suggests that beneath the phenomena of outer and inner sense the thing in itself may not be heterogeneous (ungleichartig).

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.

His psychological starting-point was the unproved assumption that the only force of which we are immediately aware is will; his metaphysical goal was the consistent conclusion that in that case the only force we can know, as the noumenal essence of which all else is phenomenal appearance, is will.

Nevertheless he was too much a child of his age to keep things known steadily before him; having asked the metaphysical question he proceeded to find a psychological answer in a theory of sensation, which asserted the mere hypothesis that the being which we ascribe to things on the evidence of sensation consists in their being felt.

This is the subject of his last metaphysical work, Die Tagesansicht gegeniiber der Nachtansicht (1879).

With the conviction that the only fair way of describing metaphysics has been to avoid putting forward one system, and even to pay most attention to the dominant idealism, we have nevertheless been driven occasionally to test opinions by this independent metaphysical method.

The cause Of this anachronism has been the failure of intuitive realism and the domination of idealism, which makes short-sighted men suppose that at all events they must begin with the psychology and the psychological idealism of the day, in the false hope that on the sands of psychological idealism they may build a house of metaphysical realism.

Centuries elapsed after Aquinas before Galileo and his successors reformed natural science, and before Bacon destroyed the metaphysical dualism of matter and form by showing that a form in Nature is only a law of the action of matter, and that, as the action of a body is as individual as the body, the form is eternal only in thought (ratione).

His disappointment at its reception was great; and though he never entirely relinquished his metaphysical speculations, though all that is of value in his later writings depends on the acute analysis of human nature to which he was from the first attracted, one cannot but regret that his high powers were henceforth withdrawn for the most part from the consideration, of the foundations of belief, and expended on its practical applications.

In the Treatise of Human Nature, which is in every respect the most complete exposition of Hume's philosophical conception, we have the first thorough-going attempt to apply the fundamental principles of Locke's empirical psychology to the construction of a theory of knowledge, and, as a natural consequence, the first systematic criticism of the chief metaphysical notions from this point of view.

It may be conjectured that, when he emerged from the purely Socratic phase of his earlier years, Plato gave himself to the study of contemporary methods of education and to the elaboration of an educational system of his own, and that it was in this way that he came to the metaphysical speculations of his maturity.

However this may be, we find amongst his writings - intermediate, as it would seem, between the Socratic conversations of his first period of literary activity and the metaphysical disquisitions of a later time - a series of dialogues which, however varied their ostensible subjects, agree in having a direct bearing upon education.

In 1810 appeared the Philosophical Essays, in 1814 the second volume of the Elements, in 1815 the first part and in 1821 the second part of the "Dissertation" written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica " Supplement," entitled "A General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters."

It is to be regarded as a propaedeutic, 12 which, although it is in contact with reality in and through the metaphysical import of the axioms, or again in the fact that the categories, though primarily taken as forms of predication, must also be regarded as kinds of being, is not directly concerned with object-reality, but with the determination for the thinking subject of what constitutes the knowledge correlative to being.

It was in the pressing to its extreme consequences of the conception of uncompromising identity which is to be found in Leibnitz, that the contradictions took their rise which Herbart aimed at solving, by the method of relations and his doctrine of the ultimate plurality of " reals," The logic of relations between conceptual units, themselves unaltered by the relation, seems a kind of reflection of his metaphysical method.

His metaphysical method, however, is like Herbart's, not identifiable with his logic, and the latter has for its central characteristic its thorough restatement of the logical forms traditional in language and the text-books, in such a way as to harmonize with the doctrine of a reality whose organic unity is all-inclusive.

Further, it is difficult not to accept Cicero's statement that Anaximenes made air a conscious deity; we are, at all events, justified in regarding Anaximenes as a link (perhaps an unconscious link) between crude Hylozoism and definitely metaphysical theories of existence.

Moreover, much work of the highest importance in ethics in modern as well as ancient times has been completed with but scanty, if any, reference to the subject of the freedom of the will, or upon a metaphysical basis compatible with most of the doctrines of both the rival theories.

Again, in his Grundproblem der Erkenntnisstheorie (1889) he uses without proof the hypothesis of psychological idealism, that we perceive psychical effects, to infer with merely hypothetical consistency the conclusion of noumenal metaphysical idealism that all we can thereby know is psychical causes, or something transcendent, beyond phenomena indeed, yet not beyond mind.

To endow the universal substance with moral attributes, to maintain that it is more than the metaphysical ground of everything, to say it is the perfect realization of the holy, the beautiful and the good, can only have a meaning for him who feels within himself what real not imaginary values are clothed in those expressions.

His work embraces in its scope many psychological and more strictly metaphysical discussions, but it is chiefly in connexion with ethics that Tucker's speculations are remembered.

After all, the metaphysical theology of Descartes, however essential in his own eyes, serves chiefly as the ground for constructing his theory of man and of the universe.

For an account of the metaphysical doctrines of Descartes, in their connexions with Malebranche and Spinoza, see Cartesianism.

In stating constructively the doctrine of immortality we must assign altogether secondary importance to the metaphysical arguments from the nature of the soul.

The pre-Socratics may be classed as naïve materialists in this sense; though, as at that early period the contrast between matter and spirit had not been' fully realized and matter was credited with properties that belong to life, it is usual to apply the term hylozoism to the earliest stage of Greek metaphysical theory.

Yet on the whole Aristotle leans to a teleological theory of evolution, which he interprets dualistually by means of certain metaphysical distinctions.

He may be said to furnish a further contribution to a metaphysical conception of evolution in his view of all finite individual things as the infinite variety to which the unlimited productive power of the universal substance gives birth.

We see how different this metaphysical conception is from that scientific notion of cosmic evolution in which the lower stages are the antecedents and conditions of the higher.

Hegel gives a place in his metaphysical system to the mechanical and the teleological views; yet in his treatment of the world as an evolution the idea of end or purpose is the predominant one.

He says Lamarck's original animal is something metaphysical, not physical, namely, the will to live.

The Pythagorean school of philosophers adopted the theory of a spherical earth, but from metaphysical rather than scientific reasons; their convincing argument was that a sphere being the most perfect solid figure was the only one worthy to circumscribe the dwellingplace of man.

It should be noticed that this (very common) psychological interpretation of "conception" differs from the metaphysical or general philosophical definition given above, in so far as it includes mental presentations in which the universal is not specifically distinguished from the particulars.

Dr Park's sermon, "The Theology of the Intellect and that of the Feelings," delivered in 1850 before the convention of the Congregational ministers of Massachusetts, and published in the Bibliotheca sacra of July 1850, was the cause of a long and bitter controversy, metaphysical rather than doctrinal, with Charles Hodge.

He also dealt with the condemnation of Pope Honorius, carried on a controversial correspondence with John Stuart Mill, and took a leading part in the discussions of the Metaphysical Society, founded by Mr James Knowles, of which Tennyson, Huxley and Martineau were also prominent members.

He is chiefly occupied with the means whereby the unio mystica is to be attained, whereas Eckhart dwells on the union as an ever-present fact, and dilates on its metaphysical implications.

The essays in the fourth volume of his Dissertations - on endowments, on land, on labour, on metaphysical and psychological questions - were written for the Fortnightly Review at intervals after his short parliamentary career.

Both his logical and his metaphysical studies were thus undertaken as the pre-requisites of a practical theory of human development.

On the one hand there has arisen a school of thinkers of the type of Thomas Hill Green, who have brought to bear on his metaphysical views the idealism of modern German thinkers.

In the commentary on the treatise De Trinitate (erroneously attributed to Boetius) he proceeds from the metaphysical notion that pure or abstract being is prior in nature to that which is.

We cannot do more than refer to Charles for discussions as to how this theory of nature is connected with the metaphysical problems of force and matter, with the logical doctrine of universals, and in general with Bacon's theory of knowledge.

The conception of the Unconscious, by which von Hartmann describes his ultimate metaphysical principle, is not at bottom as paradoxical as it sounds, being merely a new and mysterious designation for the Absolute of German metaphysicians.

Though betraying no signs of metaphysical ability, his work was regarded as conclusive and became a text-book in the schools.

In the hands of Parmenides this spirit of free thought developed on metaphysical lines.

But his great strength lay in metaphysical analysis, as was shown in his answer to the objections raised against the appointment of Sir John Leslie to the mathematical professorship (1805).

John the Scot was still E acquainted with Greek, seeing that he translated the work of the pseudo-Dionysius; and his speculative genius achieved the fusion of Christian doctrine and Neoplatonic thought in a system of quite remarkable metaphysical completeness.

Anselm's natural element was theology, and the high metaphysical questions which are as it were the obverse of theology.

This phase is most clearly developed in Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), who, though a determined opponent of metaphysical explanations, and of the chemical doctrines, gave to his own rude mechanical explanations of life and disease almost the dogmatic completeness of a theological system.

In the Metaphysical state, for volition is substituted abstract force residing in the object, yet existing independently of the object; the phenomena are viewed as if apart from the bodies manifesting them; and the properties of each substance have attributed to them an existence distinct from that substance.

In the Theological and Metaphysical state men seek a cause or an essence; in the Positive they are content with a law.

There he came under the influence of Kant, who was just then passing from physical to metaphysical problems. Without becoming a disciple of Kant, young Herder was deeply stimulated to fresh critical inquiry by that thinker's revolutionary ideas in philosophy.

This work is divided into two parts; the first intended to show that while ultimate metaphysical questions are insoluble they compel to a recognition of an inscrutable Power behind phenomena which is called the Unknowable; the second devoted to the formulation and illustration of the Law of Evolution.

The strictures of a critic in the Monthly Review of July 1763 drew from him a pamphlet called Man in Quest of Himself, by Cuthbert Comment (reprinted in Parr's Metaphysical Tracts, 1837), "a defence of the individuality of the human mind or self."

It seems impossible to deny that the tendency of his principles and his arguments is mainly in the line of a metaphysical absolute, as the necessary completion and foundation of all being and knowledge.

The physical theory, in its earlier form in The World, and later in the Principles of Philosophy (which the present account follows), rests upon the metaphysical conclusions of the Meditations.

In earlier life he had been a zealous student of Kant and Hegel, and to the end he never ceased to cultivate the philosophic spirit; but he had little confidence in metaphysical systems, and sought rather to translate philosophy into the wisdom of life.

Yet the correspondence between Mill's conclusion and what Kant had alleged to be implied in the underlying metaphysical position is very striking indeed.