Sublime

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

que la physico-théologie, très à la mode en Europe depuis la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle et dont la Théologie naturelle de William Paley, parue en 1802, passe à juste titre pour le chef-d’œuvre du genre, consistait à tirer argument de l’ordonnancement merveilleux de la nature et de la finalité des processus naturels pour démontrer l’existence de

Kant maintained that every human being is an end in himself, and this may be taken as an expression of the view introduced by Christianity. There is, however, a logical difficulty in Kant’s view, since it gives no means of reaching a decision when two men’s interests clash. If each is an end in himself, how are we to arrive at a principle for deter

A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

offers nothing even remotely resembling an argument to show that he knows what conditions would produce good men, or that anybody knows. He cannot surely mean that mere conditions of physical comfort and mental culture produce good men; because manifestly they do not.

Je le répète : la plus grande tentation de la faculté rationnelle est d’encenser sa propre capacité et ses productions et de prétendre que, face à ses théories, rien ne mérite d’exister. Cela signifie que tous les faits importants ont été révélés. Qu’il ne reste rien de notable à découvrir. Surtout, cela nie la nécessité d’une confrontation individ

And the reason simply is that these philosophers, like so many modern philosophers, do not possess the patience to see what they are taking for granted.