Sublime

“These are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”

Kant, like Berkeley, believes that our perceptions, not things-in-themselves, are the only things we experience directly. “…everything intuited in space and time, all objects of a possible experience, are nothing but phenomena, that is, mere representations; and that these, as presented to us…have no self-subsistent existence apart from human thoug

The first act of common sense is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.

Finite things are defined by their boundaries, physical or logical, that is to say, by what they are not: “all determination is negation.” There can be only one Being who is wholly positive, and He must be absolutely infinite. Hence Spinoza is led to a complete and undiluted pantheism.

And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract, were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that were worshipped because they were concrete.

The One is somewhat shadowy. It is sometimes called God, sometimes the Good; it transcends Being, which is the first sequent upon the One. We must not attribute predicates to it, but only say “It is.” (This is reminiscent of Parmenides.) It would be a mistake to speak of God as “the All,” because God transcends the All. God is present through all t

The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, emphasising the contingent and changing nature of existence, is supposed to have said that no-one ever steps into the same river twice, because new waters are always flowing down. Others have taken this as an image for human personality – that the notion of a fixed personality is an illusion.

His chief importance is in logic and theory of knowledge. His philosophy is a critical analysis, largely linguistic. As for universals, i. e., what can be predicated of many different things, he holds that we do not predicate a thing, but a word. In this sense he is a nominalist. But as against Roscelin he points out that a “flatus vocis” is a thin

Socrates adds to the doctrine of Protagoras the doctrine of Heraclitus, that everything is always changing, i.e. that “all the things we are pleased to say ‘are’ really are in process of becoming.”