United States or Italy ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
How absurd in these people, then, to persist in putting faith in "axioms" as immutable bases of Truth! But even out of the mouths of their soundest reasoners it is easy to demonstrate the futility, the impalpability of their axioms in general. Who was the soundest of their logicians? Let me see! I will go and ask Pundit and be back in a minute.... Ah, here we have it!
He would have understood, finally, that the right of possession which is born of labor is governed by the same general laws as that which results from the simple seizure of things. What kind of a legist is he who declaims when he ought to reason, who continually mistakes his metaphors for legal axioms, and who does not so much as know how to obtain a universal by induction, and form a category?
But time slowly brings about its revenges; and the man whom his ignorant and stupid fellows thought fit to hamper and imprison, and whom popular credulity looked upon with that half-horror and half-admiration with which those were regarded who were supposed to have put their souls in pawn for the sake of tasting the forbidden fruit, is now recognized not only as one of the most profound and clearest thinkers of his time, but as the very first among its experimental philosophers, and as a prophet of truths which, then neglected and despised, have since been adopted as axioms in the progress of science.
Pleasure is different from apprehension; and as the essence of the acquired intellect is apprehension, there is no room for the pleasure, the intellect being simple. According to our view love is rewarded with pleasure. Proof of this is that we find no pleasure in axioms and first principles, which we know without effort.
Then the inductive ascent from experiment to axiom is to be followed by a deductive descent from axioms to new experiments and discoveries. Bacon rejects the syllogism on the ground that it fits one to overcome his opponent in disputation, but not to gain an active conquest over nature.
On these matters, however, it is not our province to enlarge; nor is it necessary to furnish any detailed account of our author's political, religious, and philosophic axioms and systems, his paradoxes and his errors in logic: these have been so long and so exhaustively disputed over by contending factions that little is left for even the most assiduous gleaner in the field.
In the Meno, already alluded to, Socrates is representing as eliciting from one of Meno's slaves correct answers to questions involving a knowledge or apprehension of certain axioms of the science of mathematics, which, as Socrates learns, the slave had never been taught.
For such existence, like the essence of the thing, is conceived as an eternal truth. It cannot therefore be explained by duration of time, even if the duration be conceived without beginning or end. Axioms I. Everything which is, is either in itself or in another. II. That which cannot be conceived through another must be conceived through itself.
"Well, my lad," Mr. Tulliver said, "you look rarely! School agrees with you!" "I don't think I am well, father," said Tom; "I wish you'd ask Mr. Stelling not to let me do Euclid it brings on the toothache, I think." "Euclid, my lad why, what's that?" said Mr. Tulliver. "Oh, I don't know! It's definitions and axioms and triangles and things. It's a book I've got to learn in there's no sense in it."
Now unless the experience be of such a kind as to be clearly and distinctly understood, though it may convince a man, it will not have the same effect on his mind and disperse the clouds of his doubt so completely as when the doctrine taught is deduced entirely from intellectual axioms that is, by the mere power of the understanding and logical order, and this is especially the case in spiritual matters which have nothing to do with the senses.
Word Of The Day