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Updated: May 24, 2025
Experience and accident have been for a long time trusted to supply this information; but empirical knowledge, besides being costly, as we have already pointed out, is almost always imperfect. Recently the task has been undertaken of constructing catalogues of catalogues critical and systematic lists of all the catalogues in existence.
I have endeavoured less to present a ready-made solution than to indicate the direction in which we ought to look for one. The law of consciousness which I have used to explain the transformation of a nerve current into perception and images is only an empirical law produced by the generalisation of particular observations.
To constitute an empirical science is to show that the difference between different phenomena is due simply to 'circumstances. The explanation of the facts becomes sufficient when the 'law' can be stated, as that of a unit of constant properties placed in varying positions.
Mechanism applied to the world gives materialism; applied to knowledge, sensationalism of a mathematical type; applied to the will, determinism; to morality and the state, ethical and political naturalism. Nevertheless, the empirical tendency of his nation has a certain power over him; he holds fast to the position that all ideas ultimately spring from experience.
If the empirical law of causality is to conduct us to a Supreme Being, this being must belong to the chain of empirical objects in which case it would be, like all phenomena, itself conditioned. If the possibility of passing the limits of experience be admitted, by means of the dynamical law of the relation of an effect to its cause, what kind of conception shall we obtain by this procedure?
Shiva is the patron god of snakes, and the Brahmans teach the bunis to produce all kinds of mesmeric tricks by empirical methods, never explaining to them the theoretical principles, but assuring them that Shiva is behind every phenomenon. So that the bunis sincerely ascribe to their god the honor of their 'miracles."
Our knowledge of the existence of things reaches as far as our perceptions, and what may be inferred from them according to empirical laws, extend. If we do not set out from experience, or do not proceed according to the laws of the empirical connection of phenomena, our pretensions to discover the existence of a thing which we do not immediately perceive are vain.
Compared to this Vedantic concept of the Absolute, the Christian's simple, and very empirical ideal of eternal happiness is preferable.
In Section II. the passage is made from the popular moral philosophy thus arising to the metaphysic of morals. He denies that the notion of duty that has been taken above from common sage is empirical. It is proved not to be such from the very assertions of philosophers that men always act from more or less refined self-love; assertions that are founded upon the difficulty of proving that acts most apparently conformed to duty are really such. The fact is, no act can be proved by experience to be absolutely moral, i.e., done solely from regard to duty, to the exclusion of all inclination; and therefore to concede that morality and duty are ideas to be had from experience, is the surest way to get rid of them altogether. Duty, and respect for its law, are not to be preserved at all, unless Reason is allowed to lay absolute injunctions on the will, whatever experience says of their non-execution. How, indeed, is experience to disclose a moral law, that, in applying to all rational beings as well as men, and to men only as rational, must originate
On the contrary, the pure form of intuition in time, merely as an intuition, which contains a given manifold, is subject to the original unity of consciousness, and that solely by means of the necessary relation of the manifold in intuition to the "I think," consequently by means of the pure synthesis of the understanding, which lies a priori at the foundation of all empirical synthesis.
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