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Updated: May 11, 2025
But I have no doubt that you may at once reply: All this speech about causes is after all merely more or less pleasing metaphor. As a fact, human beings are just individual natural creatures. They throng and struggle for existence, and love and hate and enjoy and sorrow and die. These causes are, after all, mere dreams, or at best entities as we have just described.
The public, pleased at its ability to understand this doctrine and overlooking the more incisive part of the philosopher's teaching, could go home comforted and believing that material things were primary and perfect entities, while ideas were only abstractions, effects those realities produced on our incapable minds.
Meanwhile, it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms. Far from that: within the middle age itself, over and over again, the reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and words was founded on a misapprehension.
Ajnana which has the character of a positive entity cannot be destroyed by knowledge; just because it is a positive entity, like jars and similar things. But, it now may be said, we observe that fear and other affections, which are positive entities and produced by previous cognitions, are destroyed by sublative acts of cognition! Not so, we reply.
How does the logical terminology express these 'clusters' and 'trains'? Mill answers by a theory of 'naming. Language fulfils two purposes; it is required in order to make our ideas known to others; and in order to fix our own ideas. Ideas are fluctuating, transitory, and 'come into the mind unbidden. We must catch and make a note of these shifting crowds of impalpable entities.
At a later period, when the real character of the positive laws of nature had come to be in a certain degree understood, and the theological idea had assumed, in scientific minds, its final character, that of a God governing by general laws, the positive spirit, having now no longer need of the fictitious medium of imaginary entities, set itself to the easy task of demolishing the instrument by which it had risen.
Fire and the other substances, the origination of which has been detailed, are mentioned merely as instances, and it must be understood that also other entities, such as the 'Mahat, and so on, originate only from the immediately preceding cause, in agreement with scriptural statements. Up. Up. Up. Up. This prima facie view the next Sutra disposes of.
Yet neither he nor any one else on his side has ever effectively shaken the solid argument which Diderot fancifully illustrated in the following passage from his reply to Voltaire's letter of thanks for the opuscule: "This marvellous order and these wondrous adaptations, what am I to think of them? That they are metaphysical entities only existing in your own mind.
But even when it was no longer believed that there are real entities answering to general terms, the doctrine based upon it, viz. that a thing's essence is that without which the thing could neither be, nor be conceived to be, was still generally held, till Locke convinced most thinkers that the supposed essences of classes are simply the significations of their names.
If he were to attend a spiritualistic séance he would see the etheric matter oozing out from the side of the medium, and could observe the various ways in which the communicating entities make use of it. Another fact which could hardly fail soon to thrust itself upon his notice would be the extension of his perception of colour.
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