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Updated: May 20, 2025
It is not thus with superstitious morality; this is as obscure as the systems which prescribe it; or rather as fluctuating as the passions, as changeable as the temperaments, of those who expound them; if it was left to the theologians, ethics ought to be considered as the science of all others the most problematical, the most unsteady, the most difficult to bring to a point; it would require the most profound, penetrating genius, the most active, vigorous mind, to discover the principles of those duties man owes to himself, that he ought to exercise towards others; this would render the sources of the moral system attainable by a very small number of individuals; would effectually lock them up in the cabinets of the metaphysicians; place them under the treacherous guardianship of priests: to derive it from those systems, which are in themselves undefinable, with the foundations of which no one is actually acquainted, which each contemplates after his own mode, modifies after his own peculiar ideas, is at once to submit it to the caprice of every individual; it is completely to acknowledge, we know not from whence it is derived, nor whence it has its principles.
"So you conquer these giddy children, when you had rather be conquering German metaphysicians, or , or , what else?" "There is little to conquer in these children," said Miss Young; "they are very good with me. I assure you I have much more to conquer in myself, with regard to them. It is but little that I can do for them; and that little I am apt to despise, in the vain desire to do more."
It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew. 'A very unreasonable postulate, said the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question.
Yet if we once launch, as many metaphysicians would have us do, into the hypostasis of qualities and relations, it is certainly better and more honest to make contradictory qualities into opposed entities, and not to render our metaphysical world unmeaning as well as fictitious by peopling it with concepts in which the most important categories of life are submerged and invalidated.
Metaphysicians and geologists have constructed systems which would exclude the Almighty from the heavens and the earth. But however active and zealous these laborers in the service of the dragon, they do not reach the popular ear but in part.
In the main the arguments of the metaphysicians given above appear to me to contain a grave error. This consists in supposing that the natural sciences study the reality hidden beneath sensation, and only make use of this fact as of a sign which enables them to get back from effect to cause. This is quite inexact.
'Here emerges the distinction between two different methods of studying the problems of metaphysics; forming the radical difference between the two great schools into which metaphysicians are divided. One of these I shall call for distinction, the introspective method; the other, the psychological.
Personally, I wish that such expressions as 'the cold metaphysic of Buddhism' might be abandoned; surely metaphysicians, too, have religious needs and may have warm hearts. At the same time I will not deny that I prefer the northern variety of Buddhism, because I seem to myself to detect in the southern Buddhism a touch of a highly-refined egoism.
Almost all metaphysicians prior to Locke, as well as many since his time, have made a great mystery of Essential Predication, and of predicates which were said to be of the essence of the subject. The essence of a thing, they said, was that without which the thing could neither be, nor be conceived to be.
A whole nation of naturalised metaphysicians quarrelling with each other, and eventualiter striking each other. Phil. Well, a few blows here and there are the sauce of life, or at least a very slight evil compared with priestly government prosecution of heretics, plundering of the laity, courts of inquisition, crusades, religious wars, massacres of St. Bartholomew, and the like.
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