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Updated: May 27, 2025
But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally, as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss. It IS at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so.
In reducing all the phenomena of existence, together with the whole spiritual life of mankind, to a close development of nature according to the causal law, in expressly grouping also the utterances of the will of man under this law of an absolute necessity, in fully adopting Darwin's doctrine as the wholly satisfactory key for the comprehension of the entire development of nature up to the history of mankind, in advocating an absolutely monistic determinism and a nearly exclusive dependence of the efficacy of moral principles on the theoretic cultivation of the mind, on reasoning and education, he, as before mentioned, stands on exactly the same ground with materialists and monists among whom he expressly ranks himself; in the inconsequence with which he makes concessions to the power of the idea and the ideal over man concessions which could never be concluded from a mere immanent process of nature he is closely related to Strauss.
Thus, he may distinguish between the two substances and their manifestations, as some monists distinguish between the one substance and its manifestations. Or he may conclude that it is futile to search for substances or realities of any sort behind phenomena, arguing that such realities are never revealed in experience, and that no sound reason for their assumption can be adduced.
Various considerations have moved men to become monists in this sense of the word. Some have been influenced by the assumption one which men felt impelled to make early in the history of speculative thought that the whole universe must be the expression of some unitary principle.
The primordial substance corresponding to the "protyle" of our Monists is composed of Five Elements, which are mystically identified with Five Buddhas, all of whom are really but different modes of the One. With this idea of a primordial substance there is necessarily associated the idea of a universal sentiency. Matter is alive. Now to the German monists also matter is alive.
In regard to the possibility of metaphysics three parties are to be distinguished: On the left, the positivists, the neo-Kantians, and the monists of consciousness, who deny it out of hand.
It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great victory scored for their side when pluralists say 'the universe is many. "'The universe'!" they chuckle "his speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of monism out of his own mouth." Well, let things be one in that sense! You can then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them, but what matters it?
The world's oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly only, and as if anyone who questioned it must be an idiot. The temper of monists has been so vehement, as almost at times to be convulsive; and this way of holding a doctrine does not easily go with reasonable discussion and the drawing of distinctions.
The particular must outweigh the general, and philosophers, even the monists, must continue to be inconsistent. The individual must of necessity consider himself first and humanity afterwards; for if all men considered the welfare of the race to the neglect of self, the race would die at the root and the individual perish of his too-widely diffused pity.
Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of this abstract kind as rationalists are. The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled.
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