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Updated: June 21, 2025
He has learned to look on the crawfish as a link in a living chain a creature with physiological, psychological, ontological affinities that give it a human interest not hitherto suspected by the novitiate.
The 'Germano-Coleridgian doctrine, says Mill, was a reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century: 'ontological, 'conservative, 'religious, 'concrete and historical, and finally 'poetical, because the other was 'experimental, 'innovative, 'infidel, 'abstract and metaphysical, and 'matter-of-fact and prosaic. Yet the two approximate, and each helps to restore the balance and comes a little nearer to a final equilibrium.
Fancy, now, this transcendental divine standing behind a gun-carriage on the main-deck, and addressing five hundred salt-sea sinners upon the psychological phenomena of the soul, and the ontological necessity of every sailor's saving it at all hazards.
Here you may find a sheikh of pure Arab descent explaining to his audience, composed of white Syrians or Circassians, of brown and yellow Abyssinians and Egyptians, of negroes, Chinese, and Malays, the probable and improbable legal consequences of marriage contracts, not excepting those between men and genii; there a negro scholar is explaining the ontological evidence of the existence of a Creator and the logical necessity of His having twenty qualities, inseparable from, but not identical with, His essence; in the midst of another circle a learned mufti of indeterminably mixed extraction demonstrates to his pupils from the standard work of al-Ghazali the absolute vanity of law and doctrine to those whose hearts are not purified from every attachment to the world.
Apart from what important minds could vaguely construe to be permanent truth, human society was bereft of ontological meaning; the West was on a collision path with the environment and Islamic extremists; more and more societies possessed weapons of mass destruction that had the potential force that was beyond her imagination to conceive; and all societies were full of lies and manipulating fables disguised as truths-their own Moseses parting their own Red Seas.
The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but ontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love of God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience, as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication, as it was with Spinoza.
"Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your bookshelves.
There God was conceived in terms of substance, as the ontological basis and ground of all existence immutable, inscrutable, unqualified pure being. These two ideas, God as personal will, and God as metaphysical substance, never perfectly coalescing, flowed together. In minds like St. Augustine's one finds them both. God as pure being and God as gracious and righteous personal will St.
The former distinguishes between ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi, rejects the ontological argument, and defends determinism against Crusius on Leibnitzian grounds. It presupposes merely the two forces of matter, attraction and repulsion, and its primitive chaotic condition, a world-mist with elements of different density.
Fiske is, of course, far too subtle a thinker not to see that his previous argument from relativity precludes him from assigning much weight to the ontological speculations in which he here indulges, seeing that in whatever degree the relativity of knowledge renders legitimate the non-ascription to Deity of known psychical attributes, in some such degree at least must it render illegitimate the ascription to Deity of unknown psychical attributes.
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