United States or South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Could God be known, could his existence be made 'palpable to feeling as to sight, as unquestionably is the existence of matter, there would be no need of 'Demonstrations of the existence of God', no need of arguments a priori or a posteriori to establish that existence.
The similitude of the stile and manner of it, with those my father constantly had heard preached in his parish-church, was the ground of his conjecture, proving it as strongly, as an argument a priori could prove such a thing to a philosophic mind, That it was Yorick's and no one's else: It was proved to be so, a posteriori, the day after, when Yorick sent a servant to my uncle Toby's house to enquire after it.
The master in his first estimate of the child's character could not conceive that she had ever possessed a doll. But the master, like many other professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori than a priori reasoning. Mliss had a doll, but then it was emphatically Mliss's doll a smaller copy of herself. Its unhappy existence had been a secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morpher.
Of these some are more general, and therefore higher, than others; and as we cannot distinguish what is completely a priori from that which is known to be a posteriori where shall we draw the line which is to separate the higher and so-called first principles, from the lower and subordinate principles of cognition?
But Sir Adolphus, who had a very sweet temper, changed the discourse, grew playful, laughed at Lord Monboddo's notion of men having tails, and called him a Judge, a posteriori, which amused Dr Johnson; and thus hostilities were prevented. At supper we had Dr Cullen, his son the advocate, Dr Adam Fergusson, and Mr Crosbie, advocate. Witchcraft was introduced.
The cause of the superiority which, in this respect, transcendental philosophy possesses above all other sciences except mathematics, lies in this: it treats of conceptions which must relate a priori to their objects, whose objective validity consequently cannot be demonstrated a posteriori, and is, at the same time, under the obligation of presenting in general but sufficient tests, the conditions under which objects can be given in harmony with those conceptions; otherwise they would be mere logical forms, without content, and not pure conceptions of the understanding.
Now, while our idea of God thus tells us that God has in his hand all causal chains in the world, and its million-threaded web in constant omni-surveying presence and in all-controlling omnipotence, our reflection on the world and its substance and course also leads us from the a posteriori starting-point of analytical investigation precisely to the same result; it even leads us to a still more concrete conception of this idea namely, to the result, that not only the causal chains, in their totality and in their web, but also all single links of these chains, have their force and existence only by virtue of a transcendental, or what is the same, of a metaphysical, cause.
Clearly, then, the a priori method already plays a part in physiological reasoning. If not ostensibly employed as a means of reaching new truths, it is at least privately appealed to for confirmation of truths reached a posteriori. But the illustrations above given go far to show, that it may to a considerable extent be safely used as an independent instrument of research.
For the will stands between its a priori principle, which is formal, and its a posteriori spring, which is material, as between two roads, and as it must be determined by something, it that it must be determined by the formal principle of volition when an action is done from duty, in which case every material principle has been withdrawn from it.
Sometimes a cause can be found a posteriori by groping in the dim and deceptive light cast by an effect: or a process of exhaustion and elimination may be set up in which the qualities common to each side are cancelled and the result attributed to the credit balance which will appear under one of the accounts.
Word Of The Day