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In other words, "positive" and scientific are practically synonymous terms, the system pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal.
Third, the substituted conceptions are treated intellectualistically, that is as mutually exclusive and discontinuous, so that the first innocent continuity of the flow of sense-experience is shattered for us without any higher conceptual continuity taking its place.
A very little reflection will be sufficient to satisfy us that without the aid of conceptions higher than those of sense-experience and that is all the word metaphysic means it would be absolutely impossible to formulate a single scientific generalisation. What is the very concept of law, or system, but a metaphysical idea?
The visual presentation is not really fundamental; and we must undo the inversion induced by its great convenience whereby we refer to it all the other elements of our sense-experience and conceive of our activity and our whole actual world by reference to the visible sign.
We have followed Reid so far in his study of language, because it is along this way that he came to form the concepts that were to serve him as a key for his all-important findings in the realm of sense-experience.
Its universality, simultaneousness, minute accuracy, quantifiability, etc., are such that it is really to the visual Presentment that I refer all other elements in my sense-experience. I think of them with reference to it. In connection with it I mentally construct my world.
It is a shallow philosophy, a surface system, indeed, which is content with such an estimate, and is only possible in a school of bald empiricism which imprisons man within the boundaries of his sense-experience, and resolves him into a string of feelings bound together, like a rope of sand, by nothing. The truth is, that Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain, Mr.
All our movements are guided and determined by sensations to touch and sight, and to some extent, of hearing, of which we are unconscious. A vast amount of our sense-experience comes to us and is recorded without our having consciousness of anything of the kind going on.
This conviction of his is expressed in Goethe's lines: "If the eye were not of the nature of the sun, how could we behold light? If divine force were not at work in us, how could divine things delight us?" These thoughts about the world and man, which transcend sense-experience, were found by the Mystic in the myth of Osiris.
Since everything that comes into the human mind enters through the gates of sense, man's first reason is a reason of sense-experience. It is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes.
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