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Updated: May 16, 2025
But what it is no philosophy has ever yet been able definitely to state. Feeling. It is in the four attributes here emphasised that the true nature of mind in its underivability and superiority to all nature first becomes clear. All that we have so far considered under the name of mind is only preliminary and leads up to this.
It reminds us, as we have already seen, that the world which we know and study, and which includes ourselves, does not show its true nature to us; hidden depths lie behind appearances. And it gathers together and sums up all the great reasons for the independence and underivability of the spiritual as contrasted with the corporeal.
Parallelism. The independence and underivability of the psychical, the incomparability of its uniformities with those of mechanical or physico-chemical laws, has proved itself so clear and incontrovertible, notwithstanding all the distortions of naturalism, that it is now regarded as a self-evident fact, not only among philosophers and epistemologists, and technical psychologists, but for the last decade even among all thinking men, and “materialism” is now an obsolete position.
This kind of “creative synthesis,” that is, the underivability of the individual, was the element of truth in the mythologies of “creationism” held by the Church fathers, or in the theory of the “pre-existence of the soul” maintained by Plato and others.
But undoubtedly we must reject in great measure the claims which naturalism makes upon our domain, and maintain that the most important starting-points for the higher view are to be found in the priority of everything spiritual over everything material, in the underivability of the spiritual and the impossibility of describing it in corporeal-mathematical terms and concepts.
This psychological orderliness is in sharp antagonism to pure naturalism. It describes the laws of a sequence of causes, which have nothing to do with the physical, chemical, or mechanical, and clearly establishes the uniqueness, independence, and underivability of the psychical as contrasted with the physical.
But of the self-conscious, personal spirit religion knows that it is everlasting. It knows this from its own sources. In its insight into the underivability and autonomy of the spiritual it finds warrant and freedom to maintain this knowledge as something apart from or even in contrast to the general outlook on the world.
And finally, the further it advances in its self-realisation, the further the relation of dependence recedes into the background, and the more do the independence and autonomy of the psychical processes become prominent. We have still to consider and amplify this in several respects, and then we may go on to still more important matters. Underivability.
And if it be held fast and associated with the insight into the autonomy of the spiritual and its underivability from the natural, we are freed at once from all the petty strife with the naturalistic doctrines of evolution, descent, and struggle for existence.
Creative Power of Consciousness. To this insight into the underivability and pre-eminence of consciousness over the world of external reality there must be added at this stage a recognition of its peculiar creative character. We have here to recognise that consciousness itself creates its world,—that is, the world that becomes our own through actual experience, possession, and enjoyment.
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