Christianity and Greek Philosophy: or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His ApostlesCocker, B. F. (Benjamin Franklin)
Religion
Christianity and Greek Philosophy: or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles
Cocker, B. F. (Benjamin Franklin)
Christianity; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600; Philosophy, Ancient
We readily grant that all our empirical knowledge is confined to
phenomena in their orders of co-existence, succession, and resemblance.
"To our objective perception and comparison nothing is given but
qualities and changes; to our inductive generalization nothing but the
shifting and grouping of these in time and space." Were it, however, our
immediate concern to discuss the question, we could easily show that
sensationalism has never succeeded in tracing the genetic origin of our
ideas of space and time to observation and experience; and, without the
_à priori_ idea of _space_, as the place of bodies, and of _time_, as
the condition of succession, we can not conceive of phenomena at all.
If, therefore, we know any thing beyond phenomena and their mutual
relations; if we have any cognition of realities underlying phenomena,
and of the relations of phenomena to their objective ground, it must be
given by some faculty distinct from sense-perception, and in some
process distinct from inductive generalization. The knowledge of real
Being and real Power, of an ultimate Reason and a personal Will, is
derived from the apperception of pure reason, which affirms the
necessary existence of a Supreme Reality--an Uncreated Being beyond all
phenomena, which is the ground and reason of the existence--the
contemporaneousness and succession--the likeness and unlikeness, of all
phenomena.
The immediate presentation of phenomena to sensation is the _occasion_
of the development in consciousness of these _à priori_ ideas of reason:
the possession of these ideas or the immanence of these ideas, in the
human intellect, constitutes the original _power_ to know external
phenomena. The ideas of space, time, power, law, reason, and end, are
the logical antecedents of the ideas of body, succession, event,
consecution, order, and adaptation. The latter can not be conceived as
distinct notions without the former. The former will not be revealed in
thought without the presentation to sense, of resistance, movement,
change, uniformity, etc. All actual knowledge must, therefore, be
impure; that is, it must involve both _à priori_ and _à posteriori_
elements; and between these elements there must be a necessary relation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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