Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics: With Some of Their ApplicationsThornton, William Thomas
Philosophy
Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics: With Some of Their Applications
Thornton, William Thomas
Metaphysics; Utilitarianism
I lay no stress on certain flaws in the fundamental propositions that
'we have no knowledge of anything but phenomena, and that our knowledge
of phenomena is only relative, not absolute; that we know not the
essence nor the real mode of production of any fact, but only its
relations to other facts in the way of succession or similitude; that
the constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the
constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are
all we know about them, and that their causes, whether efficient or
final, are unknown and inscrutable.' I will only suggest that our mere
consciousness of possessing some knowledge of phenomena is itself a
knowledge distinct from the knowledge which constitutes its
subject--distinct, that is, from the knowledge of phenomena; that if it
were possible for us to be aware of only one single fact, we should know
something about that fact, notwithstanding that there were no other
facts which it could be perceived to have preceded or followed, or to
which it could be likened, even as a polype with a stomach-ache would
know something about a stomach-ache, although ignorant that it had a
stomach, and oblivious of any former sensation, whether painful or
pleasurable; and that if the causes of phenomena be utterly unknown, our
ignorance of them ought not to be so signified as to sound like
knowledge, as it does when resemblances are said to link, and sequences
to unite, phenomena together, thereby warranting the inference that one
phenomenon succeeds another _because_ the two are so linked and united.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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