Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at CambridgeRashdall, Hastings
Religion
Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge
Rashdall, Hastings
Christianity; Philosophy and religion
'Presentation, Feeling, Conation, are ever one inseparable whole, and
advance continuously to higher and higher forms. But for the fact that
psychology was in the first instance studied, not for its own sake, but
in subservience to speculation, this cardinal importance of activity
would not have been so long overlooked. We should not have heard so much
of passive sensations and so little of active movements. It is
especially interesting to find that even Kant at length--in his latest
work, the posthumous treatise on the _Connexion of Physics and
Metaphysics_, only recently discovered and published--came to see the
fundamental character of voluntary movement. I will venture to quote one
sentence: "We should not recognise the moving forces of matter, not even
through experience, if we were not conscious of our own activity in
ourselves exerting acts of repulsion, approximation, etc." But to Maine
de Biran, often called the French Kant, to Schopenhauer, and, finally, to
our own British psychologists, Brown, Hamilton, Bain, Spencer, is
especially due the merit of seeing the paramount importance of the active
side of experience. To this then primarily, and not to any merely {54}
intellectual function, we may safely refer the category of causality.'[9]
I may add that Professor Ward's _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, from which
I have quoted, constitutes the most brilliant and important modern
defence of the doctrine which I have endeavoured very inadequately to set
before you in this lecture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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