The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
In the work of a celebrated German ethnographer I read recently the
following sentence: “This tribe of people deeply degraded itself by the
practise of cannibalism.” By its side lay the book of an English inquirer
who deals with the same subject. The latter simply puts the _question
why_ certain South-Sea islanders eat human beings, finds out in the
course of his inquiries that our own ancestors also were once cannibals,
and comes to understand the position the Hindus take in the matter—a
point of view that occurred once to my five-year-old boy who while
eating a piece of meat stopped suddenly shocked and cried out, “_We_ are
cannibals to the animals!” “Thou shalt not eat human beings” is a very
beautiful maxim; but in the mouth of the ethnographer it sullies the
calm and noble lustre of unprepossession by which we so gladly discover
the true inquirer. But a step further and we will say, “Man _must_ not
be descended from monkeys,” “The earth _shall_ not rotate,” “Matter
_ought_ not everywhere to fill space,” “Energy _must_ be constant,” and
so on. I believe that our procedure differs from that just characterised
only in degree and not in kind, when we transfer views reached in the
province of physics with the dictum of sovereign validity into the domain
of psychology, where they should be tested anew with respect to their
serviceability. In such cases we are subject to dogma, if not to that
which is forced upon us by a power from without like our scholastic
forefathers, yet to that which we have made ourselves. And what result
of research is there that could not become a dogma by long habit of use,
since the very skill which we have acquired in familiar intellectual
situations, deprives us of the freshness and unprepossession which are so
requisite in a new situation.
Now that I have set forth in general outlines the position I take, I may
be able perhaps to establish my opposition to the _dualism of feeling
and motion_. This dualism is to my mind an artificial and an unnecessary
one. The way it has arisen is analogous to that in which the imaginary
solutions of certain mathematical problems have arisen—by the improper
formulation of the questions involved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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