The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and; Philosophy of ReligionBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Religion
The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and; Philosophy of Religion
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Religion -- Philosophy
Thus it is easy to see that the Unconditioned exists only as a part of
the idea of the Conditioned, the Unknowable as the foil of the Knowable;
and the erecting of these mere privatives, these negatives, these
shadows, into substances and realities, and then setting them up as
impassable barriers to human thought, is one of the worst pieces of work
that metaphysics has been guilty of.
The like does not hold in true contrasts. Each of them has an existence
as a positive,and[TN-3] is never lost in a zero of the other. The one is
always thought in relation to the other. Examples of these are subject
and object, absolute and relative, mind and matter, person and
consciousness, time and space. When any one of these is thought, the
other is assumed. It is vain to attempt their separation. Thus those
philosophers who assert that all knowledge is relative, are forced to
maintain this assertion, to wit, All knowledge is relative, is
nevertheless absolute, and thus they falsify their own position. So
also, those others who say all mind is a property of matter, assume in
this sentence the reality of an idea apart from matter. Some have argued
that space and time can be conceived independently of each other; but
their experiments to show it do not bear repetition.
All true contraries are universals. A universal concept is one of
“maximum extension,” as logicians say, that is, it is without limit. The
logical limitation of such a universal is not its negation, but its
contrary, which is itself also a universal. The synthesis of the two can
be in theory only, yet yields a real product. To illustrate this by a
geometrical example, a straight line produced indefinitely is, logically
considered, a universal. Its antithesis or true contrary is not a
crooked line, as might be supposed, but the straight line which runs at
right angles to it. Their synthesis is not the line which bisects their
angle but that formed by these contraries continually uniting, that is,
the arc of a circle, the genesis of which is theoretically the union of
two such lines. Again, time can only be measured by space, space by
time; they are true universals and contraries; their synthesis is
_motion_, a conception which requires them both and is completed by
them. Or again, the philosophical extremes of downright materialism and
idealism are each wholly true, yet but half the truth. The insoluble
enigmas that either meets in standing alone are kindred to those which
puzzled the old philosophers in the sophisms relating to motion, as, for
instance, that as a body cannot move where it is and still less where it
is not, therefore it cannot move at all. Motion must recognise both time
and space to be comprehensible. As a true contrary constantly implies
the existence of its opposite, we cannot take a step in right reasoning
without a full recognition of both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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