An Introduction to MetaphysicsMacmillan, 1913 - 79 pages |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
already analysis antinomies Aristotle artificial aspect believe bility colour concrete reality consciousness consider duration continuity contrary definite number detached direction distinct effort of intuition elementary psychical elements empiricism empiricists eternity express fact feeling fixed flux grasp ideas identical moments immobile indefinitely indivisible infinite infinity intellectual INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS irreducible oppositions Kant knowledge logical means memory ment meta metaphysicians method mind mobility modern science movement moving body nature never number of minutes object obtained once original parison passes personality philo philosophy physics place ourselves places oneself Platonism poem points of view positive science possible present psychologist pure ready-made concepts recon reconstruct relative representation resembles seek sensation shades simple SITY sketches solid sophy spectrum stationary stationary points supposed symbols T. E. HULME Taine thing thought tion translation true understanding unity and multiplicity universal mathematics UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN whilst whole word Paris
Popular passages
Page 6 - By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.
Page 16 - Certainly, concepts are necessary to it, for all the other sciences work as a rule with concepts, and metaphysics cannot dispense with the other sciences. But it is only truly itself when it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself from rigid and ready-made concepts in order to create a kind very different from those which we habitually use; I mean supple, mobile, and almost fluid representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms of 'intuition.
Page 12 - No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized.
Page 12 - ... disposition — that precisely which it must adopt in order to appear to itself as it really is, without any veil. But, then, consciousness must at least consent to make the effort. For it will have been shown nothing : it will simply have been placed in the attitude it must take up in order to make the desired effort, and so come by itself to the intuition.
Page 36 - ... there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present...
Page 3 - Consider, again, a character whose adventures are related to me in a novel. The author may multiply the traits of his hero's character, may make him speak and act as much as he pleases, but all this can never be equivalent to the simple and indivisible feeling which I should experience if I were able for an instant to identify myself with the person of the hero himself.
Page 7 - Now it is easy to see that the ordinary function of positive science is analysis. Positive science works, then, above all, with symbols. Even the most concrete of the natural sciences, those concerned with life, confine themselves to the visible form of living beings, their organs and anatomical elements. They make comparisons between these forms, they reduce the more complex to the more simple; in short, they study the workings of life in what is, so to speak, only its visual symbol. If there exists...
Page 57 - It can place itself within the mobile reality, and adopt its ceaselessly changing direction; in short, can grasp it by means of that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition. This is extremely difficult. The mind has to do violence to itself, has to reverse the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks, has perpetually to revise, or rather to recast, all its categories. But in this way it will attain to fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of...
Page 17 - ... enclosed in a conceptual representation. Let us try for an instant to consider our duration as a multiplicity. It will then be necessary to add that the terms of this multiplicity, instead of being distinct, as they are in any other multiplicity, encroach on one another; and that while we can no doubt, by an effort of imagination, solidify duration once it has elapsed, divide it into juxtaposed portions and count all these portions, yet this operation is accomplished on the frozen memory of the...
Page 7 - All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from suecessive points of view from which we note as many resemblances as possible between the new object which we are studying and others which we believe we know already..