This book is the account of the life and activity of one who is living and acting. Herodotus tells us the Greeks had a proverb which forbade them to pronounce any man happy before he is dead. We may certainly take his warning to this extent,—that we should refrain from attempting to fix a philosopher's thought so long as he continues to think. Benedetto Croce has, it is true, presented his Philosophy of Mind in such "questionable shape," that it gives the student the impression of finality, the feeling that a doctrine which throughout the history of philosophy has been struggling for expression has now at last come to light. But this appearance of finality is due to a certain artistic power which Croce possesses in an eminent degree, the power of reliving the past and making history interpret life. Beneath all his systematization there is the germ of a...
It is probable that those who seek after anything whatever, will either find it as they continue the search, will deny that it can be found and confess it to be out of reach, or will go on seeking it. Some have said, accordingly, in regard to the things sought in philosophy, that they have found the truth, while others have declared it impossible to find, and still others continue to seek it. Those who think that they have found it are those who are especially called Dogmatics, as for example, the Schools of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics and some others. Those who have declared it impossible to find are Clitomachus, Carneades, with their respective followers, and other Academicians. Those who still seek it are the Sceptics. It appears therefore, reasonable to conclude that the three principal kinds of philosophy are the Dogmatic, the Academic, and the Sceptic. Others...
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This sometimes happens with the best authors; now and...
IV. To Rusticus I am beholding, that I first entered into the conceit that my life wanted some redress and cure. And then, that I did not fall into the ambition of ordinary sophists, either to write tracts concerning the common theorems, or to exhort men unto virtue and the study of philosophy by public orations; as also that I never by way of ostentation did affect to show myself an active able man, for any kind of bodily exercises. And that I gave over the study of rhetoric and poetry, and of elegant neat language. That I did not use to walk about the house in my long robe, nor to do any such things. Moreover I learned of him to write letters without any affectation, or curiosity; such as that was, which by him was written to my mother from Sinuessa: and to be easy and ready to...
Published by THE VEDANTA SOCIETY OF SAN FRANCISCO 2963 Webster Street San Francisco, California U. S. A. Copyright, 1921, by Vedanta Society of S. F. THE INNER CONSCIOUSNESS How to Awaken and Direct It In theoretical as well as applied psychology no term is more misleading, or confusing than the term consciousness. We use the term often in our conversation; we come across it in our study; but when we are asked to define it properly, to explain its significance, its meaning, or the idea for which that word stands, we are unable to do so. And that is because there are so many varied ideas concerning consciousness. There are so many aspects of consciousness, there are so many states of consciousness that we get mixed up—that is, we confuse one with the other. So we must know thoroughly the true significance of the term. Then we can make...
Gourmont's literary career was particularly identified with the notable French Review, the Mercure de France . How he came to join the staff of that organ is interestingly recounted by Louis Dumur, in the same obituary note from which the above quotation was translated. Incidentally we obtain a glimpse of the young man just as he was emerging into note. "The great writer whom we have just lost," wrote M. Dumur, "was to us more than a friend, better than a master: he seemed to us the most complete representative, the very expression,—in all its aspects and in all its complexity,—of our literary generation. "When, in the autumn of 1889, the small group which proposed to found the Mercure de France thought first of adding several collaborators to its number," while one went off in search of Jules Renard, another invited Julien Leclercq and a third promised the assistance of...
In the fifth part of Ludwig Traube's Palaeographische Forschungen , (which I had the honor of publishing after that great scholar's death) [1] evidence was presented for Traube's apparently certain discovery of the very handwriting of John the Scot. In manuscripts of Reims, of Laon, and of Bamberg, he had observed certain marginal notes which were neither omitted sections nor glosses, but rather the author's own amplifications and embellishments of his work. Johannes had made such additions to his De Divisione Naturae in the Reims manuscript, and they all appear in that of Bamberg. In the latter manuscript there are fresh additions—or enlargements as I shall call them in the present paper—which have similarly been absorbed into the text in two manuscripts now in Paris. We thus have, in an interesting series, the author's successive recensions of his work. One of the shorter forms is the basis of the text...
To the student of the origins of Christianity there is naturally no period of Western history of greater interest and importance than the first century of our era; and yet how little comparatively is known about it of a really definite and reliable nature. If it be a subject of lasting regret that no non-Christian writer of the first century had sufficient intuition of the future to record even a line of information concerning the birth and growth of what was to be the religion of the Western world, equally disappointing is it to find so little definite information of the general social and religious conditions of the time. The rulers and the wars of the Empire seem to have formed the chief interest of the historiographers of the succeeding century, and even in this department of political history, though the public acts of the Emperors may be fairly well...
M. Antoninus, the son of Annius Verus and Domitia Calvilla, was born at Rome, A.D. 121. The Emperor T. Antoninus Pius married Faustina, the sister of Annius Verus, and was consequently the uncle of M. Antoninus. When Hadrian adopted Antoninus Pius and declared him his successor in the empire, Antoninus Pius adopted both L. Ceionius Commodus and M. Antoninus, generally called M. Aurelius Antoninus. The youth was most carefully brought up. He thanks the gods (I. 17) that he had good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good. He had the happy fortune to witness the example of his uncle and adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, and he has recorded in his work (I. 16; VI. 30) the virtues of this excellent man and prudent ruler. Like many young Romans he tried his hand at poetry and studied rhetoric. There are...
I well remember the interest excited among the learned Hindus of Calcutta by the publication of the Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha of Mádhava Áchárya in the Bibliotheca Indica in 1858. It was originally edited by Paṇḍit Íśvarachandra Vidyáságara, but a subsequent edition, with no important alterations, was published in 1872 by Paṇḍit Táránátha Tarkaváchaspati. The work had been used by Wilson in his "Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus" (first published in the Asiatic Researches, vol. xvi., Calcutta, 1828); but it does not appear to have been ever much known in India. MS. copies of it are very scarce; and those found in the North of India, as far as I have had an opportunity of examining them, seem to be all derived from one copy, brought originally from the South, and therefore written in the Telugu character. Certain mistakes are found in all alike, and probably arose from some illegible...
B. A. (Cantab) M. A. (Pb.) Ph. D. (Munich). LONDON LUZAC & Co. 46, Great Russell Street W. C. 1908 Printed by E. J. BRILL.—LEIDEN (Holland). DEDICATION to Professor T. W. ARNOLD M. A. My dear Mr. Arnold , This little book is the first-fruit of that literary and philosophical training which I have been receiving from you for the last ten years, and as an expression of gratitude I beg to dedicate it to your name. You have always judged me liberally; I hope you will judge these pages in the same spirit. Your affectionate pupil Iqbal . The most remarkable feature of the character of the Persian people is their love of Metaphysical speculation. Yet the inquirer who approaches the extant literature of Persia expecting to find any comprehensive systems of thought, like those of Kapila or Kant, will have to turn back disappointed, though deeply impressed by...
Confucius was born in the year 550 b.c. , [1] in the land of Lu, in a small village, situated in the western part of the modern province of Shantung. His name was K'ung Ch'iu, and his style (corresponding to our Christian name) was Chung-ni. His countrymen speak of him as K'ung Fu-tzu, the Master, or philosopher K'ung. This expression was altered into Confucius by the Jesuit missionaries who first carried his fame to Europe. Since the golden days of the Emperors Yao and Shun, the legendary founders of the Chinese Empire, nearly two thousand years had passed. Shun chose as his successor Yü, who had been his chief minister, a man whose devotion to duty was such that when engaged in draining the empire of the great flood—a task that took eight years to accomplish—he never entered his home till the work was done, although in the course of...
On the banks of the Baetis--the modern Guadalquiver,--and under the woods that crown the southern slopes of the Sierra Morena, lies the beautiful and famous city of Cordova. It had been selected by Marcellus as the site of a Roman colony; and so many Romans and Spaniards of high rank chose it for their residence, that it obtained from Augustus the honourable surname of the "Patrician Colony." Spain, during this period of the Empire, exercised no small influence upon the literature and politics of Rome. No less than three great Emperors--Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius,--were natives of Spain. Columella, the writer on agriculture, was born at Cadiz; Quintilian, the great writer on the education of an orator, was born at Calahorra; the poet Martial was a native of Bilbilis; but Cordova could boast the yet higher honour of having given birth to the Senecas, an honour which won for it the...
As some apology may be thought necessary for having introduced certain unusual words of Greek origin, I shall only observe, that, as all arts and sciences have certain appropriate terms peculiar to themselves, philosophy, which is the art of arts, and science of sciences, as being the mistress of both, has certainly a prior and a far superior claim to this privilege. I have not, however, introduced, I believe, any of these terms without at the same time sufficiently explaining them; but, lest the contrary should have taken place, the following explanation of all such terms as I have been able to recollect, and also of common words used by Platonists in a peculiar sense, is subjoined for the information of the reader. Anagogic, [Greek: anagogikos]. Leading on high. Demiurgus, [Greek: demiourgos]. Jupiter, the artificer of the universe. Dianoetia. This word is derived from [Greek: dianoia], or that power of...
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 1912 COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HENRY JAMES JR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The present volume is an attempt to carry out a plan which William James is known to have formed several years before his death. In 1907 he collected reprints in an envelope which he inscribed with the title ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; and he also had duplicate sets of these reprints bound, under the same title, and deposited for the use of students in the general Harvard Library, and in the Philosophical Library in Emerson Hall. Two years later Professor James published The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe , and inserted in these volumes several of the articles which he had intended to use in the ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism.’ Whether he would nevertheless have carried out his original plan, had he lived,...
I. Thales, then, as Herodotus and Duris and Democritus say, was the son of Euxamius and Cleobule; of the family of the Thelidæ, who are Phœnicians by descent, among the most noble of all the descendants of Cadmus and Agenor, as Plato testifies. And he was the first man to whom the name of Wise was given, when Damasius was Archon at Athens, in whose time also the seven wise men had that title given to them, as Demetrius Phalereus records in his Catalogue of the Archons. He was enrolled as a citizen at Miletus when he came thither with Neleus, who had been banished from Phœnicia; but a more common statement is that he was a native Milesian, of noble extraction. II. After having been immersed in state affairs he applied himself to speculations in natural philosophy; though, as some people state, he left no writings behind him. For...
There was a moment in the last century when the Gallican church hoped for a return of internal union and prosperity. This brief era of hope coincided almost exactly with the middle of the century. Voltaire was in exile at Berlin. The author of the Persian Letters and the Spirit of Laws was old and near his end. Rousseau was copying music in a garret. The Encyclopædia was looked for, but only as a literary project of some associated booksellers. The Jansenists, who had been so many in number and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier, had now sunk to a small minority of the French clergy. The great ecclesiastical body at length offered an unbroken front to its rivals, the great judicial bodies. A patriotic minister was indeed audacious enough to propose a tax upon ecclesiastical property, but the Church fought the battle and won. Troops had just...
Thomas Reid makes his first appearance as a boy in the manse of Strachan in Kincardineshire, where he entered this world of sense on the 26th of April 1710. His father, the Rev. Lewis Reid, was minister of the parish for fifty-eight years, from 1704 until his death in 1762. The mother, Margaret Gregory, was the eldest daughter, by his second marriage, of David Gregory, laird of Kinairdy in Banffshire. An elder son, David, born in 1705, and two daughters, Isobel and Jane, with Thomas, formed the family at the manse when Thomas was a boy. David was twice married, and died about 1780, without issue; the elder daughter, Isobel, died unmarried, in her stepmother’s house at Aberdeen, in 1770; and the younger, Jane, after a mésalliance , died without issue after the middle of the century. Their mother, Margaret Gregory, died in 1732, when the manse was still the...
SOCRATES: Why have you come at this hour, Crito? it must be quite early? CRITO: Yes, certainly. SOCRATES: What is the exact time? CRITO: The dawn is breaking. SOCRATES: I wonder that the keeper of the prison would let you in. CRITO: He knows me, because I often come, Socrates; moreover, I have done him a kindness. SOCRATES: And are you only just arrived? CRITO: No, I came some time ago. SOCRATES: Then why did you sit and say nothing, instead of at once awakening me? CRITO: I should not have liked myself, Socrates, to be in such great trouble and unrest as you are—indeed I should not: I have been watching with amazement your peaceful slumbers; and for that reason I did not awake you, because I wished to minimize the pain. I have always thought you to be of a happy disposition; but never did I see anything...
2. There can be no doubt that the founder of the Milesian school, and therefore the first of the cosmologists, was Thales; [55] but all we can really be said to know of him comes from Herodotos, and the romance of the Seven Wise Men was already in existence when he wrote. He tells us, in the first place, that Thales was of Phoenician descent, a statement which other writers explained by saying he belonged to the Thelidai, a noble house descended from Kadmos and Agenor. [56] This is clearly connected with the view of Herodotos that there were “Kadmeians” from Boiotia among the original Ionian colonists, and it is certain that there really were people called Kadmeians in several Ionic cities. [57] Whether they were of Semitic origin is, of course, another matter. Herodotos probably mentions the supposed descent of Thales simply because he was believed to have introduced...