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by
Will Durant
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July 28 - September 24, 2022
How do I know that my knowledge is knowledge, that my senses can be trusted in the material which they bring to my reason, and that my reason can be trusted with the conclusions which it derives from the material of sensation?
Science itself, which so superciliously scorns metaphysics, assumes a metaphysic; in its every thought. It happens that the metaphysic which it assumes is the metaphysic of Spinoza.
Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictates of our own reason; although in fact, what our reason pronounces bad is not bad as; regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the laws of our own nature taken seperately.
Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well—ordered or confused.”
“Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire.”69 Spinoza compares the feeling of free will to a stone’s thinking, as it travels through space, that it determines its own trajectory and selects the place and time of its fall.70
“no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.”
A system of morals that teaches a man to be weak is worthless; “the foundation of virtue is no other than the effort to maintain one’s being; and man’s happiness consists in the power of so doing.”82
“He who wishes to revenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. But he who endeavors to drive away hatred by means of love, fights with pleasure and confidence; he resists equally one or many men, and scarcely needs at all the help of fortune. Those whom he conquers yield joyfully.”88 “Minds are conquered not by arms but by greatness of soul,”
He knows that as passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead. “An emotion can neither be hindered nor removed except by a contrary and stronger emotion.”95
“Men who are good by reason—i. e., men who, under the guidance of reason, seek what is useful to them—desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind.”
Plato words the same conception beautifully in the Republic; “He whose mind is fixed upon true being has no time to look down upon the little affairs of men, or to be filled with jealousy and enmity in the struggle against them; his eye is ever directed towards fixed and immutable principles, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to these he would, as far as he can, conform himself.”105 “That which is necessary,” says Nietzsche, “does not offend me. Amor fati”— love of late—“is the core of my nature.”106
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It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason; that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger and guile, nor act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty.126
Freedom is the goal of the state because the function of the state is to promote growth, and growth depends on capacity finding freedom.
The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of “trained skill.”
“The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair; for it is governed solely by emotions, and not by reason.”139
Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and “he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.” Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled.
But as he became rich he became ever more generous; and a growing circle of protégés gathered about him as he passed into the afternoon of life.
And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.”19
He returned her love with fervent admiration; called her”a great man whose only fault was being a woman”;
Saint—Lambert, it is all for thee The flower grows; The rose’s thorns are all for me; For thee the rose.
“Only philosophers should write history,” he said.38“In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of this darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded by centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.”39“History,” he concludes,”is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead”;40
.”Take away the arts and the progress of the mind, and you will find nothing” in any age”remarkable enough to attract the attention of posterity.”
.”My object is the history of the human mind, and not a mere detail of petty facts; nor am I concerned with the history of great lords. . . but I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.”
You are charming in conversation; you know how to amuse and instruct at the same time.
Voltaire was shocked into seriousness and raged when he heard that the French clergy were explaining the disaster as a punishment for; the sins of the people of Lisbon. He broke forth in a passionate poem in which he gave vigorous expression to the old dilemma: Either God can prevent evil and he will not; or he wishes to prevent it and he cannot.
Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology; the changing needs of society, and not any unchanging revelation or dogma, must determine the good.
”The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women.”
for it is memory that makes your identity.
”these legislators who rule the world at two cents a sheet;. . . unable to govern their wives or their households they take great pleasure in regulating; the universe.”
Those who say that all men are equal speak the greatest truth if they mean that all men have an equal right to liberty, to the possession of their goods, and to the protection of the laws”; but”equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers.”106 ”Not all citizens can be equally strong; but they can all be equally free; it is this which the English have won. . .”To be free is to be subject to nothing but the laws.”
Voltaire believed in reason always: ”we can, by speech and; pen, make men more enlightened and better.”111 Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action; the risks of revolution did not frighten him; he relied on the sentiment of brotherhood to re—unite the social elements scattered by turmoil and the uprooting of ancient habits.
you see now that Jean Jacques resembles a philosopher as a monkey resembles a man.”113
”I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”115
Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant. Our philosopher is like and unlike Jehovah; he speaks through clouds, but without the illumination of the lightning—flash.
The mind is at birth a clean sheet, a tabula rasa; and sense—experience writes upon it in a thousand ways, until sensation begets memory and memory begets ideas.
All matter, so far as we know it, is a mental condition; and the only reality that we know directly is mind. So much for materialism.
The result appeared to be that Hume had as effectually destroyed mind as Berkeley had destroyed matter. Nothing was left; and philosophy found itself in the midst of ruins of its own making. No wonder that a wit advised the abandonment of the controversy, saying: “No matter, never mind.”
But observe, said Hume, that we never perceive causes, or laws; we perceive events; and sequences, and infer causation and necessity; a law is not an eternal and necessary decree to which events are subjected, but merely a mental summary and shorthand of our kaleidoscopic experience; we have no guarantee that the sequences hitherto observed will re—appear unaltered in future experience. “Law” is an observed custom in the sequence of events; but there is no “necessity” in custom.
Rousseau had been a sickly youth, driven into brooding and introversion by his physical weakness and the unsympathetic attitude of his parents and teachers; he had escaped from the stings of reality into a hothouse world of dreams, where the victories denied him in life and love could be had for the imagining. His Confessions reveal an unreconciled complex of the most refined sentimentality with an obtuse sense of decency and honor; and through it all an unsullied conviction of his moral superiority.6
“I venture to declare that a state of reflection is contrary to nature; and that a thinking man” (an “intellectual,” as we would now say) “is a depraved animal.” It would be better to abandon our over—rapid development of the intellect, and to aim rather at training the heart and the affections.
the scoffers and doubters would be scattered. To put these threads of argument together, to unite the ideas of Berkeley and Hume with the feelings of Rousseau, to save religion from reason, and yet at the same time to save science from scepticism—this was the mission of Immanuel Kant.
For “pure” reason is to mean knowledge that does not come through our senses, but is independent of all sense experience; knowledge belonging to us by the inherent nature and structure of the mind.
knowledge whose truth is certain to us even before experience—à priori? Then absolute truth, and absolute science, would become possible, would it not? Is there such absolute knowledge? This is the problem of the first Critique. “My question is, what we can hope to achieve with reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away.”14
Experience tells us what is, but not that it must be necessarily what it is and not otherwise. It therefore never gives us any really general truths; and our reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge, is roused by it rather than satisfied.
“How far we can advance independently of all experience, in à priori knowledge, is shown by the brilliant example of mathematics.”17 Mathematical knowledge is necessary and certain; we cannot conceive of future experience violating it. We may believe that the sun will “rise” in the west to—morrow, or that some day, in some conceivable asbestos world, fire will not burn stick; but we cannot for the life of us believe that two times two will ever make anything else than four. Such truths are true before experience; they do not depend on experience past, present, or to come. Therefore they are
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to study the inherent structure of the mind, or the innate laws of thought, is what Kant calls “transcendental philosophy,”
Space and time are not things perceived, but modes of perception, ways of putting sense into sensation; space and time are organs of perception. They are à priori, because all ordered experience involves and presupposes them. Without them, sensations could never grow into perceptions. They are à priori because it is inconceivable that we should ever have any future experience that will not also involve them.
Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.
Science, after all, is naïve; it supposes that it is dealing with things in themselves, in their full—blooded external and uncorrupted reality; philosophy is a little more sophisticated, and realizes that the whole material of science consists of sensations, perceptions and conceptions, rather than of things. “Kant’s greatest merit,” says Schopenhauer, “is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing—in—itself.”22
There is, says Kant, if we remember that space, time and cause are modes of perception and conception, which must enter into all our experience, since they are the web and structure of experience; these dilemmas arise from supposing that space, time and cause are external things independent of perception. We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.
