Quotes from leighton joseph alexander

Philosophy, like science, consists of theories or insights arrived at as a result of systemic reflection or reasoning in regard to the data of experience. It involves, therefore, the analysis of experience and the synthesis of the results of analysis into a comprehensive or unitary conception. Philosophy seeks a totality and harmony of reasoned insight into the nature and meaning of all the principal aspects of reality.

Skepticism literally means a thoughtful inquiry, the looking at a problem in a disinterested spirit, the surveying of a question from many sides. In this sense it is the very essence of philosophy and science.

Science ... is organized common sense.

Today one might be tempted to say that patriotism is the last refuge of the tribal religion dedicated to the worship of German, French, English and Russian Gods of Battles. Surely such a religion has nothing in common with the religion which counsels for the disciple non-resistance, unstinted forgiveness, and the elimination of all rancor?

Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of individual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals.

The state is the nursing mother of human culture.

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

God is the Absolute Idea, a circle that returns upon itself, not a straight line projected indefinitely.

Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.

God is a wider consciousness than we are, a pure intelligence, spiritual life and actuality. He is neither one nor many, neither man nor spirit. Such predicates belong only to finite beings.

Our obligation to the will of God is our obligation to the laws of practical reason.

Might does not make right, but right demands that those who hold to it should defend it with all their might.

The only religion which seems to have a function in time of war is the tribal religion which invokes a God as the exclusive protector of the nation which calls upon him.

Immediate knowledge tells us only that God is, not what he is. But if God is not an empty Being beyond the stars, he must be present in the communion of human spirits, and, in his relation to these, he is the One Spirit who pervades reality and thought. Hence there can be no final separation between our immediate consciousness of him and our mediated knowledge of reality.

No generation can do another generation's work for it. What we human beings can do at most is to mark out the pathway a little clearer for the generations to come after, and put legible signboards at the points where the greatest dangers have threatened us, in the hope that our posterity will read, understand, and be warned.

If the spiritual values of human existence at its highest term of development and achievement do not endure, amidst all the changes and chances of this mortal universe, there seems to be no stable or coherent meaning in existence. Then the universe is irrational--indeed it is no universe at all.

A system of philosophy, or metaphysics, is a union of a world view and a life view in one harmonious, complete, integral conception. In so far as any man strives to attain, by rational inquiry, a consistent and comprehensive view of life and reality, he is a metaphysician.

It is doubtful whether our present system of popular education does not retard independent or self thinking as much as it promotes it. All genuine education is self-education. It will incite the individual to think for himself, by rethinking what the race's great thinkers have already thought for him, thus enabling him to go ahead under his own mental steam.