Quotes About Metaphysics

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.

If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.

Let there be two possible things, A and B, one of which is such that it is necessary that it exists, and let us assume that there is more perfection in A than in B. Then, at least, we can explain why A should exist rather than B and can foresee which of them will exist; indeed, this can be demonstrated, that is, rendered certain from the nature of the thing.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

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.

Your psychologists are not able to think in terms of a soul, and your religious leaders are not able, or refuse, to comprehend it psychologically even to its simplest degree. Metaphysics and psychology have not met, in other words.

Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.

Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.

We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard...believing that it was a time for visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible meta-physics was needed.

Explanations of thoughts as the product of some deeper force such as the soul, he felt, were really the realm of metaphysics.

The literal is always abstract ? because reality is so much more than we can ever know or experience or imagine.

What a silly thing Love is,' said the Student as he walked away. 'It is not as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.

The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.

I remember saying once to André Gide, as we sat together in some Paris café, that while meta-physics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfilment.

I don't propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

THERE IS A PLEASURE in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

Kant's greatest merit," says Schopenhauer, "is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth.

The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women."59 "It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.

Do I look like a metaphysician?" "You look like a guy in an office. What exactly do you do there, Wilf?

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.