The Problems of Philosophy quotes

But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of finding out what it is like?

Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true.

Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities. The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems.

Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true.

Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities.

The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems. Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls;

Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true. Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities.

The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems.

Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls; Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God;

The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems. Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture.

Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls; Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion.

Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.

Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

… the table, we shall derive no sense-data from the table, and therefore, if the table were merely sense-data, it would have ceased to exist, and the cloth would be suspended in empty air, resting, by a miracle, in the place where the table formerly was.

This seems plainly absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

One great reason why it is felt that we must secure a physical object in addition to the sense-data, is that we want the same object for different people.

One great reason why it is felt that we must secure a physical object in addition to the sense-data, is that we want the same object for different people.

When ten people are sitting round a dinner-table, it seems preposterous to maintain that they are not seeing the same tablecloth, the same knives and forks and spoons and glasses.

But the sense-data are private to each separate person; what is immediately present to the sight of one is not immediately present to the sight of another: they all see things from slightly different points of view, and therefore see them slightly differently.

… see more or less similar things when they look at the table, and the variations in what they see follow the laws of perspective and reflection of light, so that it is easy to arrive at a permanent object underlying all the different people’s sense-data.

I bought my table from the former occupant of my room; I could not buy his sense-data, which died when he went away, but I could and did buy the confident expectation of more or less similar sense-data.

Thus it is the fact that different people have similar sense-data, and that one person in a given place at different times has similar sense-data, which makes us suppose that over and above the sense-data there is a permanent public object which underlies or causes …

And if the cat consists only of sense-data, it cannot be hungry, since no hunger but my own can be a sense-datum to me.

Thus the behaviour of the sense-data which represent the cat to me, though it seems quite natural when regarded as an expression of hunger, becomes utterly inexplicable when regarded as mere movements and changes of patches of colour, which are as incapable of hunger as a triangle is of playing football.

But the difficulty in the case of the cat is nothing compared to the difficulty in the case of human beings.

With regard to time, our feeling of duration or of the lapse of time is notoriously an unsafe guide as to the time that has elapsed by the clock.

Times when we are bored or suffering pain pass slowly, times when we are agreeably occupied pass quickly, and times when we are sleeping pass almost as if they did not exist.

Thus, in so far as time is constituted by duration, there is the same necessity for distinguishing a public and a private time as there was in the case of space.

But the sense-datum which we call hearing the thunder does not take place until the disturbance of the air has travelled as far as to where we are.

Similarly, it takes about eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach us; thus, when we see the sun we are seeing the sun of eight minutes ago.

So far as our sense-data afford evidence as to the physical sun they afford evidence as to the physical sun of eight minutes ago;

Hence common sense leaves us completely in the dark as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects, and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes us as strange.

The truth about physical objects must be strange.

It may be unattainable, but if any philosopher believes that he has attained it, the fact that what he offers as the truth is strange ought not to be made a ground of objection to his opinion.

This question of the distinction between act and object in our apprehending of things is vitally important, since our whole power of acquiring knowledge is bound up with it.

The faculty of being acquainted with things other than itself is the main characteristic of a mind.

Acquaintance with objects essentially consists in a relation between the mind and something other than the mind; it is this that constitutes the mind’s power of knowing things.

Thus the statement which seemed like a truism becomes, when restated, the following: “We can never truly judge that something with which we are not acquainted exists.” This is by no means a truism, but on the contrary a palpable falsehood.

I have not the honour to be acquainted with the Emperor of China, but I truly judge that he exists.

It may be said, of course, that I judge this because of other people’s acquaintance with him. This, however, would be an irrelevant retort, since, if the principle were true, I could not know that anyone else is acquainted with him. But further:

Let us take as an illustration a matter about which none of us, in fact, feel the slightest doubt.

We are all convinced that the sun will rise tomorrow. Why?

Is this belief a mere blind outcome of past experience, or can it be justified as a reasonable belief?

Things which we see become associated, by habit, with certain tactile sensations which we expect if we touch them; one of the horrors of a ghost (in many ghost-stories) is that it fails to give us any sensations of touch.

Uneducated people who go abroad for the first time are so surprised as to be incredulous when they find their native language not understood.

And this kind of association is not confined to men; in animals also it is very strong. A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction.

Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading.

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

But in spite of the misleadingness of such expectations, they nevertheless exist. The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again.

When Swift invites us to consider the race of Struldbugs who never die, we are able to acquiesce in imagination.

But a world where two and two make five seems quite on a different level.

We feel that such a world, if there were one, would upset the whole fabric of our knowledge and reduce us to utter doubt.

This view, however, seems open to objections similar to those which we urged before against Kant. It seems plain that it is not thought which produces the truth of the proposition “I am in my room.”

It may be true that an earwig is in my room, even if neither I nor the earwig nor anyone else is aware of this truth; for this truth concerns only the earwig and the room, and does not depend upon anything else.

Thus relations, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter, must be placed in a world which is neither mental nor physical. This world is of great importance to philosophy, and in particular to the problems of a priori knowledge.

But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where “being” is opposed to “existence” as being timeless. The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being.

The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life.

The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference …

The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life.

The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world.

According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other.

Almost all our common beliefs are either inferred, or capable of being inferred, from other beliefs which may be regarded as giving the reason for them. As a rule, the reason has been forgotten, or has even never been consciously present to our minds.

Few of us ever ask ourselves, for example, what reason there is to suppose the food we are just going to eat will not turn out to be poison.

Yet we feel, when challenged, that a perfectly good reason could be found, even if we are not ready with it at the moment. And in this belief we are usually justified.

… day, I find things of which I am quite certain, other things of which I am almost certain, other things of which I can become certain by thought and by calling up attendant circumstances, and some things of which I am by no means certain.

I am quite certain that I ate my breakfast this morning, but if I were as indifferent to my breakfast as a philosopher should be, I should be doubtful.

As to the conversation at breakfast, I can recall some of it easily, some with an effort, some only with a large element of doubt, and some not at all.

It is probable that, in these cases, what is really remembered, in the sense of being immediately before the mind, is something other than what is falsely believed in, though something generally associated with it.

George IV is said to have at last believed that he was at the battle of Waterloo, because he had so often said that he was.

In this case, what was immediately remembered was his repeated assertion; the belief in what he was asserting (if it existed) would be produced by association with the remembered assertion, and would therefore not be a genuine case of memory.

three terms are the smallest number that render it possible. York is between London and Edinburgh; but if London and Edinburgh were the only places in the world, there could be nothing which was between one place and another.

Similarly “jealousy” requires three people: there can be no such relation that does not involve three at least.

Such a proposition as “A wishes B to promote C’s marriage with D” involves a relation of four terms;

What we firmly believe, if it is neither knowledge nor error, and also what we believe hesitatingly, because it is, or is derived from, something which has not the highest degree of self-evidence, may be called “probable opinion.”

Thus the greater part of what would commonly pass as knowledge is more or less probable opinion.

In regard to probable opinion, we can derive great assistance from “coherence,” which we rejected as the “definition” of truth, but may often use as a “criterion.”

This applies, in particular, to such matters as the distinction between dreams and waking life.

If our dreams, night after night, were as coherent one with another as our days, we should hardly know whether to believe the dreams or the waking life.

As it is, the test of coherence condemns the dreams and confirms the waking life. But this test, though it increases probability where it is successful, never gives absolute certainty, unless there is certainty already at some point in the coherent system.

Just as a comparative anatomist, from a single bone, sees what kind of animal the whole must have been, so the metaphysician, according to Hegel, sees, from any one piece of reality, what the whole of reality must be—at least in its large outlines.

Every apparently separate piece of reality has, as it were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece; the next piece, in turn, has fresh hooks, and so on, until the whole universe is reconstructed.

This essential incompleteness appears, according to Hegel, equally in the world of thought and in the world of things.

Formerly it appeared that experience left only one kind of space to logic, and logic showed this one kind to be impossible. Now, logic presents many kinds of space as possible apart from experience, and experience only partially decides between them.

Thus, while our knowledge of what is has become less than it was formerly supposed to be, our knowledge of what may be is enormously increased.

Instead of being shut in within narrow walls, of which every nook and cranny could be explored, we find ourselves in an open world of free possibilities, where much remains unknown because there is so much to know.

Now, logic presents many kinds of space as possible apart from experience, and experience only partially decides between them. Thus, while our knowledge of what is has become less than it was formerly supposed to be, our knowledge of what may be is enormously increased.

Instead of being shut in within narrow walls, of which every nook and cranny could be explored, we find ourselves in an open world of free possibilities, where much remains unknown because there is so much to know.

What has happened in the case of space and time has happened, to some extent, in other directions as well. The attempt to prescribe to the universe by means of a priori principles has broken down;

If we adopt the attitude of the complete sceptic, placing ourselves wholly outside all knowledge, and asking, from this outside position, to be compelled to return within the circle of knowledge, we are demanding what is impossible, and our scepticism can never be refuted.

For all refutation must begin with some piece of knowledge which the disputants share; from blank doubt, no argument can begin.

Hence the criticism of knowledge which philosophy employs must not be of this destructive kind, if any result is to be achieved. Against this absolute scepticism, no “logical” argument can be advanced.

But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called “practical” men.

The “practical” man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind.

If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society;

Newton’s great work was called “the mathematical principles of natural philosophy.” Similarly, the study of the human mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has become the science of psychology.

Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real: those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.

This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of philosophy.

There are many questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now.

Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms?

Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man?

Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible?

Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man?

Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true.