“The critical logicians have been much affiliated to the theological seminaries.”
“So shut up are they in this conception of the world that when the seminarist Hegel discovered that the universe is everywhere permeated with continuous growth (for that, and nothing else, is the “Secret of Hegel”) it was supposed to be an entirely new idea, a century and a half after the differential calculus had been in working order.”
“Hegel, while regarding scientific men with disdain, has for his chief topic the importance of continuity, which was the very idea the mathematicians and physicists had been chiefly engaged in following out for three centuries.”
“My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume.”
“As for Hegel, who led Germany for a generation, he recognises clearly what he is about. He simply launches his boat into the current of thought and allows himself to be carried wherever the current leads. He himself calls his method dialectics, meaning that frank discussion of the difficulties to which any opinion spontaneously gives rise will lead to modification after modification until a tenable position is attained. This is a direct profession of faith in the method of inclinations. [Note to ‘Fixation of Faith’, 1893]”
“Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and Kant, the great landmarks of philosophical history, were all pronounced nominalists. Hegel first advocated realism; and Hegel unfortunately was about at the average degree of German correctness in logic. The author of the present treatise is a Scotistic realist.”
“He entirely approved the brief statement of Dr. F. E. Abbott in his Scientific Theism that Realism is implied in modern science. In calling himself a Scotist, the writer does not mean that he is going back to the general views of 600 years back; he merely means that the point of metaphysics upon which Scotus chiefly insisted and which has since passed out of mind, is a very important point, inseparably bound up with the most important point to be insisted upon today. The author might with more reason, call himself a Hegelian; but that would be to appear to place himself among a known band of thinkers to which he does not in fact at all belong, although he is strongly drawn to them.”
“In short, there was a tidal wave of nominalism. Descartes was a nominalist. Locke and all his following, Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, and even Reid, were nominalists. Leibniz was an extreme nominalist, and Rémusat who has lately made an attempt to repair the edifice of Leibnizian monadology, does so by cutting away every part which leans at all toward realism. Kant was a nominalist; although his philosophy would have been rendered compacter, more consistent, and stronger if its author had taken up realism, as he certainly would have done if he had read Scotus. Hegel was a nominalist of realistic yearnings. I might continue the list much further. Thus, in one word, all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic.”
“The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism, from which, however, it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world, or is even so much as self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct elements of the triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked up to him as the great vindicator of their truth.”
“Had I more space, I now ought to show how important for philosophy is the mathematical conception of continuity. Most of what is true in Hegel is a darkling glimmer of a conception which the mathematicians had long before made pretty clear, and which recent researches have still further illustrated.”
“Among the many principles of Logic which find their application in Philosophy, I can here only mention one. Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third.”
“First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else.”
“Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else.”
“Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation.”
“To illustrate these ideas, I will show how they enter into those we have been considering. The origin of things, considered not as leading to anything, but in itself, contains the idea of First, the end of things that of Second, the process mediating between them that of Third.”
“A philosophy which emphasizes the idea of the One is generally a dualistic philosophy in which the conception of Second receives exaggerated attention; for this One (though of course involving the idea of First) is always the other of a manifold which is not one. The idea of the Many, because variety is arbitrariness and arbitrariness is repudiation of any Secondness, has for its principal component the conception of First.”
“In psychology Feeling is First, Sense of reaction Second, General conception Third, or mediation.”
“In biology, the idea of arbitrary sporting is First, heredity is Second, the process whereby the accidental characters become fixed is Third.”
“Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third.”
“Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third.”