The Will: Divine and HumanDeighton, Bell and Company, 1856 - 291 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
absolutely abstract act of consciousness action appears argument arises assume Atheism ausser axiom believe cause ception character cognition conceivable conception consequently considered contemporaneous Cudworth determined Divine scheme doctrine Dr Brown's effect element empirical ego endeavour Erscheinungen event existence experience faculty feeling follows former freedom ground gunpowder hypothesis imagination impossible independent individual instance intellectual intuition jective judgment Jupiter knowledge latter law of causality laws of human laws of nature laws of thought Leibnitz Libertarians limited lute man's means merely mind motion motive Necessarian necessary necessity never noumenon object observation P₁ parabola particular pheno phenomena phenomenon philosopher plane positive possible predicate prescience present principle priori priori law proposition pure liberty question reason recognise reference relation representations result Richard Burthogge self-determination sensation sense sensible Sextus seyn shew shewn soul space sphere straight line suppose things thought tion truth unconditioned unity universal volition whole words
Popular passages
Page 73 - Let the course of things be allowed hitherto ever so regular; that alone, without some new argument or inference, proves not that, for the future, it will continue so. In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past experience. Their secret nature, and consequently all their effects and influence, may change, without any change in their sensible qualities. This happens sometimes, and with regard to some objects: Why may it not happen...
Page 30 - Let the person come by his volition or choice how he will, yet, if he is able, and there is nothing in the way to hinder his pursuing and executing his will, the man is fully and perfectly free, according to the primary and common notion of freedom.
Page 30 - Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel; so likewise in the actions which men voluntarily do, which, because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty, and yet because every act of man's will and every desire and inclination proceedeth from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continual chain (whose first link is in the hand of God, the first of all causes), proceed from necessity.
Page 248 - To suppose the future volitions of moral agents not to be necessary events ; or, which is the same thing, events which it is not impossible but that they may not come to pass ; and yet to suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all things ; is to suppose God's Knowledge to be inconsistent with itself.
Page 90 - ... instance in which there can be even a suspicion of an exception to the rule, that we should soon have stronger ground for believing the axiom, even as an experimental truth, than we have for almost any of the general truths which we confessedly learn from the evidence of our senses. Independently of A, priori evidence we should certainly believe it with an intensity of conviction far greater than we accord to any ordinary physical truth...
Page 181 - But was the man determined by no motive to that determination ? Was his specific volition to this or to that without a cause ? On the supposition that the sum of influences (motives, dispositions, tendencies) to volition A, is equal to 12, and the sum of influences to...
Page 109 - That is to say, the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things without me.
Page 29 - First, though I deny liberty in a certain meaning of that word, yet I contend for liberty, as it signifies a power in man to do as he wills or pleases.
Page 85 - ... those pictures just as fit subjects of geometrical experimentation as the realities themselves ; inasmuch as pictures, if sufficiently accurate, exhibit of course all the properties which would be manifested by the realities at one given instant, and on simple inspection ; and in geometry we are concerned only with such properties, and not with that which pictures could not exhibit, the mutual action of bodies one upon another. The foundations of geometry would therefore be laid in direct experience,...
Page 27 - That there is some fixed law of nature respecting the will, as well as the other powers of the mind, and every thing else in the constitution of nature ; and consequently that it is never determined without some real or apparent cause foreign to itself; ie without some motive of choice ; or, that motives influence us in some definite and invariable manner, so that every volition, or choice, is sonstantly...