S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Sir William Hamilton
Analysis and synthesis, though commonly treated as two different methods, are, if properly understood, only the two necessary parts of the same method. Each is the relative and correlative of the other.
Consciousness is thus, on the one hand, the recognition by the mind or ego of its acts and affections:in other words, the self-affirmation that certain modifications are known by me, and that these modifications are mine.
Knowledges (or cognitions), in common use with Bacon and our English philosophers till after the time of Locke, ought not to be discarded. It is, however, unnoticed by any English lexicographer.
If we consider the mind merely with a view of observing and generalizing the various phenomena it reveals, that is, of analyzing them into capacities or faculties, we have one mental science, or one department of mental science; and this we may call the phenomenology of mind.
The term nature is used sometimes in a wider, sometimes in a narrower extension. When employed in its most extensive meaning, it embraces the two worlds of mind and matter. When employed in its most restricted signification, it is a synonyme for the latter only, and is then used in contradistinction to the former.
The word perception is, in the language of philosophers previous to Reid, used in a very extensive signification. By Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibnitz, and others, it is employed in a sense almost as unexclusive as consciousness, in its widest signification. By Reid this word was limited to our faculty acquisitive of knowledge, and to that branch of this faculty whereby, through the senses, we obtain a knowledge of the external world. But his limitation did not stop here. In the act of external perception he distinguished two elements, to which he gave the names of perception and sensation. He ought perhaps to have called these perception proper and sensation proper, when employed in his special meaning.
Philosophy has been defined:the science of things divine and human, and the causes in which they are contained;the science of effects by their causes;the science of sufficient reasons;the science of things possible, inasmuch as they are possible;the science of things evidently deduced from their first principles;the science of truths sensible and abstract;the application of reason to its legitimate objects;the science of the relations of all knowledge to the necessary ends of human reason;the science of the original form of the ego, or mental self;the science of science;the science of the absolute;the science of the absolute indifference of the ideal and real.
In the philosophy of mind, subjective denotes what is to be referred to the thinking subject, the ego; objective what belongs to the object of thought, the non ego. Philosophy being the essence of knowledge, and the science of knowledge supposing, in its most fundamental and thorough-going analysis, the distinction of the subject and object of knowledge, it is evident that to philosophy the subject of knowledge would be by pre-eminence the subject, and the object of knowledge the object. It was therefore natural that the object and objective, the subject and subjective, should be employed by philosophers as simple terms, compendiously to denote the grand discrimination about which philosophy was constantly employed, and which no others could be found so precisely and promptly to express.
By a double blunder in philosophy and Greek, ideologic has in France become the name peculiarly distinctive of that philosophy of mind which exclusively derives our knowledge from sensation.
Power is, therefore, a word which we may use both in an active and in a passive signification; and in psychology we may apply it both to the active faculty and to the passive capacity of the mind.
There is a distinction, but no opposition, between theory and practice; each, to a certain extent, supposes the other: theory is dependent on practice; practice must have preceded theory.
This word is employed by English writers in a very loose and improper sense. It is with them usually convertible into hypothesis, and hypothesis is commonly used as another term for conjecture. The terms theory and theoretical are properly used in opposition to the terms practice and practical. In this sense they were exclusively employed by the ancients; and in this sense they are almost exclusively employed by the continental philosophers.
This [faculty], to which I give the name of the elaborative faculty,the faculty of relations or comparisons,constitutes what is properly denominated thought.
I use the term understanding not for the noetic faculty, intellect proper, or place of principles, but for the dianoetic or discursive faculty in its widest signification, for the faculty of relations or comparisons; and thus in the meaning in which Verstand is now employed by the Germans.