Scepticism and animal faith

A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of epic poets and to plunge _in medias res_. The origin of things, if things have an origin, cannot be revealed to me, if revealed...

Custom does not breed understanding, but takes its place, teaching people to make their way contentedly through the world without knowing what the world is, nor what they think...

Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention. Children insensibly accept all the suggestions of sense and language, the only initiative they show being a certain wilfu...

Do I know, can I know, anything? Would not knowledge be an impossible inclusion of what lies outside? May I not rather renounce all beliefs? If only I could, what peace would de...

As I watch a sensible object the evidence of variation is often irresistible. This flag is flapping. This flame is dancing. How shall I deny that almost everything, in nature an...

Why should the mystic, in proportion as he dismisses the miscellany of experience as so much illusion, feel that he becomes one with reality and attains to absolute existence? I...

Scepticism is not sleep, and in casting a doubt on any belief, or proving the absurdity of any idea, the sceptic is by no means losing his sense of what is proposed. He is merel...

The ultimate position of the sceptic, that nothing given exists, may be fortified by the authority of many renowned philosophers who are accounted orthodox; and it will be worth...

The loss of faith, as I have already observed, has no tendency to banish ideas; on the contrary, since doubt arises on reflection, it tends to keep the imagination on the stretc...

There is some danger in pointing out the obvious. Quick wits, perceiving at once how obvious the obvious is (though they may never have noticed it before), will say it is futile...

I have now reached the culminating point of my survey of evidence, and the entanglements I have left behind me and the habitable regions I am looking for lie spread out before m...

Human beliefs and ideas (which in modern philosophy are called human knowledge) may be arranged systematically in various different series or orders. One is the _order of genesi...

The essence which is the object of intuition is probably not simple. Perhaps nothing that has a character recognisable in reflection can be utterly simple. The datum may seem pu...

To believe nothing and live immersed in intuition might be the privilege of a disembodied spirit; and if a man could share it he would not only be relieved from doubt but would,...

I have now agreed to believe that discourse is a contingent survey of essence, partial, recurrent, and personal, with an arbitrary starting-point and an arbitrary direction of p...

Experience, when the shocks that punctuate it are reacted upon instinctively, imposes belief in something far more recondite than mental discourse, namely, a person or self; and...

Belief in memory is implicit in the very rudiments of mind; mind and memory are indeed names for almost the same thing, since memory furnishes most of the resources of a mind at...

In the claims of memory I have a typical instance of what is called knowledge. In remembering I believe that I am taking cognisance not of a given essence but of a remote existe...

All knowledge, being faith in an object posited and partially described, is belief in substance, in the etymological sense of this word; it is belief in a thing or event subsist...

According to those philosophers who look for the foundations of the universe in their own minds, substance is but a dead and fantastic thing—a ghost or abstracted shadow of many...

Animal faith, being an expression of hunger, pursuit, shock, or fear, is directed upon _things_; that is, it assumes the existence of alien self-developing beings, independent o...

Belief in substance, I have seen, is inevitable. The hungry dog _must_ believe that the bone before him is a substance, not an essence; and when he is snapping at it or gnawing...

The sense that nature is animate, and in particular that men and brutes have feelings and thoughts, stands in greater need of criticism than of defence. I assume it before my no...

Scientific psychology is a part of physics, or the study of nature; it is the record of how animals act. Literary psychology is the art of imagining how they feel and think. Yet...

From the beginning of discourse there is a subtle reality posited which is not a thing: I mean the truth. If intuition of essence exists anywhere without discourse, the being of...

Is the existence of spirit evident to spirit, and involved in the presence of anything? Is its nature simple and obvious? I think there is something of which this may be said, b...

Descartes was the first to begin a system of philosophy with universal doubt, intended to be only provisional and methodical; but his mind was not plastic nor mystical enough to...