The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it bec...omes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man you can define; but the true essence of any man, say, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln, remains the endlessly elusive and myst...erious object of the biographer's interest, of the historian's comments, of popular legend, and of patriotic devotion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see the ...self, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its chosen good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect f...inally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual th...eory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No consensus of men can make an error erroneous. We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we s...ay what was an error already.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If usually the "present age" is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the ...history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The individual as such is never the mere result of law. In consequence, the causal explanation of an object never defines its indi...vidual and unique characters as such, but always its general characters. Consequently, if the and the expression of that will in any moment of our finite life possess characters, namely, precisely these individual and uniquely significant characters which no causal explanation can predetermine, then such acts of will, as significant expressions of purpose in our life, constitute precisely what ethical common sense has always meant by free acts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its ow...n type, or is such that no other of its class exists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »