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Mind in Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

In the idealistic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British philosophy under Hegelian influence endeavoured to demonstrate the rationality of the universe as based on logical construction. The keynote of the Hegelian dialectic, as interpreted by both F. H. Bradley and J. E. McTaggart is that the mind is there from the first. In the advance from the bare abstraction of Being to the fully concrete whole—“Before the mind there is a single conception, but the whole mind itself which does not appear, engages in the process, operates on the datum, and produces the result.” The idea expressed by poetry in Tennyson's “Flower in the crannied wall,” which as the mind is fixed upon it reveals in an expansion to the universe the nature of God and Man, illustrates in a simple way the central philosophic conception of the British metaphysical idealists. Poetry could overlook the hard struggle of the little plant to keep its foothold against crowding competitors. Philosophy was perhaps too oblivious of this in its compelling postulate of the all pervading unity in which every difference and seeming contradiction would be reconciled.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1945

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References

page 31 note 1 Bradley, (Logic III, I, ii) quoted by McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Dialectic.

page 32 note 1 The Logical Analysis of Syntax, Rudolf Carnap.

page 32 note 2 Man on His Nature, Chap. ixGoogle Scholar.

page 33 note 1 Man on His Nature, Chap. ixGoogle Scholar.

page 33 note 2 Ibid., chap. xii.

page 33 note 3 Life Movements in Plants. I, II, VII, VIIIGoogle Scholar.

page 33 note 4 Response in the Living and the non-Living.

page 33 note 5 Ibid., chap. xx.

page 34 note 1 Space, Time and Deity, vol. ii, book iii, chap. iGoogle Scholar.

page 35 note 1 Space, Time and Deity, vol. ii. book iii, chap. iGoogle Scholar.

page 35 note 2 Holism and Evolution. General Smuts, however, would not allow that disorder has entered in.

page 35 note 3 Chap. iii.

page 35 note 4 From a letter to The Times, date not recorded. October, 1943.

page 36 note 1 Metaphysics of Nature, chap, x, and append. B; see also Contribution to British Contemporary Philosophy, Carveth Read.

page 37 note 1 Haldane, J. S., Philosophy of a Biologist. IIGoogle Scholar.

page 38 note 1 Italics mine.