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Present Tendencies in Speculative Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

According to Plato, it is the aim of Philosophy to furnish us with a certain vision of all time and all existence. This must always have seemed a large and difficult undertaking; but the opening years of the present century have already introduced considerable changes in our estimation of magnitudes. We are learning to think of modes of existence that are much more minute and of others that are much larger than any that had previously been conceived with any definiteness. Analysis now leads us to entities and processes that are almost inconceivably small; and synthesis points to a totality that is almost inconceivably great, and that may be even greater than we know. Our interests naturally begin with our human lives on earth ; and we are rapidly discovering that even these have to be thought of in ways that were hardly possible for any previous generation. In a sense, it may be said that our human world has been becoming much smaller. Distances within it are beginning to seem, in many respects, almost negligible ; and great hopes may be based upon this contraction.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1927

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References

page 449 note 1 The substance of two Lectures delivered in University College, Bangor.

page 450 note 1 Hegel's view of Infinity as meaning what is complete and perfect seems to be philosophically more satisfactory, though, of course, the mathematical conception may be valid for the purposes of that science.

page 450 note 2 I think this is involved, for instance, in Professor Alexander's view.

page 452 note 1 When he was invited to give Gifford Lectures, he said that he had nothing to add to what had been stated by Paley.

page 459 note 1 MrCollingwood, R. G. (Speculum Mentis, p. 53)Google Scholar considers Science to have been the chief contribution of the Greeks; but, having regard to their history as a whole, I think it was rather Art.