“God is a wider consciousness than we are, a pure intelligence, spiritual life and actuality. He is neither one nor many, neither man nor spirit. Such predicates belong only to finite beings.”
Source: Typical Modern Conceptions of God: Or, The Absolute of German Romantic Idealism and of English Evolutionary Agnosticism, with a Constructive Essay
“Science ... is organized common sense.”
Source: The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy
“The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.”
Source: The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy
“Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.”
Source: The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy
“Skepticism literally means a thoughtful inquiry, the looking at a problem in a disinterested spirit, the surveying of a question from many sides. In this sense it is the very essence of philosophy and science.”
Source: The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy
“God is the Absolute Idea, a circle that returns upon itself, not a straight line projected indefinitely.”
Source: Typical Modern Conceptions of God: Or, The Absolute of German Romantic Idealism and of English Evolutionary Agnosticism, with a Constructive Essay
“Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.”
Source: Man and the Cosmos - An introduction to Metaphysics.
“This is the very heart of true morality--not to struggle, not to fight with any weapons, for one's self alone--but to struggle and to fight for the common interest, to wield the power of brain and good right arm if need be for one's family, for the ordered community of life, for the state, for moral principles, humanity, and the common good.”
“If the spiritual values of human existence at its highest term of development and achievement do not endure, amidst all the changes and chances of this mortal universe, there seems to be no stable or coherent meaning in existence. Then the universe is irrational--indeed it is no universe at all.”
Source: Man and the Cosmos - An introduction to Metaphysics.
“No generation can do another generation's work for it. What we human beings can do at most is to mark out the pathway a little clearer for the generations to come after, and put legible signboards at the points where the greatest dangers have threatened us, in the hope that our posterity will read, understand, and be warned.”