Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Saturday, September 14, 2019
PHILOSOPHY SKETCH
"Philosophy in its incipient state and regarded as the research of causes, is as old as man's inquisitive soul, and may be seen glimmering in the mythologies and cosmogonies of the most ancient nations. It began in wonder, for Aristotle says: 'From wonder, men both now and at the first, began to philosophize.'...
"All human knowledge, which is but a clear conception of what is true, is made up of facts and truth,--intuitive truths, and such as are reached or inferred, by reasoning from facts and other truths.
"Facts are, what has been, what is, and that which is to be. Truth is that which perfectly accords with facts.
"A clear conception of the relation of facts and truths is knowledge.
"When knowledge is systematized we call it 'science', and when science is employed in practice, we call it 'art', so that a principle of science becomes a 'rule' of art .
"When a knowledge of natural phenomena is acquired by tracing the first principles of nature , through their various combinations, to the forms and qualities recognized by the senses, we call it natural, or physical philosophy; and, when by a similar process we acquire knowledge of phenomena of the mind, we call it mental or metaphysical philosophy.
"Thus, the simple terms, mind and matter , comprehend the entire field of physical and metaphysical philosophy; and the problem of the philosopher is to show their connection and set forth the laws under which they carry on their combined functions, and present the phenomenal universe to the consciousness of the human soul through the medium of the senses."
P. 3-4, SKETCH OF PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS, by Rufus Lewis Milford Hope Perry (1918)