Bibliography

Logic and Spiritualism [R]

Hyperbolic philosophy has to assume for starting-point something free, as neither requiring explanation nor admitting derivation. The free is living; the immediately living is feeling. Feeling, then, is assumed as starting-point; but feeling uncoördinated, having its manifoldness implicit. For principle of progress or growth, something must be taken not in the starting-point, but which from infinitesimal beginning will strengthen itself continually. This can only be a principle of growth of principles, a tendency to generalization. Assume, then, that feeling tends to be associated with and assimilated to feeling, action under general formula or habit tending to replace the living freedom and inward intensity of feeling. This tendency to take habits will itself increase by habit. Habit tends to coordinate feelings, which are thus brought into the order of Time, into the order of Space.

In regard to the principle of movement, three philosophies are possible.
   1. Elliptic philosophy. Starting-point and stopping-point are not even ideal. Movement of nature recedes from no point, advances towards no point, has no definite tendency, but only flits from position to position.
   2. Parabolic philosophy. Reason or nature develops itself according to one universal formula; but the point toward which that development tends is the very same nothingness from which it advances.
   3. Hyperbolic philosophy. Reason marches from premisses to conclusion; nature has ideal end different from its origin.

Feelings over whose relations to their neighbors habit has acquired such an empire that we detect no trace of spontaneity in their actions, are known as dead matter.

Habit tends to coordinate feelings, which are thus brought into the order of Time, into the order of Space. Feelings coordinated in a certain way, to a certain degree, constitute a person; on their being dissociated (as habits do sometimes get broken up), the personality disappears.