Author: James Martineau

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-16

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 9781330321546

Excerpt from Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. 1 Still more, if, following up this experience, I have then gone with him through the series of his writings, and fallen in chronologically with the turns and openings of his thought, I have insensibly gained the key to his final mysteries, and, having passed through the intermediate dialects, can now construe the new language by the old. Nay, I confess to having accepted aid from a far more commonplace commentary on the difficulties of an authors work, viz. the realisation of his personal characteristics, his human relations, his preponderant sympathies, and the study especially of the transitions of his thought and the testing crises of his life. Intellectual pride and self-ignorance alone can blind us to the fact that systems of philosophical opinion grow from the mind's instinctive effort to unify by sufficient reason, and justify by intelligible pleas, its own deepest affections and admirations. At all events, I attempt no more; and shall not hesitate, therefore, to touch upon one or two of the personal experiences, to which these volumes owe their chief features. When I first woke up, before and during my College life, to the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations, I carried into them, from previous training for the profession of civil engineer, a store of exclusively scientific conceptions, rendered familiar in the elementary study of mathematics, mechanics, and chemistry. Small as it was, it was my all, and necessarily dictated the only rules of judgment which I could apply. I had nothing to take with me into logical and ethical problems but the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge; and as the instructions of the philosophical classroom, excellent of their kind, moved strictly within the same limits, I was inevitably shut up in the habit of interpreting the human phenomena by the analogy of external nature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.