American philosopher
George Holmes Howison (29 November 1834 – 31 December 1916) was an American philosopher, who established the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley and held the position there of Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity.He also founded the Philosophical Union, one of the oldest philosophical organizations in the United States. Howison’s philosophy is set forth almost entirely in his volume entitled, The Limits of Evolution, and other essays, illustrating the metaphysical theory of personal idealism. Scrutinizing the idea of evolution that had come to the fore, he proved not only that no Person can be wholly “the product of ‘continuous creation’”, evolution, but went on also to show that, rooted in the very same (a priori) reason, fulfilled philosophy necessarily ends in the “Vision Beatific”, “that universal circle of spirits which, since the time of the stoics, has so pertinently been called the City of God”. Friends and former students of Howison established the Howison Lectures in Philosophy in 1919. Over the years, the lecture series has included talks by distinguished philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Our real experiences, day by day and moment by moment, are so intrinsically organised and definite, it does not at first occur to us that the principles which organise and define them, rendering them intelligible, and consciously apprehensible, are and must be the spontaneous products of the mind's own action.
Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond of their law which in the mood of vague and inaccurate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an effect.
The process which has led us to this result, and which might justifiably be called a Critique of all Scepticism, yields also the final impossibility of materialism in a still clearer way than we noticed before. We saw, some distance back, that the actual of sense could by no possibility be the source of consciousness, being, on the contrary, its mere phenomenon — its mere externalised presentation (picture-object) originated from within. But the hypothetical potential of sense, the assumed subsensible substance called matter, we have now seen to be precisely that self-contradiction talked of as the physical thing-in-itself, and it therefore disappears from the real universe along with that illusion. We have, then, a definitive Critique of all Materialism.
Freedom and determinism are only the obverse and the reverse of the two-faced fact of rational self-activity. Freedom is the thought-action of the self, defining its specific identity, and determinism means nothing but the definite character which the rational nature of the action involves. Thus freedom, far from disjoining and isolating each self from other selves, especially the Supreme Self, or God, in fact defines the inner life of each, in its determining whole, in harmony with theirs, and so, instead of concealing, opens it to their knowledge — to God, with absolute completeness eternally, in virtue of his perfect vision into all possible emergencies, all possible alternatives; to the others, with an increasing fulness, more or less retarded, but advancing toward completeness as the Rational Ideal guiding each advances in its work of bringing the phenomenal or natural life into accord with it. For our freedom, in its most significant aspect, means just our secure possession, each in virtue of his self-defining act, of this common Ideal, whose intimate nature it is to unite us, not to divide us; to unite us while it preserves us each in his own identity, harmonising each with all by harmonising all with God, but quenching none in any extinguishing Unit. Freedom, in short, means first our self-direction by this eternal Ideal and toward it, and then our power, from this eternal choice, to bring our temporal life into conformity with it, step by step, more and more.
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No, nothing short of the creative principle of imagination gives the fine arts their specific quality—the principle that creates for the sake of creating, for the sake of giving free course to that imagination which is not only an essential but the guiding factor in the supersensible being of man, and which not only founds for him the world of religion and of science, as well as that of art, but is the constructive and developing principle of the universe itself.
But now we come upon another objection, which I judge will be the last you can raise. You will say, I suspect, that this world of freedom, self-equipped for sin, is indeed a world which "lieth in wickedness," that in truth there is no real hope of good in it: it is a world of inherent and inexpugnable wrong, and not only damnable, but in fact already damned.
A world of such individual minds is by the final implications of this proof the world of primary causes, and every member of it, secure above the vicissitudes of Time and Space and Force, is possessed of a supertemporal or eternal reality, and is therefore not liable to any lethal influence from any other source. Itself a primary cause, it can neither destroy another primary cause nor be destroyed by any. The objector who would open the eternal permanence of the soul to doubt, then, must assail the proofs of a priori knowledge; for so long as these remain free from suspicion, there can be no real question as to what they finally imply. The concomitance of our two streams of experience, the timed stream and the spaced stream, raised from a merely historical into a necessary concomitance by the argument that refers it to the active unity of each soul as its ground, becomes the steadfast sign and visible pledge of the imperishable self-resource of the individual spirit.”