Personal responsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands; an… - George Holmes Howison
" "Personal responsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands; and the voice of aspiring and successful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of God. By them he proclaims: We are many, though indeed one; there is one nature, in manifold persons; personality alone is the measure, the sufficing establishment, of reality; unconditional reality alone is sufficient to the being of persons; for that alone is sufficient to a Moral Order, since a moral order is possible for none but beings who are mutually responsible, and no beings can be responsible but those who originate their own acts.
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About George Holmes Howison
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.
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Additional quotes by George Holmes Howison
[T]he word "eternal" must by him be taken to stand for what "temporal" does not and cannot stand for; namely, the unchangeable Ground presupposed by the changing temporal; the necessary as against the contingent; the independent as against the dependent; the primary as against the derivative; the self-existent as against that which exists in and through it; the genuine cause, the causa sui, as against that which is after all nothing but effect, however it may be tied, by the causa sui, in an unrupturable chain of antecedent and consequent. Or we may say it means the noumenon as against the phenomenon; or, in fine, the thing in itself as against the thing in other. That is, the relation between the eternal and the temporal is not, and cannot be, only another case of the temporal relation. The relation is just one of pure reason, and is, in fact, sui generis: the eternal does not precede the temporal by date, but only in logic; it is the sine qua non without which the temporal cannot exist, nor is even conceivable. In brief, throughout my book I mean by the "eternal" simply the Real as contrasted with the apparent; the world of self-active causes as contrasted with the world of derivative effects, in so far passive.
But a second afterthought would follow, and I should ask: What must be the nature of this life dissevered from Nature,—bodiless, void of all sense-perception? What would be left in it except the pure elements of reason, the pure elements of perception, the pure formularies of science, and pure imagination? But what are these, altogether, but the common equipment, not of my mind or of some other individual mind, but of the universal human nature? And what is that universal nature but just the nature of the eternal Cosmic Consciousness? Yes, my personality has vanished; and death, in dissolving the tie to Nature under the alluring prospect of an existence for me wholly self-referred and self-sustaining, has resolved me back into the infinite Vague of the Cosmic Mind, as this might, perchance, be fancied to be in itself, apart from Nature and creation,
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