True is it indeed, that without an Abiding and Active in us the transitory and sensible is impossible. As the case has been forcibly put in a saying … - George Holmes Howison

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True is it indeed, that without an Abiding and Active in us the transitory and sensible is impossible. As the case has been forcibly put in a saying that deserves to become classic, "Our unconditioned universality is the ground of our existence," — its ground, that is, at once its necessary condition and its sufficient reason.

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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

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.

Human finitude as the summary of human powers, with its consequent complete subjection to Divine predestination, is inwrapt in this conception of Divine causation as causation by efficiency; and there can be no way of supplementing this finitude by the infinity (i.e. freedom) required by a moral order, except by dislodging this view of creation and regeneration.

But so long as human nature is what it is, so long as we are by essence prepossessed in favour of our freedom and yearn for a life that may put death itself beneath our feet, and with death imperfection and wrong, so long will our nature reluctate, so long will it even revolt, at the prospect of having to accept the doctrine of pantheism; so long shall we instinctively draw back from that vast and shadowy Being which, be it conscious or unconscious or simply the Unknowable, must for us and our highest hopes be verily the Shadow of Death

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