The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
F. H. BradleyRead
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that our instinctual beliefs often require justification that may not be valid.
F. H. Bradley's quote highlights the tendency of humans to seek rational explanations for their instincts or beliefs, often leading to the identification of flawed or 'bad' reasons. It implies a critique of how people rationalize their inherent convictions, suggesting that the true understanding may lie beyond mere intellectual justification, tapping instead into deeper metaphysical considerations.
In practice
In a philosophy class while discussing the nature of belief and reason.
The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? That what has never been, should be, or that what has been, should be again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it.
Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.
I returned to Jerusalem, and it is by virtue of Jerusalem that I have written all that God has put into my heart and into my pen.
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
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