Thomas Carlyle Quotes

If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

Does our hand show in this?

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe ? Another act of willing?

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.

I see man more as an instrument or an agent more than anything else.

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory. It was us.

The implication is that this basic idea we have that we are controlled by our genes is false. It's an idea that turns us into victims. I'm saying we are the creators of our situation. The genes are merely the blueprints. We are the contractors, and we can adjust those blueprints. And we can even rewrite them.

No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.

I have never believed that things happen by themselves.

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man.

We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Man now has the power to put an end to his own history.

All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can't talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.

A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?

People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.