Transcendental Idealism Quotes

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.

The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain

Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science, or complement of sciences, exclusively occupied with mind.

Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

Kant ... stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

[Kant] was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed imjplicitly in the maximx that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.

Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

I shall risk nothing on an attempt to prove the transcendence of p. If others undertake this enterprise, no one will be happier than I in their success. But believe me, it will not fail to cost them some effort.

Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

[To] interpret Parmenides as a Kant before Kant ... this is exactly what we must do.

Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.

Natural science physics contains in itself synthetical judgments a priori, as principles. ... Space then is a necessary representation a priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions.

As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealists on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.