Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance. (A.I. p. 203)

Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world - the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross. (P.R. p. 513)

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. This narrowness arises from the idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilisation. The evidence relied upon is arbitrarily biased by the temperaments of individuals, by the provincialities of groups, and by the limitations of schemes of thought. (P.R. p. 512)

What I am essentially arguing against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, insofar as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream. (C.N. p. 30)

We live in a world of turmoil. Philosophy, and religion, as influenced by orthodox philosophic thought, dismiss turmoil. Such dismissal is the outcome of tired decadence. We should beware of philosophies which express the dominant emotions of periods of slow social decay. Our inheritance of philosophic thought is infected with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and with the decadence of eastern civilisations. (M.T. pp. 109-10)

Philosophy has been haunted by the unfortunate notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought. But the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion and not its origin. (P.R. pp. 11-2)

The great thinkers from whom we derive inspiration enjoyed insights beyond their own systems. They made statements hard to reconcile with the neat little ways of thought which we pin on to their names. (M.T. p. 113)

The theory of Induction is the despair of philosophy - and yet all our activities are based upon it. (S.M.W. p. 35)

There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. (P.R. p. x)

When any eminent scholar has converted Plato into a respectable professor, by providing him with a coherent system, we quickly find that Plato in a series of Dialogues has written up most of the heresies from his own doctrines. (A.I. p. 134)

He (Plato) is never entirely self-consistent, and rarely explicit and devoid of ambiguity. He feels the difficulties, and expresses his perplexities. No one could be perplexed over Aristotle's classifications; whereas Plato moves about amid a fragmentary system like a man dazed by his own penetration. (A.I. pp. 187-8)

Plato...gave an unrivalled display of the human mind in action, with its ferment of vague obviousness, of hypothetical formulation, of renewed insight, of discovery of relevant detail, of partial understanding, of final conclusion, with its disclosure of deeper problems as yet unsolved. (Harvard p. 264)

No two of his (Plato's) dialogues are completely consistent with each other. No two modern scholars agree as to what any one dialogue exactly means. (Harvard p. 262)

Plato grasped the importance of mathematical system; but his chief fame rests upon the wealth of profound suggestions scattered throughout his dialogues, suggestions half smothered by the archaic misconceptions of the age in which he lived. (M.T. p. 3)

Aristotle ... derived his own sources of thought from Plato's theoretical activity. He dissected fishes with Plato's thoughts in his head. He systematised the welter of Platonic suggestions, and in the course of his work he modified, improved, and spoilt. But he did introduce into sciences other than Astronomy the much-needed systematic practice of passing beyond theory to direct observation of details. Unfortunately this was the one aspect of life which never had any direct influence on any succeeding epoch. (A.I. p. 136)

European philosophy is founded upon Plato's dialogues, which in their methods are mainly an endeavour to elicit philosophic categories from a dialectic discussion of the meanings of language taken in combination with shrewd observation of the actions of man and of the forces of nature. (A.I. p. 293)

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. (P.R. p. 63)

This Platonic ideal (liberal education) has rendered imperishable services to European civilisation. It has encouraged art, it has fostered that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the origin of science, it has maintained the dignity of mind in the face of material force, a dignity which claims freedom of thought. Plato did not, like St. Benedict, bother himself to be a fellow worker with his slaves; but he must rank among the emancipators of mankind. (A.E. p. 71)

The insistence in the Platonic culture on disinterested intellectual appreciation is a psychological error. Action and our implication in the transition of events amid the inevitable bond of cause to effect are fundamental. An education which strives to divorce intellectual or aesthetic life from these fundamental facts carries with it the decadence of civilisation. Essentially, culture should be for action, and its effect should be to divest labour from the associations of aimless toil. Art exists that we may know the deliverances of our senses as good. It heightens the sense-world. (A.E. pp. 73-4)

An evil side of the Platonic culture has been its total neglect of technical education as an ingredient in the complete development of ideal human beings. This neglect has arisen from two disastrous antitheses, namely, that between mind and body, and that between thought and action. I will here interject, solely to avoid criticism, that I am well aware that the Greeks highly valued physical beauty and physical activity. They had, however, that perverted sense of values which is the nemesis of slave-owning. (A.E. pp. 77-8)

I lay it down as an educational axiom that in teaching you will come to grief as soon as you forget that your pupils have bodies. This is exactly the mistake of the post-renaissance Platonic curriculum. But nature can be kept at bay by no pitchfork; so in English education, being expelled from the classroom, she returned with a cap and bells in the form of all-conquering athleticism. (A.E. p. 78)

If once you conceive fundamental fact as a multiplicity of subjects qualified by predicates, you must fail to give a coherent account of experience. The disjunction of subjects is the presupposition from which you start, and you can only account for conjunctive relations by some fallacious slight of hand, such as Leibnitz's metaphor of his monads engaged in mirroring. The alternative philosophic position must commence with denouncing the whole idea of "subject qualified by predicate" as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language.(Princ. Rel. pp. 13-4)

The Leibnitzian theory of the "best of possible worlds" is an audacious fudge produced in order to save the face of a Creator constructed by contemporary, and antecedent, theologians. (P.R. p. 74)

I do not like this habit among philosophers, of having recourse to secret stores of information, which are not allowed for in their system of philosophy. They are the ghost of Berkeley's "God", and are about as communicative (anti-Hume and Russell). (Uniformity and Contingency, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, N.S. Vol. XXIII, p. 13)

Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. (C.N. p. 27)

Hume’s theory of a complex of . . . impressions elaborated into a supposition of a common world is entirely contrary to naive experience. . . . A young man does not initiate his experience by dancing with impressions of sensation, and then proceed to conjecture a partner. . . . The unempirical character of the philosophical school derived from Hume cannot be too often insisted upon. (P.R. p. 480-1)

Empiricists . . .refuse to admit experience, naked and unashamed, devoid of a priori fig leaf. (Criticism of the sensationalist dogma of Hume) (P.R. p. 221)

It is almost indecent to draw the attention of philosophers to the minor transactions of daily life, away from the classic sources of philosophic knowledge; but, after all, it is the empiricists who began this appeal to Caesar. (P.R. p. 264)

Kant ... was … led to balance the world upon thought - oblivious to the scanty supply of thinking. (P.R. p. 229)

Modern idealisms have contributed the unhelpful suggestion that the phenomenal world is one of the inferior avocations of the Absolute. (P.R. p. 178)

Bradley's argument proves that relations ... are indiscretions of the absolute. (P.R. p. 350)

It is a temptation for philosophers that they should weave a fairy tale of the adjustment of factors; and then as an appendix introduce the notion of frustration, as a secondary aspect. I suggest to you that this is the criticism to be made on the monistic idealisms of the nineteenth century, and even of the great Spinoza. It is quite incredible that the Absolute, as conceived in monistic philosophy, should evolve confusion about its own details (M.T. pp. 69-70)

The pragmatic test can never work, unless on some occasion - in the future, or in the present - there is a definite determination of what is true on that occasion. Otherwise the poor pragmatist remains an intellectual Hamlet, perpetually adjourning decision of judgment to some later date. (P.R. p. 275)