The First Step in Philosophy

The first step in philosophy is not a step; the first step in philosophy is to open your eyes. Not until he has looked round him, and with more than a little astonishment, in the actual world, not until he has in some measure become ‘a spectator of all time and all existence’, has any man a standing in the realm of thought. The majority of us are rustics, whose daily perambulations round the village pump mark the limits of our travel. ‘The winds of the world’, in Walter Page’s phrase, ‘have not ventilated our brains.’ I do not except the learned doctors,

profoundly skilled in analytic,
Who can distinguish and divide
A hair ‘twixt south and south-west side—

who know, it may be, the language of the brain but not of the soul, who know what algebra is but not adversity, comfort, but not dismay, sobriety, but not savagery, what respectability is, but not fury, madness, despair, who are strangers to nature and the passions in the raw, in their wide, untamed expanses. There is another way of thinking than theirs, more fundamental than logic, and another language than it speaks, God’s thinking and God’s logic, the universal, invincible, terrible logic and language of facts.

W. M. Dixon, The Human Situation, Lexture XI. (Dixon was a last-minute Gifford lecturer; he stepped in when Emile Meyerson died before giving his course of lectures. Meyerson's a name you don't hear much these days, but he was an extraordinarily well-respected chemist and philosopher of science in his day.)