Spirit and general principles of the Course.—Object of the
Lectures of this year:—application of the principles of which an
exposition is given, to the three Problems of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good.
[Lecture I.]—The Existence of Universal and Necessary
Principles [39]
Two great wants, that of absolute truths, and that of absolute
truths that may not be chimeras. To satisfy these two wants is
the problem of the philosophy of our time.—Universal and
necessary principles.—Examples of different kinds of such
principles.—Distinction between universal and necessary
principles and general principles.—Experience alone is incapable
of explaining universal and necessary principles, and also
incapable of dispensing with them in order to arrive at the
knowledge of the sensible world.—Reason as being that faculty of
ours which discovers to us these principles.—The study of
universal and necessary principles introduces us to the highest
parts of philosophy.
Résumé of the preceding Lecture. A new question, that of the
origin of universal and necessary principles.—Danger of this
question, and its necessity.—Different forms under which truth
presents itself to us, and the successive order of these forms:
theory of spontaneity and reflection.—The primitive form of
principles; abstraction that disengages them from that form, and
gives them their actual form.—Examination and refutation of the
theory that attempts to explain the origin of principles by an
induction founded on particular notions.