Ernst Cassirer
Ernst Cassirer
Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy. Trained within the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.
"Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging."
"No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astonishingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material.... Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity."
"Science is the last step in mans mental development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture."
"I studied your treatise thoroughly and with very much interest and admired, above all, how securely you master the essence of relativity theory. I made brief comments in the margin where I was not completely in agreement. E.g., I could not accept your opinion about the Kant-Newton relationship with reference to space and time. Newton’s theory requires an absolute (objective) space in order to be able to attribute real meaning to acceleration, which Kant does not seem to have recognized."
"The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element."
"Love and knowledge have one and the same goal, for both strive to overcome the separation in the elements of being and return to the point of their original unity.… To know an object means to negate the distance between it and consciousness; it means, in a certain sense, to become one with the object: cognitio nihil est aliud, quam Coitio quaedam cum suo cognobili. [Knowledge is nothing else than a kind of union with what is known.]"
