From the Introduction:
In its conception this book was intended to be a study of the nature, value and principal species of contemplation. In an age when action and production are so widely regarded as the end and content of human life, contemplation is so little understood that it is considered an idle and barren dreaming without vital relation to reality. We should live rather than think about life, master the world by action, not brood inactively upon its meaning. The thesis here maintained flatly challenges such an attitude. It will argue that the entire fabric of knowledge and consequently of action and production is founded upon contemplation. A structure of active achievement, individual or social, which lacks this foundation is but an imposing sham doomed to collapse. For we cannot profitably handle objects whose nature is unknown. But the nature of things is constituted by their form. And contemplation is an intuition of form.
The study of contemplation therefore led me to consider more closely the metaphysical character of form which makes the world of our experience what it is, so that we can know objective reality only by apprehending its form. A philosophy of contemplation thus became under my hands a philosophy of form.
Chapters include:
- Matter and From
- Contemplation and Action
- The Nature of Contemplation
- Vital Union and Contemplation
- Contemplation The Source of Freedom and Unity
- Contemplation and Sociology
- Four Species of Contemplation
- Axiological Contemplation
- Speculative Contemplation
- Aesthetic Contemplation
- Religious Contemplation