Sublime

He begins by supposing what he calls a “state of nature,” antecedent to all human government. In this state there is a “law of nature,” but the law of nature consists of divine commands, and is not imposed by any human legislator.

Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty.

Using modern terminology, we may say: Ideas of unperceived things or occurrences can always be defined in terms of perceived things or occurrences, and therefore, by substituting the definition for the term defined, we can always state what we know empirically without introducing any unperceived things or occurrences. As regards our present problem

Spinoza’s metaphysic is the best example of what may be called “logical monism”—the doctrine, namely, that the world as a whole is a single substance, none of whose parts are logically capable of existing alone. The ultimate basis for this view is the belief that every proposition has a single subject and a single predicate, which leads us to the c

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

Astrology is to be rejected, for the usual reasons. In answer to the question “Is there such a thing as fate?” Aquinas replies that we might give the name “fate” to the order impressed by Providence, but it is wiser not to do so, as “fate” is a pagan word. This leads to an argument that prayer is useful although Providence is unchangeable. (I have

that the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.

Observation is not always the mother of deduction.

In the first place, Plato has no understanding of philosophical syntax. I can say “Socrates is human,” “Plato is human,” and so on. In all these statements, it may be assumed that the word “human” has exactly the same meaning. But whatever it means, it means something which is not of the same kind as Socrates, Plato, and the rest of the individuals