Sublime

Without criticizing Hobbes’s metaphysics or ethics, there are two points to make against him. The first is that he always considers the national interest as a whole, and assumes, tacitly, that the major interests of all citizens are the same. He does not realize the importance of the clash between different classes, which Marx makes the chief cause

The views of Aristotle on ethics represent, in the main, the prevailing opinions of educated and experienced men of his day. They are not, like Plato’s, impregnated with mystical religion; nor do they countenance such unorthodox theories as are to be found in the Republic concerning property and the family.

All the important inferences outside logic and pure mathematics are inductive, not deductive; the only exceptions are law and theology, each of which derives its first principles from an unquestionable text, viz. the statute books or the scriptures.

“No virtue can be conceived as prior to this endeavour to preserve one’s own being.”

Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.

When God’s existence has been proved, the rest proceeds easily. Since God is good, He will not act like the deceitful demon whom Descartes has imagined as a ground for doubt. Now God has given me such a strong inclination to believe in bodies that He would be deceitful if there were none; therefore bodies exist. He must, moreover, have given me the

I should agree with Plato that arithmetic, and pure mathematics generally, is not derived from perception. Pure mathematics consists of tautologies, analogous to “men are men,” but usually more complicated. To know that a mathematical proposition is correct, we do not have to study the world, but only the meanings of the symbols; and the symbols, w

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubt, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. —Francis Bacon

in the advanced political cultures of the Enlightenment tradition the creation of knowledge can and should be paramount, and the idea that representative government depends on proportionate representation in the legislature is unequivocally a mistake.