The World's Greatest Books — Volume 14 — Philosophy and Economics
Philosophy
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 14 — Philosophy and Economics
Economics; Philosophy
All bodies are either moving or resting. Every body moves sometimes
slowly, sometimes quickly. Bodies are distinguished from each other by
degrees of motion and quiescence, not with regard to substance. All
bodies agree in some aspects. Bodies affect each other in motion and
rest. Each individual thing must necessarily be determined as to motion
or rest by some other thing.
The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies by which it
is, as it were, regenerated. The human mind increases its aptitude in
proportion to the number of ways in which the body can be disposed. The
idea constituting a formal being of the human mind is not simple, but is
highly complex. An idea of each component part of the body must
necessarily exist in God.
The human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know
that the human body exists, except through the ideas and affections by
which the body is affected. Indeed, the human mind is the very idea or
knowledge of the human body. These ideas are in God. Thought is an
attribute of God, and so the thought of the mind originates of necessity
in Him. All the ideas which are in God always agree with those things of
which they are ideas, and therefore they are all true.
Falsity consists in privation of knowledge, involved in confusion and
mutilation of ideas. For instance, because they think themselves to be
free, and the sole reason for this opinion is that they are conscious of
their own actions, and ignorant of the causes determining those actions.
Nobody knows what the will is and how it moves to-day. Those who pretend
otherwise and invent locations of the soul, usually excite derision and
disgust.
When we look at the sun and imagine it to be immensely nearer to us than
it really is, the error arises from the manner in which the essence of
the sun affects the body, not merely from the exercise of the
imagination.
_Mutual Influences_
The more things the body possesses in common with other bodies, the more
things will the mind be adapted to perceive. The human mind possesses
an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God. But
the reason why men have not a knowledge of God as clear as that which
they have of common notions is that they cannot imagine God as they can
imagine bodies, and because they have attached the name of God to the
images of things they are accustomed to see. This they can hardly avoid,
because they are constantly affected by external bodies. And, indeed
most errors arise from our application to the wrong names of things.
For if some one says that the lines drawn from the centre to the
circumference of a circle are unequal, it is because he understands by a
circle something different from what we understand by the
mathematicians. I did not reckon a man to be in error whom I recently
heard complaining that his court has flown into one of his neighbour's
fowls for I understand what he meant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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