The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system ... which is neve...r a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We men know very little a priori, and have our senses to thank for nearly all our knowledge. Through experience we know only appea...rances ..., but not the modum noumenon ..., not things as they are in themselves.... God knows all things as they are in themselves a priori and immediately through an intuitive understanding.... If we were to flatter ourselves so much as to claim that we know the modum noumenon, then we would have to be in community with God so as to participate immediately in the divine ideas. To expect this in the present life is the business of mystics and theosophists. Thus arises the mystical self- annihilation of China, Tibet, and India, in which one is under the delusion that he will finally be dissolved in the Godhead. Fundamentally Spinozism could just as well be called a great fanaticism as a form of atheism. For of God, the one substance, Spinoza affirms two predicates: extension and thought. Every soul, he says, is only a modification of God's thought, and every body is a modification of his extension. Thus Spinoza assumed that everything existing could be found in God. But by making this assumption he fell into crude contradictions. For if only a single substance exists, then either I must be this substance, and consequently I must be God (but this contradicts my dependency); or else I am an accident (but this contradicts the concept of my ego, in which I think myself as an ultimate subject which is not the predicate of any other being).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all illusions in the world, the most universally received is the concern for reputation and glory, which we espouse even to the... point of giving up riches, rest, life, and health, which are effectual and substantial goods, to follow that vain phantom and mere sound that has neither body nor substance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abando...n the trunk and body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a... repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy ruptu...re, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,--for the sun acts on one side first,--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,--had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the gutteral g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feather and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He shall love my soul as though Body were not at all,... He shall love your body Untroubled by the soul, Love cram love's two divisions Yet keep his substance whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »