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 »
The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or int...ension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For women ... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can ...predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The predicate of truth-value of a proposition, therefore, is a mere fictive quality; its place is in an ideal world of science onl...y, whereas actual science cannot make use of it. Actual science instead employs throughout the predicate of weight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The ...systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »