Ideas from Éthique
503 ideas
Sample Ideas
- The idea of an actually existing individual thing is caused by God only insofar as he is affected by another individual idea, and so on to infinity; God's knowledge of what happens in an object is insofar as he has the idea of that object.
- The common belief that virtue is a burdensome bondage obeyed for rewards and out of fear of posthumous punishments is absurd; abandoning reason because there is no immortality would be like choosing poisons over wholesome food or preferring madness to rational life.
- The knowledge of good and evil is nothing but the consciousness of pleasure and pain tied to our power of activity; idea and emotion are distinct only in conception.
- Man’s highest happiness or blessedness consists in perfecting the understanding through the intuitive knowledge of God; the rational person’s ultimate aim is an adequate conception of self and all things.
- Insofar as a thing is in harmony with our nature, it is necessarily good; usefulness varies directly with harmony with our nature.
- The common view that God could refrain from producing what follows from his nature is absurd; denying necessary production is like denying that a triangle’s interior angles equal two right angles.
- Our perceptions of others (e.g., ‘Peter’) differ depending on whether the idea is Peter’s own essence or another’s idea of Peter; the latter chiefly reflects the perceiver’s bodily disposition rather than Peter’s nature.
- The idea of each modification of the human body does not include an adequate knowledge of the human body itself.
- Truth is self-certifying: when the mind has an idea that corresponds to its object, that suffices for knowing it is true; clear and distinct ideas are necessarily true because, insofar as the mind perceives truly, it is part of God’s infinite intellect.
- There is no cause whose nature does not produce some effect.