The Present Is Saturated With The Past

Every Mind Has A Horizon In Respect To Its Present Intellectual Capacity But Not In Respect To Its Future Intellectual Capacity.

Although The Whole Of This Life Were Said To Be Nothing But A Dream And The Physical World Nothing But A Phantasm, I Should Call This Dream Or Phantasm Real Enough, If, Using Reason Well, We Were Never Deceived By It.

Let There Be Two Possible Things, A And B, One Of Which Is Such That It Is Necessary That It Exists, And Let Us Assume That There Is More Perfection In A Than In B. Then, At Least, We Can Explain Why A Should Exist Rather Than B And Can Foresee Which Of Them Will Exist; Indeed, This Can Be Demonstrated, That Is, Rendered Certain From The Nature Of The Thing.

Each Portion Of Matter May Be Conceived Of As A Garden Full Of Plants, And As A Pond Full Of Fishes. But Each Branch Of The Plant, Each Member Of The Animal, Each Drop Of Its Humors, Is Also Such A Garden Or Such A Pond.

All The Different Classes Of Beings Which Taken Together Make Up The Universe Are, In The Ideas Of God Who Knows Distinctly Their Essential Gradations, Only So Many Ordinates Of A Single Curve So Closely United That It Would Be Impossible To Place Others Between Any Two Of Them, Since That Would Imply Disorder And Imperfection. Thus Men Are Linked With The Animals, These With The Plants And These With The Fossils Which In Turn Merge With Those Bodies Which Our Senses And Our Imagination Represent To Us As Absolutely Inanimate.