"But, you may retort, we are surely right in being more concerned about future misfortunes, which may possibly be averted, than about past calamities about which we can do nothing. To this argument Spinoza's determinism supplies the answer. Only ignorance makes us think that we can alter the future; what will be will be, and the future is as unalterably fixed as the past. That is why hope and fear are condemned: both depend upon viewing the future as uncertain, and therefore spring from a lack of wisdom."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 574.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
A History of Western Philosophy
359 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by A History of Western Philosophy →
Related Quotes
"Heraclitus himself, for all his belief in change, allowed something everlasting. The conception of eternity (as oppos…"
"Passing from that small to the large, astronomy no longer allows us to regard the heavenly bodies as everlasting."
"A dose of disaster is likely to bring men's hopes back to their older super-terrestrial forms: if life on earth is di…"
"He [Anaxagoras] rejected necessity and chance as giving the origins of things; nevertheless there was no "Providence"…"
"Science, like philosophy, has sought to escape from the doctrine of perpetual flux by finding some permanent substrat…"
"Nothing daunted, the physicists invented new and smaller units, called electrons and protons, out of which atoms were…"
"The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of instincts leading men to philosophy. It is derived, no do…"
"The cheerfulness of the nineteenth century turned men against these static conceptions, and modern liberal theology b…"
"Philosophically inclined mystics, unable to deny that whatever is in time is transitory, have invented a conception o…"
"The doctrine of perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to …"