Mind

"[T]o assert that an immortal machine is a chimera or a logical fiction, is to reason as absurdly as caterpillars would reason if, seeing the cast-off skins of their fellow-caterpillars, they should bitterly deplore the fate of their species, which to them would seem to come to nothing."

"[O]f two physicians, the better one and the one who deserves more confidence is always, in my opinion, the one who is more versed in the physique or mechanism of the human body, and who, leaving aside the soul and all the anxieties which this chimera gives to fools and to ignorant men, is seriously occupied only in pure naturalism."

"We are veritable moles in the field of nature; we achieve little more than the mole's journey and it is our pride which prescribes limits to the limitless."

"[W]e disdain, ungrateful wretches that we are, this common mother of all kingdoms... We imagine, or rather we infer, a cause superior to that to which we owe all, and which truly has wrought all things in an inconceivable fashion."

"Let us observe the ape, the beaver, the elephant, etc., in their operations. If it is clear that these activities can not be performed without intelligence, why refuse intelligence to these animals?"

"[W]ho does not see that the soul of an animal must be either mortal or immortal, whichever ours [is]... and that thus [in admitting that animals have souls], you fall into in the effort to avoid ?"

"He who so thinks will be wise, just, tranquil about his fate, and therefore happy. He will await death without either fear or desire, and will cherish life... filled with reverence, gratitude, affection, and tenderness for nature, in proportion to his feeling of the benefits he has received from nature; he will be happy, in short, in feeling nature, and in being present at the enchanting spectacle of the universe, and he will surely never destroy nature either in himself or in others."

"[T]he soul is but a principle of motion or a material and sensible part of the brain, which can be regarded, without fear of error, as the mainspring of the whole machine, having, a visible influence on all the parts."

"Without the precepts of hygiene, Epictetus, Socrates, Plato, and the rest preach in vain: all ethics is fruitless for one who lacks his share of temperance; it is the source of all virtues, as intemperance is the source of all vices."

"Such is my system, or rather the truth, unless I am much deceived. It is short and simple. Dispute it now who will."

"[T]here is every reason to believe that we were gregarious animals before we became men... And a belief in the eject—some sort of recognition of a kindred consciousness in one's fellow beings—is clearly a condition of gregarious action among animals so highly developed as to be called conscious at all."

"It may not be logical, but to my imagination, it is far more satisfactory to look at the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves, the larvæ of the Ichneumidæ feeding within the live bodies of their prey, cats playing with mice, otters and cormorants with living fish, not as instincts specially given by the Creator, but as very small parts of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic bodies —Multiply, Vary, let the strongest Live and the weakest Die."

"Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence, and yet can not learn music. What is the reason for this... would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so."

"In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale."

"Stahl... has wished to persuade us that the soul is the sole cause of all our movements. But this is to speak as a fanatic and not as a philosopher."

"[I]f the nerve-tension which causes pain occasions also the fever by which the distracted mind loses its will-power, and if, conversely, the mind too much excited, disturbs the body... if an agitation rouses my desire and my ardent wish for what, a moment ago, I cared nothing about, and if in their turn certain brain impressions excite the same longing and the same desires, then why should we regard as double what is manifestly one being? In vain you fall back on the power of the will, since for one order that the will gives, it bows a hundred times to the yoke. ...[A]s the power of the will is exercised by means of the nerves, it is likewise limited by them"

"Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence, and yet can not learn music. What is the reason for this... would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so. ...I should take it in the condition of the pupils of Amman, that is to say, I should not want it to be too young or too old... Would not Amman too have passed for mad if he had boasted that he could instruct scholars like his in so short a time, before he had happily accomplished the feat? ...Amman's discoveries are certainly of a much greater value; he has freed men from the instinct to which they seemed to be condemned, and has given them ideas, intelligence, or in a word, a soul which they would never have had. What greater power than this!"

"Should we... be astonished that philosophers have always had in mind the health of the body, to preserve the health of the soul, that Pythagoras gave rules for the diet as carefully. as Plato forbade wine? The regime suited to the body is always the one with which sane physicians think they must begin, when it is a question of forming the mind, and of instructing it in the knowledge of truth and virtue; but these are vain words in the disorder of illness, and in the tumult of the senses."

"One need only read the "Institutions of Medicine" by Boerhaave to see what laborious and enticing systems this great man was obliged to invent, by the labor of his mighty genius, through failure to admit that there is so wonderful a force in all bodies."

"Willis and Perrault, minds of a more feeble stamp, but careful observers of nature seem to have preferred to suppose a soul generally extended over the whole body, instead of the principle which we are describing."

"What more do we know of our destiny than of our origin? Let us then submit to an invincible ignorance on which our happiness depends."

"Full of humanity, this man will love human character even in his enemies. He will pity the wicked without hating them... [as] mis-made men. ...[T]he materialist, convinced, in spite of the protests of his vanity, that he is but a machine or an animal, will not maltreat his kind... he will not wish to do to others what he would not want them to do to him."

"Let us not lose ourselves in the infinite, for we are not made to have the least idea thereof, and are absolutely unable to get back to the origin of things."

"[W]ho can be sure that the reason for man's existence is not simply the fact that he exists? Perhaps... simply that he must live and die, like the mushrooms which appear from day to day, or like those flowers which border the ditches and cover the walls."

"[I]t does not matter for our peace of mind, whether matter be eternal or have been created, whether there be or be not a God. How foolish to torment ourselves so much about things which we can not know, and which would not make us any happier even were we to gain knowledge about them!"

"I do not mean to call in question the existence of a supreme being; on the contrary it seems to me that the greatest degree of probability is in favor of this belief. But since the existence of this being goes no further than that of any other toward proving the need of worship, it is a theoretic truth with very little practical value."

"Nature has created us solely to be happy—yes, all of us from the crawling worm to the eagle lost in the clouds."

"[S]ince... religion does not imply exact honesty, we are authorized by the same reasons to think that atheism does not exclude it."

"[T]o destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God—I mean, nature."

"[W]hat is there absurd in thinking that beings, almost as perfect machines as our selves, are, like us, made to understand and to feel nature? ...Man is not moulded from a costlier clay; nature has used but one dough, and has merely varied the leaven."

"Such is the chaos and the continuous quick succession of our ideas: they drive each other away even as one wave yields to another. Therefore, if imagination does not... maintain a kind of equilibrium... to keep its attention for a while... and to prevent itself from contemplating prematurely another object—[unless the imagination does all this], it will never be worthy of the fine name of judgment. ...it will create orators, musicians, painters, poets, but never a single philosopher."

"[T]here are a thousand hereditary vices and virtues which are transmitted from parents to children..."

"[I]f attention, that key or mother of the sciences, does not do its part, imagination can do little more than run over and skim its objects."

"If one is known as having little judgment and much imagination, this means that the imagination has been left too much alone, has... occupied most of the time in looking at itself in the mirror of its sensations... more impressed by images than by their truth or their likeness."

"See that bird on the bough: it seems always ready to fly away. Imagination is like the bird... [T]he soul pursues it, often in vain: it must expect to regret the loss of that which it has not quickly enough seized and fixed. Thus, imagination, the true image of time, is being ceaselessly destroyed and renewed."

"[T]here is so much pleasure in doing good, in recognizing and appreciating what one receives, so much satisfaction in practising virtue, in being gentle, humane, kind, charitable, compassionate and generous (for this one word includes all the virtues), that I consider as sufficiently punished any one who is unfortunate enough not to have been born virtuous."

"The weight of the universe therefore far from crushing a real atheist does not even shake him. All these evidences of a creator, repeated thousands and thousands of times... Such is the pro and the con, and the summary of those fine arguments that will eternally divide the philosophers. I do not take either side."Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites." [It is not for us to settle such weighty disputes among you. --from Virgil--]"

"If one's organism is an advantage, and the preeminent advantage, and the source of all others, education is the second. The best made brain would be a total loss without it... But if the brain is at the same time well organized and well educated, it is a fertile soil, well sown, that brings forth a hundredfold what it has received... and takes in easily an astounding number of objects, in order to deduce from them a long chain of consequences, which are again but new relations, produced by a comparison with the first, to which the soul finds a perfect resemblance. Such is... the generation of intelligence."

"Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem... Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue have theirs."

"I say of truth in general what M. de Fontenelle says of certain truths in particular, that we must sacrifice it in order to remain on good terms with society. ...The Cartesians would here in vain make an onset upon me with their innate ideas. I certainly would not give myself a quarter of the trouble that M. Locke took, to attack such chimeras. In truth, what is the use of writing a ponderous volume to prove a doctrine which became an axiom three thousand years ago?"

"The more the imagination or the poorest talent is exercised, the more it gains in embonpoint... and the larger it grows. It becomes sensitive, robust, broad, and capable of thinking. The best of organisms has need of this exercise."

"By the imagination, by its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on living and ruddy flesh, by the imagination the sciences flourish, the arts are adorned, the wood speaks, the echoes sigh, the rocks weep, marble breathes, and all inanimate objects gain life. It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets. ...it can not reflect on what it has mechanically conceived, without thus being judgment itself."

"Man's preeminent advantage is his organism. ...Only through nature do we have any good qualities; to her we owe all that we are."

"According to the principles which we have laid down, and which we consider true; he who has the most imagination should be regarded as having the most intelligence or genius, for all these words are synonymous; and again, only by a shameful abuse [of terms] do we think that we are saying different things, when we are merely using different words, different sounds, to which no idea or real distinction is attached."

"One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason."

"The soul follows the progress of the body, as it does the progress of education."

"I should prefer an intelligent man without an education, if he were still young enough, to a man badly educated. A badly trained mind is like an actor whom the provinces have spoiled."

"The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. ...[W]e catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc... the body of the spectator mechanically imitates, in spite of himself, all the motions of a good mimic."

"[A] brilliant man is his own best company, unless he can find other company of the same sort. In the society of the unintelligent, the mind grows rusty for lack of exercise..."

"[I]magination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul."