Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX, 1
“By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid Art,
Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow.”
Annus Mirabilis (1667), stanza 155.
Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Introduction, p. xvii
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Compensation
Context: The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
"Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy" : Rule I
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 37
On First Principles, Bk. 2, ch. 11; vol. 1, p. 148
On First Principles
Final Speech at the Trial of Warren Hastings, 28 May 1794; in The Works of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, vol. 8 (1877) 5th edition, p. 51
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)
Context: On one side, your lordships have the prisoner declaring that the people have no laws, no rights, no usages, no distinctions of rank, no sense of honor, no property; in short that they are nothing but a herd of slaves to be governed by the arbitrary will of a master. On the other side, we assert that the direct contrary of this is true. And to prove our assertion we have referred you to the institutes of Ghinges Khân and of Tamerlane: we have referred you to the Mahomedan law, which is binding upon all, from the crowned head to the meanest subject; a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned, and most enlightened jurisprudence that perhaps ever existed in the world. We have shown you, that if these parties are to be compared together, it is not the rights of the people which are nothing, but rather the rights of the sovereign which are so. The rights of the people are every thing, as they ought to be in the true and natural order of things.
“Metaphysics is the science of the Absolute or the true nature of things.”
[2009, Logic and Transcendence, World Wisdom, 29, 978-1-933316-73-4]
Spiritual path, Metaphysics
