“I cannot conceive, how a body, destitute of understanding and sense, truly so called, can moderate and determine its own motions; especially so as to make them conformable to laws that it has no knowledge of.”

"A Free Inquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature" Sect.1 ibid.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I cannot conceive, how a body, destitute of understanding and sense, truly so called, can moderate and determine its ow…" by Robert Boyle?

Robert Boyle21

English natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and invent… 1627–1691

Related quotes

“Now, on other hand, as President, I cannot just impose my will on Congress -- the Congress of the United States -- even though sometimes I wish I could. The legislative branch has its own powers and its own prerogatives, and so they check my power and balance my power. I appoint some of our judges, but I cannot tell them how to rule, because every person in America -- from a child living in poverty to me, the President of the United States -- is equal under the law. And a judge can make a determination as to whether or not I am upholding the law or breaking the law. And I am fully accountable to that law.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012, Yangon University Speech (November 2012)

“I think all aesthetic judgments—all the aesthetic choices we are making—are moral choices. They cannot escape the moral dimension in the broader sense. It has to relate to the philosophical understanding of who we are and how so-called “art and culture” functions in today’s world.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Escape from Propaganda, 2009

“Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Organic and Inorganic
Source: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter

“I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81

“The frustration mainly comes from trying to understand what they really want. Also, you cannot understand how can such a large nation maintain its so-called stability by doing something very unlawful. I mean, how can they possibly manage to stabilize the whole social condition by not [acting with] justice and fairness.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, You’re There but You’re Not Existing, 2012

“How can you reach the womb of the Abyss to make it fruitful? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: How can you reach the womb of the Abyss to make it fruitful? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation.
No form of instruction exists, no Savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened.

“The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

“Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Organic and Inorganic
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter
Context: Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals’ and plants’ business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.

“You see," said my Teacher, "how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understands them at all, he accepts them as his own — for he cannot conceive of any other except himself — and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 20. How the Sphere Encouraged Me in a Vision

“Diogenes the cynic, seeing one of the so-called freedmen pluming himself, while many heartily congratulated him, marveled at the absence of reason and discernment. “A man might as well,” he said, “proclaim that one of his servants became a grammarian, a geometrician, or musician, when he has no idea whatever of the art.” For as the proclamation cannot make them men of knowledge, so neither can it make them free.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

157
Every Good Man is Free

“I cannot conceive, how a body, destitute of understanding and sense, truly so called, can moderate and determine its own motions; especially so as to make them conformable to laws that it has no knowledge of.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Robert Boyle21

Related quotes

Related topics