“For how shall the finite comprehend the infinite?”
George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854) Ch. 13. Clarke and Spinoza, pp. 216-217. https://books.google.com/books?id=DqwAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA216
Context: It is not possible, I think, to rise from the perusal of the arguments of Clark and Spinoza without a deep conviction of the futility of all endeavors to establish, entirely à priori, the existence of an Infinite Being, His attributes, and His relation to the universe. The fundamental principle of all such speculations, viz. that whatever we can clearly conceive, must exist, fails to accomplish its end, even when its truth is admitted. For how shall the finite comprehend the infinite? Yet must the possibility of such conception be granted, and in something more than the sense of a mere withdrawal of the limits of phænomal existence, before any solid ground can be established for the knowledge, à priori, of things infinite and eternal.
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Baruch Spinoza 210
Dutch philosopher 1632–1677Related quotes
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Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)
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Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.373
“The Infinite alone exists and is Real; the finite is passing and false.”
43 : Toys in the Divine Game, p. 70.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)
Context: The Infinite alone exists and is Real; the finite is passing and false.
The Original Whim in the Beyond caused the apparent descent of the Infinite into the realm of the seeming finite. This is the Divine Mystery and Divine Game in which Infinite Consciousness for ever plays on all levels of finite consciousness.
“Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.”
“The world's nature is a harmonious compound of infinite and finite elements”
The Life of Pythagoras (1919)
Context: Fragment 1. (Stob.21.7; Diog.#.8.85) The world's nature is a harmonious compound of infinite and finite elements; similar is the totality of the world in itself, and of all it contains.
b. All beings are necessarily finite or infinite, or simultaneously finite and infinite; but they could not all be infinite only.
Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.115
The Vocation of Man (1800), Faith