第66章

Since I am a being with extension and thought, my extension and my thought are therefore necessary productions of this Being.It is evident to me that I cannot give myself either extension or thought.I have therefore received both from this necessary Being.

Can He give me what He has not? I have intelligence and I am in space;therefore He is intelligent, and He is in space.

To say that this eternal Being, this omnipotent God, has from all time necessarily filled the universe with His productions, is not to deprive Him of His liberty; on the contrary, for liberty is only the power of acting.

God has always acted to the full; therefore God has always made use of the fullness of His liberty.

The liberty that is called liberty of indifference is a phrase without idea, an absurdity; for it would be determination without reason;it would be an effect without a cause.Therefore, God cannot have this so-called liberty which is a contradiction in terms.He has therefore always acted through this same necessity which makes His existence.

It is therefore impossible for the world to be without God, it is impossible for God to be without the world.

This world is filled with beings who succeed each other, therefore God has always produced beings who succeed each other.

These preliminary assertions are the basis of the ancient Oriental philosophy and of that of the Greeks.One must except Democritus and Epicurus, whose corpuscular philosophy combated these dogmas.But let us remark that the Epicureans relied on an entirely erroneous natural philosophy, and that the metaphysical system of all the other philosophers holds good with all the systems of natural philosophy.The whole of nature, excepting the vacuum, contradicts Epicurus; and no phenomenon contradicts the philosophy which I have just explained.WelI, is not a philosophy which is in accord with all that passes in nature, and which contents the most careful minds, superior to all other non-revealed systems?

After the assertions of the ancient philosophers, which I have reconciled as far as has been possible for me, what is left to us? a chaos of doubts and chimeras.I do not think that there has ever been a philosopher with a system who did not at the end of his life avow that he had wasted his time.It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to mankind than the inventors of syllogisms : the man who invented the shuttle surpasses with a vengeance the man who imagined innate ideas.Philosophical Dictionary: Prejudices PREJUDICES PREJUDICE is an opinion without judgment.Thus all over the world do people inspire children with all the opinions they desire, before the children can judge.

There are some universal, necessary prejudices, which even make virtue.

In all countries children are taught to recognize a rewarding and revenging God; to respect and love their father and their mother; to look on theft as a crime, selfish lieing as a vice, before they can guess what is a vice and what a virtue.

There are then some very good prejudices; they are those which are ratified by judgment when one reasons.

Sentiment is not a simple prejudice; it is something much stronger.

A mother does not love her son because she has been told she must love him; she cherishes him happily in spite of herself.It is not through prejudice that you run to the help of an unknown child about to fall into a precipice, or be eaten by a beast.

But it is through prejudice that you will respect a man clad in certain clothes, walking gravely, speaking likewise.Your parents have told you that you should bow before this man; you respect him before knowing whether he merits your respect: you grow in years and in knowledge; you perceive that this man is a charlatan steeped in arrogance, self-interest and artifice;you despise what you revered, and the prejudice cedes to judgment.Through prejudice you have believed the fables with which your childhood was cradled;you have been told that the Titans made war on the gods, and Venus was amorous of Adonis; when you are twelve you accept these fables as truths;when you are twenty you look on them as ingenious allegories.

Let us examine briefly the different sorts of prejudices, so as to set our affairs in order.We shall be perhaps like those who, at the time of Law's system, perceived that they had calculated imaginary riches.PREJUDICES OF THE SENSESIs it not strange that our eyes always deceive us, even when we have very good sight, and that on the contrary our ears do not deceive us? Let your well-informed ear hear " You are beautiful, I love you"; it is quite certain that someone has not said " I hate you, you are ugly ": but you see a smooth mirror; it is demonstrated that you are mistaken, it has a very uneven surface.You see the sun as about two feet in diameter; it is demonstrated that it is a million times bigger than the earth.