the life of man, etc. Flame cannot exist without air;
therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other.

Since everything then is cause and effect, dependent and supporting,
mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though
imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most
different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without
knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in
detail.

[The eternity of things in itself or in God must also astonish our
brief duration. The fixed and constant immobility of nature, in
comparison with the continual change which goes on within us, must have
the same effect.]

And what completes our incapability of knowing things, is the fact that
they are simple, and that we are composed of two opposite natures,
different in kind, soul and body. For it is impossible that our rational
part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are
simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of
things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows
itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself.

So if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are
composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly things which are
simple, whether spiritual or corporeal. Hence it comes that almost all
philosophers have confused ideas of things, and speak of material things
in spiritual terms, and of spiritual things in material terms. For they
say boldly that bodies have a tendency to fall, that they seek after
their centre, that they fly from destruction, that they fear the void,
that they have inclinations, sympathies, antipathies, all of which
attributes pertain only to mind. And in speaking of minds, they consider
them as in a place, and attribute to them movement from one place to
another; and these are qualities which belong only to bodies.

Instead of receiving the ideas of these things in their purity, we
colour them with our own qualities, and stamp with our composite being
all the simple things which we contemplate.

Who would not think, seeing us compose all things of mind and body, but
that this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is the very
thing we least understand. Man is to himself the most wonderful object
in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the
mind is, and least of all how