Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
To explain this problem, one of the profoundest in philosophy, M. Lamennais at one time denies evil, at another makes God the author of evil, and at still another seeks outside of God a first cause which is not God, an amalgam of entites more or less incoherent, borrowed from Plato, Proclus, Spinoza, I might say even from all philosophers.
When M. Edgar Quinet declares that France suffers and declines because there is an ANTAGONISM of men and of interests, he declares an entite; for the problem is to discover the cause of this antagonism. When M. Lamennais, in thunder tones, preaches self-sacrifice and love, he proclaims two entites; for we need to know on what conditions self-sacrifice and love can spring up and exist.
Suppress, as useless entites, the three persons in God; then, starting directly from heat, light, and electro-magnetism, which, according to the author, are the three original fluids, the three primary external manifestations of Will, Intelligence, and Love, you have a materialistic and atheistic cosmogony. On the contrary, are you wedded to spiritualism?
I find everywhere only vain and puerile entites; nowhere do I discover an idea. I will explain the meaning of this word entite, new, without doubt, to most of you. By entite is generally understood a substance which the imagination grasps, but which is incognizable by the senses and the reason.
Thus the SOPORIFIC POWER of opium, of which Sganarelle speaks, and the PECCANT HUMORS of ancient medicine, are entites. The entite is the support of those who do not wish to confess their ignorance. It is incomprehensible; or, as St. Paul says, the argumentum non apparentium. In philosophy, the entite is often only a repetition of words which add nothing to the thought.
Hence his horror of positive ideas, his feeble powers of analysis, his pronounced taste for indefinite analogies, verbal abstractions, hypothetical generalities, in short, all sorts of entites. Further, the entire life of M. Lamennais is conclusive proof of his anti-philosophical genius.
In short, "L'Esquisse," judged as a system, and divested of all which its author borrows from previous systems, is a commonplace work, whose method consists in constantly explaining the known by the unknown, and in giving entites for abstractions, and tautologies for proofs. Its whole theodicy is a work not of genius but of imagination, a patching up of neo-Platonic ideas.
As for the sovereignty of the people, that is a grosser entite than the sovereignty of reason; it is the entite of entites. In fact, since sovereignty can no more be conceived of outside of the people than outside of reason, it remains to be ascertained who, among the people, shall exercise the sovereignty; and, among so many minds, which shall be the sovereigns.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking