Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Those are solitary instances which exhibit the nature under investigation in subjects which have nothing in common with other subjects except that nature; or, again, which do not exhibit the nature under investigation in subjects which resemble other subjects in every respect in not having that nature.

But do we pretend to be acquainted with the nature of the human soul and the nature of an idea, or the aptitude of the one to produce the other?

Nature, like a careful gardener, thus takes her seeds from a bed of a particular nature, and drops them in another equally well fitted for them.

For example, let the nature proposed be consistency, or the nature of that which determines its own figure, opposed to which is fluidity.

APHORISMS [BOOK ONE] I Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature.

Why torture your brain to justify the course of nature upon suppositions, which, for aught you know, may be entirely imaginary, and of which there are to be found no traces in the course of nature?

But to resolve nature into abstractions is less to our purpose than to dissect her into parts; as did the school of Democritus, which went further into nature than the rest.

Now some of the above-mentioned notions (as that of the nature of the elements, of the nature of heavenly bodies, of rarity) are vague and ill defined.

Instances, therefore, which are useful in this regard are of no despicable power, but have a certain prerogative. But great caution must here be employed lest the human understanding, after having discovered many of those particular forms and thereupon established partitions or divisions of the nature in question, be content to rest therein, and instead of proceeding to the legitimate discovery of the great form, take it for granted that the nature from its very roots is manifold and divided, and so reject and put aside any further union of the nature, as a thing of superfluous subtlety and verging on mere abstraction.

Again, let the nature in question be the transitory nature of flame and its instantaneous extinction.