170 definitions
The book's index
Selections from the Principles of Philosophy
142 concepts · 170 definitions
- 21
- accident1
- action1
- air1
- anthropocentrism1
- appetite1
- Aristotle1
- artifice1
- assent1
- atom1
- authority1
- belief1
- boat1
- body3
- book1
- cavity1
- certainty2
- certitude1
- childhood1
- Chimera1
- cipher1
- clarity1
- clear1
- clear and distinct perception1
- coherence1
- color3
- confusion1
- conservation1
- contradiction1
- courage1
- creation1
- creator1
- Democritus1
- disciple1
- distance1
- doubt3
- duration1
- education1
- emptiness2
- error3
- eternal truth1
- existence1
- experiment1
- explanation2
- finitude1
- firmament1
- fortune1
- free will2
- God1
- goodness1
- gravity1
- guess1
- hardness1
- haste1
- highest good1
- human body1
- hunger1
- hypothesis1
- idea of the infinite1
- imagination2
- infancy1
- infinite1
- infinity1
- innate idea1
- joy2
- judgment1
- language1
- life1
- light2
- love of truth1
Error (n.) from a false principle is a road walked backward: the more care and speed you put into following it, the farther you get from the truth.
Error (n.) is never willed, yet everyone willingly assents to things in which, unknown to him, error lurks.
Error (n.) is, to God, a mere negation, but to us a privation — and it comes less from our understanding than from our will.
The Body (n.) is a machine built by nature to move itself, turning at random toward what helps and away from what harms — and only then does the mind notice that there is a world outside it.
The Body (n.) is not hard, heavy or coloured at bottom; strip away all these and it remains entire — it is extension alone.
The Body (n.) is divisible, and divisibility is imperfection — which is why God cannot be a body.
Color (n.) in objects is only an unknown something that produces in us a vivid sensation; admitting the ignorance guards against error, forgetting it breeds error.
Color (n.) seems to sit out there on the thing, exactly like our sensation of it — a childhood habit so old that it feels certain.
Color (n.) touches only one sense and leaves only a confused image, while shape and motion are confirmed by touch, sight and hearing together.
Doubt (n.) is a mode of willing, not of perceiving — like desiring, refusing, affirming and denying.
Doubt (n.) is a method: treat doubtful things as false, so that what is certain stands out more clearly.
Doubt (n.) things should be treated as false, so that what is certain stands out more clearly.
Emptiness (n.) never means “containing nothing” — only lacking what we expected: a pitcher full of air, a fish-pond full of water but no fish.
Emptiness (n.) never means "containing nothing" — only lacking what we expected: a pitcher full of air, a fish-pond full of water but no fish.
Prejudice (n.) is a childhood belief we later forget we accepted unexamined, so it masquerades as sense-evidence or nature's own teaching.
A Prejudice (n.) survives its refutation: we know the stars are vast, and still can hardly stop imagining them tiny.
Sensation (n.) is known clearly as long as we take it for a thought; the moment we place it out in the world, we have no idea what we are talking about.
Sensation (n.) need not resemble its cause any more than a word resembles a tempest: a mere motion can raise any thought in the mind.
An Explanation (n.) by "first matter, substantial forms" and a grand array of qualities is backward — each is harder to understand than all it claims to explain.
An Explanation (n.) that is merely verbal — supposing something unintelligible to give a merely apparent account — is worse than positing invisible bodies we cannot sense.
Free will (n.) is the one defense left against even an all-powerful deceiver: we can always refuse our assent.
Free will (n.) is the thing we comprehend most clearly of all, even though we cannot see how God's foreordaining leaves it free.
Joy (n.) can be nothing but well-tempered blood dilating the heart and tugging tiny nerves — and any other cause moving those nerves the same way gives the same joy.
Joy (n.) of the intellectual kind is the mind rejoicing at good news before the body joins in — the joy the Stoics allowed even their passionless sage.