404 definitions
The book's index
Ethics
231 concepts · 404 definitions
- abasement1
- accident1
- acquiescence2
- action2
- adequate ideas1
- afterlife1
- agreement1
- akrasia1
- ambition3
- animal1
- anxiety1
- argument from ignorance1
- association1
- avarice1
- bad1
- beauty1
- Being1
- Blessedness4
- body7
- bondage1
- Buridan's ass1
- causa sui1
- cause2
- certainty2
- character1
- charity1
- childhood1
- circle1
- clarity1
- common notion1
- company1
- compassion1
- confidence1
- confused idea1
- confusion1
- contingency4
- controversy1
- courage1
- crowd1
- death3
- deception1
- dejection2
- desire3
- distance1
- dream1
- duration3
- education1
- emotion6
- end1
- envy1
- error2
- eternity3
- evil4
- excellence1
- existence4
- explanation1
God (n.) loves no one and hates no one, strictly speaking, for he feels neither joy nor sorrow.
God (n.) as ruler of the universe was inferred by people who found conveniences they had not made and concluded that some other being had made them for human use.
God (n.) is the one being no one can hate — and the love of him can never turn into hate.
God (n.) loves himself with an infinite intellectual love.
Mind (n.) is the idea of the body — of this body, actually existing, and of nothing else.
Mind (n.) is not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
Mind (n.) and body are one and the same individual, conceived now under thought, now under extension.
Mind (n.) surpasses other minds as its body surpasses other bodies in doing and undergoing many things at once.
Reason (n.) sees things under a certain form of eternity — not as contingent but as necessary, and without any relation to time.
Reason (n.) does not govern every man because God lacked no material for any degree of perfection, from the highest down to the lowest.
Reason (n.) wins in the long run: its emotions attach to what is always present and never change, so the passions, which need their absent objects to keep going, must bend to it little by little.
Reason (n.) is time-blind: what it grasps, it feels equally whether the thing is past, present or future.
Freedom (n.) is the feeling of men conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes that determine them.
Freedom (n.) from birth would leave men, so long as they remained free, with no conception of good and evil at all.
Freedom (n.) in God cannot mean the power to stop what follows from his nature, any more than he could stop a triangle's angles from equalling two right angles.
Freedom (n.) is greater under common law than in solitude: the rational man is freer as a citizen than as a hermit.
The Body (n.) is not a stuff but a ratio: a fixed proportion of motion and rest among its parts — keep the ratio and you keep the body.
The Body (n.) differs from body only in motion and rest, speed and slowness — never in substance.
The Body (n.) capable of the greatest number of activities goes with a mind whose greatest part is eternal — immortality is earned through a versatile body.
The Body (n.) is known to its own mind only through the ways it is affected; the mind has no direct acquaintance with it.
Virtue (n.) and power are the same thing.
Virtue (n.) is itself happiness and perfect freedom; to expect God to decorate it with rewards is to treat it as the direst slavery endured.
Virtue (n.) would still come first even if we had never learned the mind is eternal; it does not need immortality to be worth it.
Virtue (n.) grows with how hard you seek your own advantage; neglecting yourself is not humility but lack of power.
Emotion (n.) cannot be argued away; it can only be beaten by a contrary emotion that is stronger.
Emotion (n.) of any kind can be understood clearly, at least in part — so no one is wholly at the mercy of his feelings.
Emotion (n.) obeys us in proportion as we know it.
Emotion (n.) are natural phenomena like any other, and show nature's power and ingenuity as fully as the things we admire.
Good (n.) is no quality in things: music is good for the melancholy, bad for the mourner, and neither for the deaf.
Good (n.) as a goal God aims at sets something above God, destiny under another name, and a God of sheer fiat is less far from the truth.
Good (n.) was the name for whatever served health and the worship of God; bad, for whatever got in the way.
Good (n.) means nothing grander than what we certainly know to be useful to us.
Love (n.) caused by anything but freedom of soul — bodily beauty, say — readily turns into hate, unless, worse, it is a kind of madness.
Love (n.) for something eternal is the only love we can truly come into possession of, free of the faults of ordinary love, and able to grow until it fills the mind.
Love (n.) dies with the body — all except intellectual love, which alone is eternal.
Love (n.) is joy hitched to the thought of an outside cause — unhitch the joy from that thought and the love itself is destroyed.
Imagination (n.) contains no error in itself; the mind errs only for lack of the idea that rules out what it imagines.
Imagination (n.) survives the truth: know the sun's real distance, and you will still see it hanging two hundred feet away.
Imagination (n.) of things known to be absent is no fault but a power of the mind — free, if it depends on the mind's own nature.
Imagination (n.) as knowledge of the first kind is the only source of falsity, while knowledge of the second and third kinds is necessarily true.