ellauri106.html on line 543: ... Her parents (Clairen kai) were simple people in the grips of a pipe dream that they could not begin to articulate or rationally defend but for which they were zealously willing to sacrifice friends, relatives, business, the good will of neighbors, even their own sanity, even their children’s sanity....
ellauri158.html on line 694: Hence also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together. Consider, I pray you, the result: among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, &c.: so they declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at some wrong done to them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God´s judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes. There are other reasons (which I need not mention here) besides mathematics, which might have caused men´s minds to be directed to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge of the truth.
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 85: The proposition, nothing comes from nothing, nothing is just nothing, owes its particular importance to its opposition to becoming in general and hence also to the creation of the world out of nothing. Those who zealously hold firm to the proposition, nothing is just nothing, are unaware that in so doing they are subscribing to the abstract pantheism of the Eleatics and essentially also to that of Spinoza. The philosophical view that accepts as principle that being is only being, nothing only nothing, deserves the name of 'system of identity'; this abstract identity is the essence of pantheism. - Hegel, 'Becoming', in 'The Science of Logic', 1812. [Kay Sage, 'Arithmetic of Breaking Wind', 1947]
xxx/ellauri167.html on line 492: “I should be very happy in your Excellency’s good Opinion, that the Contagion of Illuminatism or Jacobinism had not yet reached this Country; but when I consider the anarchical and seditious Spirit, that shewed itself in the United States from the Time M. Genet and Fauchet (who certainly is of the Order) arrived in this Country and propagated their seditious Doctrines, which the illuminated Doctor from Birmingham has been zealously employed to strengthen, I confess I cannot divest myself of my Suspicions: yet I trust that the Alwise and Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe will so dispose the Minds of the People of these United States that true Religion and righteous Government may remain the Privileges of this Nation!
4