24 APR 2012 by ideonexus

 Species Go Through the Same Stages as Individual Living B...

Just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, an individual comes into being, so to speak, grows, remains in being, declines and passes on, will it not be the same for entire species? If our faith did not teach us that animals left the Creator's hands just as they now appear and, if it were permitted to entertain the slightest doubt as to their beginning and their end, may not a philosopher, left to his own conjectures, suspect that, from time immemorial, animal life had its own constituent e...
Folksonomies: religion philosophy
Folksonomies: religion philosophy
  1  notes

They grow, change, and die.

18 MAR 2012 by ideonexus

 Society Needs People Who Are Concerned With Ideas, Not Th...

Humanity certainly needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without the slightest doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organised society should assure to such...
Folksonomies: science society funding
Folksonomies: science society funding
  1  notes

Quoting Marie Curie on a class of people who are not materialist, but society should support them so they need not be concerned with materialism.

20 JUL 2011 by ideonexus

 I Think; Therefore, I Am

I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What, then, can be esteemed as true? Perhaps nothing at all, unless that there is nothing in the world that is certain. But how can I know there is not something different from those things that I have just...
  1  notes

Descartes most important contribution to philosophical thought.