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Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”
Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.
There are few things, that are incapable of being represented by a fiction.
By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”
The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however—for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”
Unlike the Alchemists, who see angels, demons, miracles, and divine essences everywhere, I recognize nothing in the world but bodies and minds. And nothing in bodies but certain observable quantities such as magnitude, figure, situation, and changes in these. Everything else is merely said, not understood; it is sounds without meaning. Nor can anything in the world be understood clearly unless it is reduced to these. Unless physical things can be explained by mechanical laws, God cannot, even if He chooses, reveal and explain nature to us.
