for example my very steel

cannot exist without air; therefore, to understand the
one, we must understand the other.

Since everything, then, is cause and effect, dependent and supporting,
mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though
imperceptible chain which binds together things most distant and most
different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing
the whole and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail.

The eternity of things in itself or in God must also astonish our brief
duration. The fixed and constant immobility of nature, in comparison with
the continual change which goes on within us, must have the same effect.

And what completes our incapability of knowing things is the fact that they
are simple and that we are composed of two opposite natures, different in
kind, soul and body. For it is impossible that our rational part should be
other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal,
this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being
nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is
impossible to imagine how it should know itself.

So, if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are
composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly things which are
simple, whether spiritual or corporeal. Hence it comes that almost all
philosophers have confused ideas of things, and speak of material things in
spiritual terms, and of spiritual things in material terms. For they say
boldly that bodies have a tendency to fall, that they seek after their
centre, that they fly fro


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