The Fall Of Human Intellect Quotes

The world is a mountain. Whatever you say, it will echo it back to you. Don't say, "I sang nicely and the mountain echoed an ugly voice!" That is not possible. The human intellect is a place where hesitation and uncertainty take root. There is no way to overcome this hesitation except by falling in love.

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy. And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

The greatest want of the world is the want of men—men who will not be bought or sold, men who in their inmost souls are true and honest, men who do not fear to call sin by its right name, men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole, men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall. But such a character is not the result of accident; it is not due to special favors or endowments of Providence. A noble character is the result of self-discipline, of the subjection of the lower to the higher nature—the surrender of self for the service of love to God and man. The youth need to be impressed with the truth that their endowments are not their own. Strength, time, intellect, are but lent treasures. They belong to God, and it should be the resolve of every youth to put them to the highest use. He is a branch, from which God expects fruit; a steward, whose capital must yield increase; a light, to illuminate the world's darkness. Every youth, every child, has a work to do for the honor of God and the uplifting of humanity.

William Drummond wisely observes: He who cannot reason is a fool; he who will not is a bigot; he who dare not is a slave.

William Shakespeare: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances.

The knowledge that [he] had passed a loveless, institutionalized childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities, helped one to understand him—but not to like him.

Thinking is not something that comes to you naturally like respiration or perspiration. You must devote time and effort to question, reason and build your intellect.

As impulsive actions displace discriminative actions one loses one’s sanity.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

People all over the world blindly follow the routine of their predecessors or mere peer pressure. You accept and do what others have done in the past or what they do at present.

Richness and poverty is actually determined by the equation between the wealth a person possesses and the desires he entertains.

A person with a dull intellect is confused as to his role in the world. He fails to perform his obligatory duties and responsibilities.

The procedure for rehabilitation of the intellect needs to be undertaken by the individual, by the society and educational institutions throughout the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, wisely advises all human beings: It is difficult to find happiness within oneself but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

The pressure of desires never ceases until you find your original Self. In truth, the purpose of human birth is to regain one’s primal nature.

Knowledge has to be drawn out of students. Not thrust into them.

Educational institutions therefore need to maintain an equable balance between acquisition of intelligence and developing an intellect.

The mass of humanity craves indulgence in external objects and beings. People indiscriminately run after sensual pleasures of the world. Few attempt to think, analyse the nature of their pursuits of enjoyment.

It was evidently quite obvious to a powerful intellect like his that the one essential condition for a healthy society was equal distribution of goods - which I suspect is impossible under capitalism. For, when everyone's entitled to get as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, which means that everyone else is poor.

You gain knowledge from teachers and textbooks. But wisdom you attain when your intellect reflects, contemplates upon the knowledge acquired.

Humanity has long disregarded the intellect. People have denied themselves the ability to think, reason independently. That has rendered humans helpless victims of the devastating mind. The once sovereign state of human beings has fallen into abject slavery to the mind’s endless desires and demands.

Due to the paucity of intellect people do not realise that it is through the discipline of regulated abstinence that one can really enjoy the world. Your intellect must constantly check and control indiscriminate indulgence.

The plight of human beings is that they do not know their activities lack the support of thought, reason or judgement. The mass of humanity mechanically follows a routine pattern

To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given, But all his serious thoughts had rest in Heaven. As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form, Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm, Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.

This mingling of life and death, rising and falling is so strange that we cannot even know where we truly are, for our perceptions are so sundered from each other that we can’t tell what is real. On the one hand, we live in a holy agreement with God; when we feel the Divine Presence in our lives, we set our wills, our intellects, our souls, and our strength to following God. Then we hate the arrogant stirrings in our minds, all that causes us to fall away from God, physically and spiritually. But then again, we lose sight of the Divine sweetness, and we fall once more into such darkness that we stumble into all manner of sorrows and troubles. We can only comfort ourselves that we never give our deepest permission for the trouble and sorrow to enter our lives; the strength of Christ our Protector guards our inmost beings. We revolt against the darkness, our minds filled with groaning, enduring the pain and sadness, praying for the time when the Divine Presence will once again be revealed to us. This is the medley of human life: faith and sorrow, insight and darkness, joy and agony, singing in counterpart through our days. But God wants us to know that through it all the Divine Presence is the melody that never changes.

The entire flaw in the Bible is the notion that God is perfect. It represents a failure of imagination on the part of the early scholars. It’s responsible for every impossible theological question as to good and evil with which we’ve been wrestling through the centuries. God is good, however, wondrously good. Yes, God is love. But no creative force is perfect. That’s clear.” “And the Devil? Is there any new intelligence about him?” He regarded me for a moment with just a touch of impatience. “You are such a cynical being,” he whispered. “No, I’m not,” I said. “I honestly want to know. I have a particular interest in the Devil, obviously. I speak of him much more often than I speak of God. I can’t figure out really why mortals love him so much, I mean, why they love the idea of him. But they do.” “Because they don’t believe in him,” David said. “Because a perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God. Imagine, the Devil never learning anything during all this time, never changing his mind about being the Devil. It’s an insult to our intellect, such an idea.” “So what’s your truth behind the lie?” “He’s not purely unredeemable. He’s merely part of God’s plan. He’s a spirit allowed to tempt and try humans. He disapproves of humans, of the entire experiment. See, that was the nature of the Devil’s Fall, as I see it. The Devil didn’t think the idea would work. But the key, Lestat, is understanding that God is matter! God is physical, God is the Lord of Cell Division, and the Devil abhors the excess of letting all this cell division run wild.

Dr. Tom Lawson, so Chief Engineer Lawrence had decided, was an exception to the old saying, “To know all is to forgive all.” The knowledge that the astronomer has passed a loveless, institutionalised childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities helped one to understand him—but not to like him. It was singular bad luck, thought Lawrence, that he was the only scientist within three hundred thousand kilometres who happened to have an infra-red detector, and knew how to use it.

The main factor which determines success or failure in human life is the acquisition of certain powers, for Happiness is just the exercise or putting forth of these in actual living, everything else is secondary and subordinate. These powers arise from the due development of certain natural aptitudes which belong (in various degrees) to human nature as such and therefore to all normal human beings. In their developed form they are known as virtues (the Greek means simply "goodnesses," "perfections," "excellences," or "fitnesses"), some of them are physical, but others are psychical, and among the latter some, and these distinctively or peculiarly human, are "rational," i e, presuppose the possession and exercise of mind or intelligence. These last fall into two groups, which Aristotle distinguishes as Goodnesses of Intellect and Goodnesses of Character. They have in common that they all excite in us admiration and praise of their possessors, and that they are not natural endowments, but acquired characteristics But they differ in important ways. (1) the former are excellences or developed powers of the reason as such—of that in us which sees and formulates laws, rules, regularities systems, and is content in the vision of them, while the latter involve a submission or obedience to such rules of something in us which is in itself capricious and irregular, but capable of regulation, viz our instincts and feelings, (2) the former are acquired by study and instruction, the latter by discipline. The latter constitute "character," each of them as a "moral virtue" (literally "a goodness of character"), and upon them primarily depends the realisation of happiness.

He then gave my many other promises, both from the Old and the New Testament, especially some most precious promises respecting our Lord Jesus Christ. I never can, in words, make any human being understand how precious and true those promises appeared to me. I took them one after the other as infallible truth, the assertions of God who could not lie. They did not seem so much to fall into my intellect as into my heart, to be put within the grasp of the voluntary powers of my mind; and I seized hold of them, appropriated them, and fastened upon them with the grasp of a drowning man.

Clearly, the Fall was not just an isolated act of disobedience that could be quickly mended. Every part of God's good handiwork was marred by the human mutiny. This is why the Reformers described human nature as "totally depraved." They did not mean that human nature is completely corrupted, for in the midst of our sin, we still bear the image of God, just as a child's sweet face shows through smudges of mud and dirt. Total depravity, according to the Reformers, means that every part of our being-intellect, will, emotions, and body-shows the effects of sin. No part remains untouched by the Fall.

Myth #3: Fasting Causes Low Blood Sugar Sometimes people worry that blood sugar will fall very low during fasting and they will become shaky and sweaty. Luckily, this does not actually happen. Blood sugar level is tightly monitored by the body, and there are multiple mechanisms to keep it in the proper range. During fasting, our body begins by breaking down glycogen (remember, that’s the glucose in short-term storage) in the liver to provide glucose. This happens every night as you sleep to keep blood sugars normal as you fast overnight. FASTING ALL-STARS AMY BERGER People who engage in fasting for religious or spiritual purposes often report feelings of extreme clear-headedness and physical and emotional well-being. Some even feel a sense of euphoria. They usually attribute this to achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment, but the truth is much more down-to-earth and scientific than that: it’s the ketones! Ketones are a “superfood” for the brain. When the body and brain are fueled primarily by fatty acids and ketones, respectively, the “brain fog,” mood swings, and emotional instability that are caused by wild fluctuations in blood sugar become a thing of the past and clear thinking is the new normal. If you fast for longer than twenty-four to thirty-six hours, glycogen stores become depleted. The liver now can manufacture new glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis, using the glycerol that’s a by-product of the breakdown of fat. This means that we do not need to eat glucose for our blood glucose levels to remain normal. A related myth is that brain cells can only use glucose for energy. This is incorrect. Human brains, unique amongst animals, can also use ketone bodies—particles that are produced when fat is metabolized—as a fuel source. This allows us to function optimally even when food is not readily available. Ketones provide the majority of the energy we need. Consider the consequences if glucose were absolutely necessary for brain function. After twenty-four hours without food, glucose stored in our bodies in the form of glycogen is depleted. At that point, we’d become blubbering idiots as our brains shut down. In the Paleolithic era, our intellect was our only advantage against wild animals with their sharp claws, sharp fangs, and bulging muscles. Without it, humans would have become extinct long ago. When glucose is not available, the body begins to burn fat and produce ketone bodies, which are able to cross the blood-brain barrier to feed the brain cells. Up to 75 percent of the brain’s energy requirements can be met by ketones. Of course, that means that glucose still provides 25 percent of the brain’s energy requirements. So does this mean that we have to eat for our brains to function?

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose. This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.

This makes a mockery of real science, and its consequences are invariably ridiculous. Quite a few otherwise intelligent men and women take it as an established principle that we can know as true only what can be verified by empirical methods of experimentation and observation. This is, for one thing, a notoriously self-refuting claim, inasmuch as it cannot itself be demonstrated to be true by any application of empirical method. More to the point, though, it is transparent nonsense: most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical. The sciences concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or of what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their methods give them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science because such truths are not, as those findings must always be, susceptible of later theoretical revision; and then there are truths of mathematics that are subject to proof in the most proper sense and so are more irrefutable still. And there is no one single discourse of truth as such, no single path to the knowledge of reality, no single method that can exhaustively define what knowledge is, no useful answers whose range has not been limited in advance by the kind of questions that prompted them. The failure to realize this can lead only to delusions of the kind expressed in, for example, G. G. Simpson’s self-parodying assertion that all attempts to define the meaning of life or the nature of humanity made before 1859 are now entirely worthless, or in Peter Atkins’s ebulliently absurd claims that modern science can “deal with every aspect of existence” and that it has in fact “never encountered a barrier.” Not only do sentiments of this sort verge upon the deranged, they are nothing less than violent assaults upon the true dignity of science (which lies entirely in its severely self-limiting rigor).

Astell insisted women’s minds were better suited to grasp the truth than men’s.210 She wrote that women have an intellectual sensibility informed by both reason and love.211 Love plays a critical role in knowledge, because it draws us toward objects. She argued that when our passion is fixed on God, then our intellects are curious to know God and his creation. Only in this way does the natural world unfold before the human mind, revealing its secrets. By contrast, the intellectual temperament of men falls short of this ideal. Whether by nature or nurture (Astell isn’t decided), men are far more prone to selfishness and, so, capable of producing only distorted truths.212 A case in point: men insist upon women’s inferiority not because they have true insight into women’s nature but rather because they selfishly want women to serve them.

What was the Reformation answer? It said that the root of the trouble sprang from the old and growing Humanism in the Roman Catholic Church, and the incomplete Fall in Aquinas’s theology which set loose an autonomous man. The Reformation accepted the biblical picture of a total Fall. The whole man had been made by God, but now the whole man is fallen, including his intellect and will.

This has led George Marsden to observe that while “Calvinists had maintained that the human mind was blinded in mankind’s Fall from innocence, in the Common Sense version, the intellect seemed to suffer from a slight astigmatism only.”42

Over thousands of years of history, the Western world wrapped a dreamlike fantasy about the nature of Evil around its central religious core. That fantasy had a protagonist, an adversarial personality absolutely dedicated to the corruption of being ... Give it life in the figure of Satan, Lucifer the light bearer. Lucifer's primal temptation and its immediate consequences - he opposed with ambitious aim against the throne and monarchy of God; raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud ... Lucifer, the spirit of reason was the most wondrous angel brought forth from the Void by God. Reason is something alive; it lives in all of us. It's older than any of us; it's best understood as a personality, not a faculty. It has its aims and its temptations and its weaknesses. It flies higher and sees farther than any other spirit. But reason falls in love with itself, and worse, it falls in love with its own productions. It elevates them and worships them as absolutes. ... Lucifer is therefore, the spirit of totalitarianism. It is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories, nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown, but most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with being. Willingness to learn from what you don't know - that is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for being. Totalitarian means everything that needs to be discovered has been discovered. Everything will unfold precisely as planned. All problems will vanish forever once the perfect system is accepted ... Communism was attractive not so much to oppressed workers but to intellectuals, to those whose arrogant, pride and intellect assured them, they were always right.

However weak the position of intuitionism seemed to be after this period of mathematical development, it has recovered by abandoning Kant’s a-priority of space but adhering the more resolutely to the a-priority of time. This neo-intuitionism considers the falling apart of moments of life into qualitatively different parts, to be reunited only while remaining separated by time as the fundamental phenomenon of the human intellect, passing by abstracting from its emotional content into the fundamental phenomenon of mathematical thinking, the intuition of the bare two-oneness. This intuition of two-oneness, the basal intuition of mathematics, creates not only the numbers one and two, but also all finite ordinal numbers, inasmuch as one of the elements of the two-oneness may be thought of as a new two-oneness, which process may be repeated indefinitely; this gives rise still further to the smallest infinite ordinal number ω. Finally this basal intuition of mathematics, in which the connected and the separate, the continuous and the discrete are united, gives rise immediately to the intuition of the linear continuum, i.e., of the “between,“ which is not exhaustible by the interposition of new units and which therefore can never be thought of as a mere collection of units.

We could now be at the mercy of”—he put on a voice-over voice—“‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic’ that could hijack every piece of hardware that has any connection with the global comm networks. In short, everything. Mankind: the complete works. On disk.” “Cheerful bastard, aren’t you?” “Yes, I am! Because the whole goddamn datasphere is meaningless without humans doing things with it.

It is no coincidence that the two primary terms for heaven and hell in Judaism are “Gan Eden” and “Gehinnom.” Gan Eden, as explained above, refers to the four-leveled realm of the intellect, in all its depth and beauty. Gehinnom, on the other hand, takes its name from an infamous valley just outside Jerusalem, a portmanteau of Gei Ben-Hinnom (literally “Valley of the Son of Hinnom”). In this valley, King Ahaz would burn incense to idols, practice witchcraft, and sacrifice his children in fire (II Divrei HaYamim 28:3, 33:6). Putting aside the hokey connotations with which we have saddled these two terms, neither Gan Eden nor Gehinnom bear any connection to the supernatural. On the contrary, they pertain exclusively to this world. Gan Eden—or rather Pardes—is the highest high to which the human intellect may soar, while Gehinnom is the lowest low to which we may fall. But both exist in this world. Elisha ben-Abuya even uses these terms in this very sugya when teaching his disciple Rabbi Meir, “HaShem created righteous, and he created wicked; he created the Gan Eden, and he created Gehinnom” (15a).

humanity learns once again to trust its deeper feminine side, as it is beginning to do, the mind will naturally fall into its own rhythm. This revolution is already underway in the individual. Intuition emerges from the whole so it naturally leads to synthesis, and intuition backed by the intellect is capable of extraordinary things. The fact is that the more you trust in your intuition, the more integrated your life becomes. Your relationships open up and become softer, the path of your destiny is made increasingly clear and events move more smoothly, as though the entire universe were supporting you. This is of course exactly what is occurring.

Dropout Scientist (The Sonnet) I am a scientist who doesn't have a degree, I am a poet who has no control over words. I am a philosopher who has no intellect whatsoever, I am a monk with no idea, what it means to be religious. If I am being honest, I have no clue what I am, And I know quite well that you do not know either. But believe you me my friend, one day in sheer awe, Your descendants will come up with the rightful answer. In my 30 years of life, I've traveled quite a distance, Which will take the world at least a millennium to cover. That's why archaic designations fall short to define life, No designation is qualified to define a being beyond border. My faith is humanity, my reason is humanity, my love is humanity. I am but a glimpse of the future, without coldness and rigidity.

Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which (as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The skeptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

Lo and behold, while many believed confidently and with fanatical certainty that the procession would end the plague, the death toll went up the next day, in every social class and in every part of the city. It rose so suddenly and so steeply that no one could mistake the cause, or the occasion, for anything other than the procession itself. But, oh, the incredible deadly power of a common prejudice! The assembly of so many people, and for so long, was not blamed. Nor was the infinite multiplication of casual contacts. The blame was laid squarely on the ease with which the anointers had been able to carry out their evil plan on a large scale. The rumor was that they had mingled with the crowd, infecting as many people as possible with their unguent. But that did not seem an adequate or appropriate explanation for the death of so many people, across every social class. Apparently not even the eyes most keen on identifying suspicious behavior (and misinterpreting it) had caught a glimpse of unguent smears or stains of any kind on the walls or anywhere else. So to explain this turn of events, they had to fall back on the other venerable myth of poisonous malignant powders that the scientific community of Europe believed in those days. Rumor had it that these powders had been sprinkled along the streets and especially at the places where the procession stopped, thus sticking to the hems of clothing and to the bare feet of those who had walked in the crowd that day. “Hence on the same day of the procession, piety could be seen clashing with evil, perfidy with honesty, and loss with gain,” according to one contemporary writer.[*4] In truth, it was feeble human intellect clashing with its own delusions.

They are the most disagreeable of people. … Their insincerity? Can you not feel a sense of disgust at the arrogant presumption of superiority of these people? Superiority of intellect! Then, when it comes to practice, down they fall with a wallop not only to the level of ordinary human beings but to a level which is even far below the average.

[Neo-intuitionism] considers the falling aparts of moments of life into qualitatively different parts, to be reunited only while remaining separated by time, as the fundamental phenomenon of the human intellect, passing by abstracting from its emotional content into the fundamental phenomenon of mathematical thinking, the intuition of the bare two-oneness. This intuition of two-oneness, the basal intuition of mathematics, creates not only the numbers one and two, but also all finite ordinal numbers, inasmuch as one of the elements of the two-oneness may be thought of as a new two-oneness, which process may be repeated indefinitely.

Neointuitionism considers the falling apart of moments of life into qualitatively different parts, to be reunited only while remaining separated by time, as the fundamental phenomenon of the human intellect, passing by abstracting from its emotional content into the fundamental phenomenon of mathematical thinking, the intuition of the bare two-oneness. This intuition of two-oneness, the basal intuition of mathematics, creates not only the numbers one and two, but also all finite ordinal numbers, inasmuch as one of the elements of the two-oneness may be thought of as a new twooneness, which process may be repeated indefinitely; this gives rise still further to the smallest infinite ordinal ω. Finally this basal intuition of mathematics, in which the connected and the separate, the continuous and the discrete are united, gives rise immediately to the intuition of the linear continuum, i.e., of the “between”, which is not exhaustible by the interposition of new units and which can therefore never be thought of as a mere collection of units. In this way the apriority of time does not only qualify the properties of arithmetic as synthetic a priori judgments, but it does the same for those of geometry, and not only for elementary two- and three-dimensional geometry, but for non-euclidean and n-dimensional geometries as well. For since Descartes we have learned to reduce all these geometries to arithmetic by means of coordinates.

there are some who, in their overestimate of the human faculties, maintain that as soon as man’s intellect becomes subject to divine authority it falls from its native dignity, and hampered by the yoke of this species of slavery, is much retarded and hindered in its progress toward the supreme truth and excellence.

There’s nothing that people rebel more against, I told Jacques, than being forced to acknowledge the secret and immediate power their fellow human beings have over them. There’s maybe nothing more common, routine. A savage power, as indifferent as a thunderbolt, where intellect, merit, beauty, language are nothing but animal electricity, a polarity that suddenly develops. Falling under the spell. Forever. We never talk about it—it’s taboo.

God had given mankind intellect, one of my teachers had once said, and the Fall had given him prejudice; and there was no human force more dangerous than a combination of the two.

The Bible is a portrait of God, not a tool to calculate the age of the earth or number the generations of humanity. If we expect the Bible to be a textbook, we will be disappointed. Searching the Scriptures for validation of humanity’s theories is the opposite of searching the Bible for God’s face. We have to become okay with saying, ‘I don’t know why,’ when Scripture conflicts with science and history. God does not intend for us to know everything about Him and His creation while we are on earth. If He did, then we would have access to that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:17)! Complete knowledge is reserved for God, and those of us who claim to have it—even on a scriptural basis—are falling into the same trap as Eve and Adam did. We find ourselves simultaneously swamped by pride in our intellects and fear of what we still don’t understand.