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1 " Since evil is nothing positive, there can be no principle of evil. It has no meaning expect in reference to something good. "
― Fulton J. Sheen ,
2 " The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics. "
3 " Being is the soul of every concept, of every judgment and of every reasoning. "
4 " In a like manner, as soon as we know the meaning of being and the meaning of nonbeing, we know that a thing cannot be and not be at one and the same time, and under the same formal consideration. "
5 " To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma. "
6 " If you know where you are, you do not know how fast you are moving, and if you know how fast you are moving, you do not know where you are. "
7 " Facts in our day are not the same as the facts in the time of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. But the principles by which these facts are interpreted have not changed, for common sense remains essentially the same throughout the ages. "
8 " The soul cannot be seen in a biological laboratory, any more than pain can be seen on an operating table. "
9 " The assumption that numbers and mathematical or logical laws are mental is due to the even more widespread notion that only particular sensible entities exist in nature, and that relations abstractions, or universals cannot have any such objective existence - hence they are given a shadowy existence in the mind. "
10 " The term science means something quite different for our generation than it did not so many generations ago. "
11 " This is a very imperfect analogy, because the nature of a thing is not a core but a principle. "
12 " Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content. "
13 " We simply cannot put a man into a crucible to see if he will give off unmistakable green fumes of envy. "
14 " Like all great divorces, whether they be marital or epistemological, it had its antecedents in history. "
15 " Philosophy, like science, is only a collection of hypotheses, introduced for the usefulness of the ensemble, or for economy of thought. "
16 " These are but a few specimens of philosophy which is no longer conscious of its own intrinsic worth, and which sees no higher mission in life for itself than applying the categories of the material to the spiritual, of the physical to the mental, and the spatio-temporal to the eternal. "
17 " Facts themselves do not give knowledge "
18 " The conclusion is that the physical theory and the mathematical theory of science are valid methods but not valid philosophies. Facts need interpretation the physical theory forgets that it has no such principles of interpretation with its own bosom. "
19 " This is what Aristotle meant when he said that the object of science is the necessary and the universal; man and not this man. "
20 " The sciences need philosophy; philosophy, in turn, needs the sciences. On both sides, certain naive minds, too confident in their own forces and satisfied with ideas entirely too superficial, believed in the universal value of a single method. On both side a severe critique must lead each method back to its just limits, and teach them to ask aid of the other methods and manners of approach which, by their convergence, will permit the mind to embrace the diverse aspects of reality "