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3 ideas
| 4818 | People who are ignorant of true causes imagine anything can change into anything else [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: Those who are ignorant of true causes make complete confusion - thinking that trees might talk just as well as men, that men might be formed from stones as well as seed, and imagine that any form might be changed into any other. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], I Pr 08 n2) | |
| A reaction: Spinoza himself can be guilty of this, but it strikes me as a key idea. Humean scepticism about causation seems to me the product of eighteenth century ignorance about the mechanisms of cause and effect which have since been uncovered by science. |
| 20310 | Error does not result from imagining, but from lacking the evidence of impossibility [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: The mind does not err from the fact that it imagines, but only insofar as it is considered to lack an idea which excludes the existence of those things which it imagines to be present to it. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], II Pr 17 s) | |
| A reaction: These may be the wisest words I have yet found on conceivability and possibility. My example is imagining a bonfire on the moon, which seems possible until you fully grasp what fire is. |
| 11958 | Impossibilites are easily conceived in mathematics and geometry [Reid, by Molnar] |
| Full Idea: Reid pointed out how easily conceivable mathematical and geometric impossibilities are. | |
| From: report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Intellectual Powers 4: Conception [1785], IV.III) by George Molnar - Powers 11.3 | |
| A reaction: The defence would be that you have to really really conceive them, and the only way the impossible can be conceived is by blurring it at the crucial point, or by claiming to conceive more than you actually can |