This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The two Antonines... governed the Roman world forty-two years, with the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue... Their united reigns are possible the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.
Government | History | Object | People | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Happiness |
The mind or spirit is present everywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present because, even when related to this or that object, it does not cling to it and thus lose its original mobility. Like water filling a pond, which is always ready to flow off again, it can work its inexhaustible power because it is free, and be open to everything because it is empty. This state is essentially a primordial state, and its symbol, the empty circle, is not empty of meaning for him who stands within it.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
I do not know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist. Further, I know what I mean by the terms I and Myself; and I know this immediately or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound. The Mind, Spirit, or Soul is that indivisible unextended thing which thinks, acts, and perceives.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The religious concentration of the soul appears in the form of feeling; it nevertheless passes also into reflection; a form of worship is a result of reflection. The second form of the union of the objective and subjective in the human spirit is art. This advances farther into the realm of the actual and sensuous than religion. In its nobles walk it is occupied with representing, not indeed, the spirit of God, but certainly the form of God; and in its secondary aims, that which is divine and spiritual generally. Its office is to render visible the divine; presenting it to the imaginative and intuitive faculty. but the true is the object not only of conception and feeling, as in religion - and of intuition, as in art - but also of the thinking faculty; and this gives us the third form of the union in question - philosophy.
Aims | Art | God | Intuition | Object | Office | Philosophy | Question | Reflection | Religion | Soul | Spirit | Thinking | Worship | Art |
Deep ecology is supported by modern science... but it is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation. When the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual.
Awareness | Change | Consciousness | Individual | Life | Life | Oneness | Perception | Reality | Science | Sense | Spirit | Awareness |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite - Matter. As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom... Matter has its essence outside itself; Spirit is Being-within-itself (self-contained existence). But this, precisely, is Freedom. For if I am dependent, I refer myself to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of Spirit is none other than self-consciousness - consciousness of one’s own being.
Consciousness | Existence | Freedom | Nature | Self | Spirit |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Length of time is something entirely relative, and the element of spirit is eternity. Duration, properly speaking, cannot be said to belong to it.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind. Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks; and in truth whoever shall go about to divide his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task.
Abstract | Existence | Ideas | Mind | Nothing | Soul | Spirit | Time | Truth | Will |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a world all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit - it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit.
Earth | Eternal | Existence | Heaven | Important | Man | Mind | Need | Spirit | World | Absurdity | Truths |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I am free... when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of spirit is none other than self-consciousness, consciousness of one’s own being. Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self consciousness these are merged in one; for spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realize itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially.
Appreciation | Consciousness | Energy | Existence | Nature | Self | Spirit | Appreciation |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will... There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.
I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those disasters which break down the spirit of man and prostrate him in the dust seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character that at times it approaches to sublimity.
Where bright imagination reigns, the fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains.
Imagination | Spirit |