🚀 go-pugleaf

ourselves to
any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it,
it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for
us. This is our natural condition and yet most contrary to our inclination;
we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation
whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork
cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Let us, therefore, not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is
always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the
two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.

If this be well understood, I think that we shall remain at rest, each in
the state wherein nature has placed him. As this sphere which has fallen to
us as our lot is always distant from either extreme, what matters it that
man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he
but gets a little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end,
and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if
it lasts ten years longer?

In comparison with these Infinites, all finites are equal, and I see no
reason for fixing our imagination on one more than on another. The only
comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he
is of going further. How can a part know the whole? But he may perhaps
aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion. But the
parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another that I
believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to all he knows. He needs a place wherein to
abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements to
compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees light;
he feels bodies; in