On the Improvement of the Understanding, Benedict de Spinoza [best romance books of all time txt] 📗

are wont to determine duration by the aid of some measure

of motion which, again, takes place by aid of imagination,

we preserve no memory connected with pure intellect. [91e] The chief rule of this part is, as appears from the first

part, to review all the ideas coming to us through pure

intellect, so as to distinguish them from such as we imagine:

the distinction will be shown through the properties of each,

namely, of the imagination and of the understanding. [92f] Observe that it is thereby manifest that we cannot understand

anything of nature without at the same time increasing our

knowledge of the first cause, or God.

End of “On the Improvement of the Understanding.”

Notes by Volunteer.

1. Used, in part, with kind permission from:

http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Spinoza/TIE/

2. The text is that of the translation of the Tractatus de Intellectus

Emendatione by R. H. M. Elwes, as printed by Dover Publications

(NY):1955), ISBN 0-486-20250-X. This text is “an unabridged and

unaltered republication of the Bohn Library edition originally

published by George Bell and Sons in 1883.”

3. Paragraph Numbers, shown thus [1], are from Edwin Curley’s

translation in his “The Collected Works of Spinoza”, Volume 1, 1985,

Princeton University Press; ISBN 0-691-07222-1.

4. Sentence Numbers, shown thus (1), have been added by volunteer.

5. Spinoza’s endnotes are shown thus [a]. The letter is taken from

Curley, see Note 3.

6. Search strings are enclosed in square brackets; include brackets.

7. HTML versions of “On the Improvement of the Understanding” are

published in the Books On-Line Web Pages;

ttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html and they include:

http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Spinoza/TIE/

http://www.erols.com/jyselman/teielwes.htm

End of Project Gutenberg’s Etext On the Improvement of the Understanding (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect), by Baruch Spinoza