Causes of individuals presuppose causes of the species, which are not univocal yet not wholly equivocal either, since they are expressing themselves in their effects. We could call them analogical. In language too all universal terms presuppose the non-univocal analogical use of the term *being*.
God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.
...and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on "college life" before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?