Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/59

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PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS.
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superficial on this topic. Materialism is the asymptote of psychology.


In such a complicated machine as this world of ours, in spite of our own little contributory efforts, we must, as regards the principal thing, it seems to me, be always gamblers in a lottery.


Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.


God created man in his own image. This probably means that man created God in his.


When I regard anything first as body and then as spirit, it produces a tremendous parallax. The former might be styled the somato-centric, and the latter the psycho-centric region of a thing.


That after death the soul remains was undoubtedly first a matter of belief, and only subsequently one of proof. To believe in this is no more extravagant than building houses for one man sufficient to accommodate a hundred, than calling a girl a goddess or a crowned head immortal. Man is no more skilfully fashioned a creature than the rest; it is simply that he knows himself to be so fashioned, and explains everything from that fact; and we do well to give this attribute of our mind the preference over any other attribute of a mind,