Of Experience

There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails us, we use experience, which is a weaker and less dignified means. But truth is so great a thing that we must not disdain any medium that will lead us to it.

Reason has so many forms that we know not which to take; experience has no fewer. The inference we try to draw from the resemblance of events is unsure, because they are always dissimilar: there is no quality so universal in this aspect of things as diversity and variety.

“Never did two men judge alike about the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men, but in the same man at different times.”

Nature has committed herself to make nothing separate that is not different. Therefore, the more we enlarge our experience, the more we realize the boundlessness of the unknown. We are born to inquire after truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics. In this universe of things, I find nothing so frail, so subject to change, as my own body and mind, yet I must live with both until the end. To know how to enjoy our being rightfully is an absolute and almost divine perfection. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside.