Authentic wisdom hooks you into Truth in its living form and Truth drags you off to unfathomable depths. A living truth cannot be hauled home and hung over your mantle. By the time you get it to shore, the sharks of your ignorance and finitude will have reduced it to a skeleton. If you would pursue Truth, you must hold on and let it take you where it will. But there will come a point at which you must let go. For living Truth leads to God himself, and God will not be caught.

copied from entry on 2/23/2000:

Logic ≈ Deductive Thinking

• it can only work within a given set of rules.
• it cannot prove anything, it can only disprove.

My definition of “Rationalism” - the theory that Reason is able to recognize absolute truth, and that it is the only function of the mind which is able to do so (NOT Logic or sensory perception).

It is possible to conceive of something logically, yet unreasonably.

Reason ≈ Inductive Thinking

• intuition?
• cannot prove anything
• what “makes sense”

It is impossible to conceive of something that is reasonable, yet illogical.

• Logic is a function of Reason. Therefore, Reason is not accountable or obedient to Logic.
• No thoughts are “irrational”. That would imply that there is no reason for why we have these thoughts.
• Reason is founded upon absolutes.
• Counter-rational thinking is possible because we can conceive of things that are contrary to absolute truths.
• There may be absolute contradictions to absolute truths. But Logic, insofar as it operates exclusively on a deductive level, can never reveal anything but apparent contradictions.
• Correlate: Logic can never disprove a rational concept.

copied from entry on 2/20/2000, 3:30 AM:

1. Preface - explaining purpose, organization and reasoning behind organization.
2. Personal Definitions of Key Terms and Concepts
3. Intuited Concepts and Extra-logical Conclusions
4. Logical Conclusions within the paradigm of #3
5. Logical Conclusions within other paradigms (including Science and other philosophical approaches)
6. Logical Conclusions resulting from comparison and contrast of #3 and #5.
7. List of Issues to be covered in 3-6.
8. Collection of resources and references to resources pertaining to issues in #7.

2/23/00

All complex words and concepts must be defined in the simplest and clearest terms possible when writing my comprehensive philosophy. This must be done in order to tear down (as much as possible) the barrier that denies us direct access to and sharing of Reason, viz. Language.

(Am I reconstructing the Tower of Babel?)

To call forth a concept a word is needed. To portray a phenomenon a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.

- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, from Traite Elementaire de Chemie, 1789

If someone should now ask why we are, by nature, so inclined to divide quantity, I shall answer that we conceive quantity in two ways: abstractly, or superficially, as we commonly imagine it, oras substance, which is done by the intellect alone without the help of the imagination. So if we attend to quantity as it is in the imagination, which we do often and more easily, it will be found to be finite, divisible, and composed of parts; but if we attend to it as in the inteelect, and conceive of it insofar as it is a substance, which happens seldom and with great difficulty, then (as we have already sufficiently demonstrated) it will be found to be infinite, unique, and indivisible.

- Baruch Spinoza