Great Throughts Treasury

"Love is the great subduing, transforming, and harmonizing emotion in human nature. And it is love alone by which responsive love is awakened, or on account of which love is felt in return. Ultimately therefore, it is the love of God for man, and that alone, which redeems the man; because that love alone calls forth in return that love of man for God, by which man’s whole nature is transformed."

"It is love alone by which responsive love is awakened, or on account of which love is felt in return. Ultimately therefore, it is the love of God for man, and that alone, which redeems the man; because that love alone calls forth in return that love of man for God, by which the man’s whole nature is transformed. But to be efficacious in that man, it must be appropriated by man, that is, believed in and reciprocated by conscious acts of will."

"The mirage of absolute existence, wholly apart from knowledge, is a common-sense prejudice."

"We shall have to consider in the course of these pages whether any causal relation obtains between these two correlates, necessity and universality. For the present it is enough to explain, that no necessity can be admitted to exist in the objective world; that what we call a necessary sequence is necessary solely in reference to our understanding, because we refer the consequent to a special antecedent, and bring it thus under some law which we think of as fixed, at least so far as the particular case under consideration in concerned; and that the only thing which corresponds to our notion of necessity in nature in the phenomenon of universality."