This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Thus the same statement that guarantees that God exists and that his most suitable name is He Who Is, also reveals to us the perfect simplicity of the divine essence. And indeed, God did not say: I am this or that, but simply I Am. I am what? I am ‘I Am.’ So, more than ever, the statement of Exodus seems to soar above in a kind of empty space, where the attraction of the weight of philosophy can no longer be felt. The work of reason is good, healthy, and important, for it proves that, left to itself, philosophy can establish with certitude the existence of the primary being whom everyone calls God. But a single word of the sacred text at once puts us in personal relations with him. We say his name, and by the simple fact of saying it, it teaches us the simplicity of the divine essence.
Music must naturally have been criticized in proportion as it improved, especially if its progress was considerable and subitaneous: for then it differs most from the sounds to which our ear is accustomed. But if we begin to be used to it, then it pleases, and it is prejudice any longer to oppose it.
Circumstances | Order | Power | Present |
Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
Hence arises a perception which represents them to us as distant and limited; and which consequently implies the idea of some extension.
Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.
Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure.
Ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.
Experience | Friendship |
If we want to revive a perception which is not familiar to us, such as the taste of a fruit of which we have eaten but once, our endeavors will terminate, generally speaking, in causing a kind of concussion in the fibres of the brain and of the mouth; and the perception shall bear no resemblance to the taste of that fruit. It would be the same in regard to a melon, to a peach, or even to a fruit of which we had never tasted. The like remark may be made in respect to the other senses.
Circumstances | Distinguish | Nature |
She knew now to look slowly and carefully at a face; she was convinced that it was impossible to see it all at once.
And yet, let the nature of these perceptions be what it will, and let them be produced as they will, if we look amongst them for the idea of extension, for instance, of a line, of an angle, and any other figure, we shall find it in that repository very clearly and distinctly.
Abstract | Circumstances | Mind | Perception | Power | Think |
I distinguish three sorts of signs: 1. Accidental signs, or the objects which particular circumstances have connected with some of our ideas, so as to render the one proper to revive the other. 2. Natural signs, or the cries which nature has established to express the passions of joy, of fear, or of grief, 3. Instituted signs, or those which we have chosen ourselves, and bear only an arbitrary relation to our ideas.
Distinction | Distinguish | Experience | Impression | Play | Rest |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.
Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |
The ideas of extension are those which we revive the most easily; because the sensations from which we derive them, are such as it is impossible for us to be without, so long as we are awake. The taste and smell may not be affected.
A single word, which depicts nothing, would not have been sufficiently expressive to have immediately succeeded the mode of speaking by action: this was a language so well proportioned to rude capacities, that it could not be supplied by articulate sounds, without accumulating expressions one upon the other.
There were two reasons why persons of any abilities, that attempted this kind of music, could not help meeting with success. The first is, that without doubt they pitched upon such pieces, as in the course of reciting, they had been accustomed to render particularly expressive; or at least they imagined some such. The second is the surprise, which this music must needs have produced by its novelty. The greater the surprise she greater the impression of the music.
Attention | Circumstances | Object |