greatness and weakness. Its greatness is real: for it brings
together the past and the present, without confusion; and by its
reasoning penetrates into futurity. It has the idea both of bodies
and spirits. Nay, it has the idea of the infinite: for it supposes
and affirms all that belongs to it, and rejects and denies all that
is not proper to it. If you say that the infinite is triangular,
the mind will answer without hesitation, that what has no bounds can
have no figure. If you desire it to assign the first of the units
that make up an infinite number, it will readily answer, that there
can be no beginning, end, or number in the infinite; because if one
could find either a first or last unit in it, one might add some
other unit to that, and consequently increase the number. Now a
number cannot be infinite, when it is capable of some addition, and
when a limit may be assigned to it, on the side where it may receive
an increase.


SECT. LI. The Mind knows the Finite only by the Idea of the
Infinite.


It is even in the infinite that my mind knows the finite. When we
say a man is sick, we mean a man that has no health; and when we
call a man weak, we mean one that has no strength. We know
sickness, which is a privation of health, no other way but by
representing to us health itself as a real good, of which such a man
is deprived; and, in like manner, we only know weakness, by
representing to us strength as a real advantage, which such a man is
not master of. We know darkness, which is nothing real, only by
denying, and consequently by conceiving daylight, which is most