matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe?
If he has it, he but gets a little higher. Is he not always infinitely
removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally
removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?

In comparison with these Infinites all finites are equal, and I see no
reason for fixing our imagination on one more than on another. The only
comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how
incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole? But he
may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some
proportion. But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to
one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other
and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to all he knows. He needs a place wherein
to abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements
to compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees
light; he feels bodies; in short, he is in a dependent alliance with
everything. To know man, then, it is necessary to know how it happens
that he needs air to live, and, to know the air, we must know how it is
thus related to the life of man, etc. Flame cannot exist without air;
therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other.

Since everything then is cause and effect, dependent and supporting,
mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though
imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most
different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without
knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in