One and Many

Works to read

• The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, 1511 · Great Books
• Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 by Michael Faraday, 1839 · Great Books
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes, 1936 · Great Books
• Enneads by Plotinus, c. 253-270 · Great Books
• Rules for the Direction of the Mind by Rene Descartes, c. 1628 (published 1701) · Great Books
• A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America by John Adams, 1787-1788
• History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great by Thomas Carlyle, 1858–1865
• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, 1868
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925
• Metaphysics by Aristotle, c. 350-322 BC · Great Books
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne, 1580-1595 · Great Books
• Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes, 1637 · Great Books

Passages

From the texts

• For on the one hand, if all opinions and appearances are true, all statements must be at the same time true and false.

  — Aristotle, Metaphysics

• On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the carnal passion, there must be a heating of the blood and the bile, a well-defined state of the body; on the other hand, the impulse towards The Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like certain others too, it would belong necessarily to the Soul alone.

  — Plotinus, Enneads

Verified quotations

• Alas! there’s no man free: for some are slaves To gold, to fortune others, and the rest, The multitude or written laws restrain From acting as their better judgment dictates.

  — Euripides, The Trojan Women and Other Plays

• I will build a motor car for the great multitude.

  — Henry Ford, My Life and Work

• the Original of Laws was for the keeping of the Multitude in Order

  — Robert Filmer, Patriarcha

• HE that goeth about to persuade a multitude, that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favourable hearers

  — Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Preface and Book I)

• Now this infinite multitude of Men are by the Creation of God innocently simple, altogether void of and averse to all manner of Craft, Subtlety and Malice

  — Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

• We have shown that Scripture does not teach philosophy, but merely obedience, and that all it contains has been adapted to the understanding and established opinions of the multitude.

  — Baruch Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise

Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: unity, one, many, multitude. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.