Secret Teachings of All Ages

canons:

"(1) Sense is never deceived; and therefore every sensation and every perception of an appearance is true. (2) Opinion follows upon sense and is superadded to sensation, and capable of truth or falsehood,

(3) All opinion attested, or not contradicted by the evidence of sense, is true. (4) An opinion contradicted, or not attested by the evidence of sense, is false."

He maintained that everything in the world belongs to the wise, a declaration which he proved by the following logic: "All things belong to the gods; the gods are friends to wise persons; all things are common amongst friends; therefore all things belong to the wise."

The six headings under which the disciplines of philosophy are commonly classified are: metaphysics, which deals with such abstract subjects as cosmology, theology, and the nature of being; logic, which deals with the laws governing rational thinking, or, as it has been called, "the doctrine of fallacies"; ethics, which is the science of morality, individual responsibility, and character -- concerned chiefly with an effort to determine the nature of good; psychology, which is devoted to investigation and classification of those forms of phenomena referable to a mental origin; epistemology, which is the science concerned primarily with the nature of knowledge itself and the question of whether it may exist in an absolute form; and aesthetics, which is the science of the nature of and the reactions awakened by the beautiful, the harmonious, the elegant, and the noble.

uclid maintained that good has no opposite and therefore evil does not exist.

the Eleatic concept that goodness is absolute unity and all change an illusion of the senses.

Man's status in the natural world is determined, therefore, by the quality of his thinking. He whose mind is enslaved to his bestial instincts is philosophically not superior to the brute-, he whose rational faculties ponder human affairs is a man; and he whose intellect is elevated to the consideration of divine realities is already a demigod, for his being partakes of the luminosity with which his reason has brought him into proximity.