Chapter 1 - The Knowledge of Self
"reason may be called the vizier, or prime minister, passion the revenue collector, and anger the police officer. under the guise of collecting revenue, passion is continually prone to plunder on its own account, while resentment is always inclined to harshness and extreme severity.
both of these, the revenue collector and the police officer have to be kept in due subordination to the king, but not killed or expelled, as they have their own proper functions to fulfil. but if passion and resentment master reason, the ruin of the soul infallibly ensues." ( 22)
"nor is it only by reason of knowledge acquired and intuitive that the soul of man holds the first rank among created things, but also by reason of power." (25)
"besides mere incapicity, there are other hinderences to the attainment of spiritual truth. one of these is externally acquired knowledge. to use a figure, the heart may be represented as a well, and the five senses as five streams which are continually conveying water into it. in order to find out the real contents of the heart, these streams must be stopped for a time, at any rate, and the refuse they have brought with them must be cleared out of the well. in other words, if we are to arrive at pure spiritual truth, we must put away, for the time, knowledge which has been acquired by external processes and which too often hardens into dogmatic prejudice." (26)
"any one who will look into the matter will see that happiness is necessarily linked with the knowledge of God. each faculty of ours delights in that for which it was created: lust delights in accomplishing desire, anger in taking vengeance, the eye in seeing beautiful objects, and the ear in hearing harmonic sounds. the highest function of the soul of man is the perception of truth ; in this accordingly it finds special delight." ...
"a person in whom the desire of this knowledge has dissapeared is like one who has lost his appetite for healthy food, or who prefers feeding on clay to eating bread. all bodily appetites perish at death with the organs they use, but the soul dies not, and retains whatever knowledge of God it posseses ; nay, increases it." (27-28)
"man has been truly termed "microcosm", or little world in himself, and the structure of his body should be studied...by those who wish to attain to a more intimate knowledge of God, just as close study of the niceties and shades of language in a great poem reveals to us more and more of the genius of the author." (29)
"the body may be compared to a steed and the soul to its rider ; the body was created to the soul, the soul for the body. if a man knows not his own soul, which is the nearest thing to him, what is the use of his claiming to know others? it is as if a beggar who has not the wherewithal for a meal should claim to be able to feed a town."
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