[[1]] I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the "clara et distincta idea" and the "inadequatœ] idea"; but the distinction above flows from a conception of the universe and of man's destiny which is not Spinoza's nor Spinozistic.
[[2]] Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht; Der Herr der Schöpfung hat alles bedacht.
Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise,
Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.
GOETHE, West-östlicher Divan, Buch der Sprüche.
[[3]] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan Arabia. "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam offers a fair field for speculative politics.
[[4]] Yet the scientific conception of the destruction or decay of this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into a mockery. (See Prof. C. A. Young, Manual of Astronomy, p. 571, and Prof. F. R. Moulton, Introduction to Astronomy, p. 486.)
[[5]] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the noblest works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was one of those minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse. The fogs and mists of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot. And a fragment written by Turgot in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the title of Condorcet's great Esquisse.