The greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine child; he could not have told how he did it, and we cannot tell why we feel it to be divine. There are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of. It is sometimes possible to find all the mysteries of the Universe in someone’s hands. Judge a person by their questions rather than their answers. I have found that the heart is not whole, but divided; that is seeks a soft cushion whereon to repose; that it vitalizes the blood; which else were weaker than water: I have found that we cannot live without hearts; through the heartless live the longest. Yet, hug your hearts, ye handful that have them; that is a blessed inheritance! And yet is not humankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. However, the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 7

If people can get you asking the wrong questions and to focus on things that do not matter, they do not have to worry about giving the proper answer or doing what is required. We must learn to take full account of every dimension of human experience, be it the logical, the emotional, the moral, or the religious. We must learn to maintain a strong degree of character in our lives, even to the level that has been revealed in our vision of God. The lasting characteristic of a spiritual being is the ability to understand correctly the meaning of each dimension of the criterion of truth. Each dimension should be given full value and not be arbitrarily explained away by pontifical claims made in the name of such doctrines as Christian supernaturalism, psychological associationism and materialism, or ethical utilitarianism. This means that reasoning discovers the real by interweaving and interpreting the different dimensions of experience. The presupposition of thought and actions is a unified, thinking self, or person. Were the person unable to will freely (granted limitations) and to choose in accordance with moral and intellectual ideals, there could be no trustworthy science or philosophy and no significance to moral and religious living. We have no right to express an opinion until we know the answers.  #RyanPhillippe 2 of 7

The nature of humans is far from being in itself evil; it abounds with benevolence, charity, and pity, coveting praise and honor, and shunning shame and disgrace. Bad education, bad habits, and bad customs, debauch our nature, and drive it headlong as it were into vice. It is in the nature and experience of this self-identical, thinking, willing, and feeling person, who may not be reduced either to a mode of matter or to a mode of divinity, and this is where we find clues to, and learn how to model of, reality. Persons, however, do not create themselves, or each other. They cannot communicate with each other were they are not bound by the same laws of reason and subject to a common World. Each knower is bombarded by a flux of discontinuous sense impressions to which one responds as constructively as one can in accordance with one’s own dynamic categories, such as time, space, quality, quantity, cause, substance, and purpose. Thus, the “common World” is the phenomenal World as organized by knowers who interact with, and ultimately depend upon, the structure of the real World independent of them. The phenomenal World is not a mask of the real World; it is the real World as related to the cognitive nature and purposes of finite knowers. We cannot know nor understand things we have never directly experienced, and what we learn is often shared by the people we relate with. Reality is depended, often times, on your age, culture, and the journeys we partake in.  #RyanPhillippe 3 of 7

Many people are ethnocentric and use their truth as a generalized way of relating to the World. And, other times they know that their experiences are not truth of the cultures of others, but just want to use a vice to forge the perception of others. Nevertheless, keep in mind, there are virtues which are their own reward, so there are vices which are amply their own punishment. The real World is neither nonmental nor independent of persons. For in knowing, and in interacting with an order other than itself, the mind must meet not only the conditions of its own nature but those of some agency or agencies independent of it. Since knowledge exists, and yet is not imported into a passive mind, the realist’s contention that the real is unaffected by knowing is unintelligible. The fact mist stand that the minds, in following their own natures, can know with reasonable assurance the reality in which they live and can construct a common World of thought and action, even though they are not identical with the real knowing. Furthermore, minds in their theoretical and practical action are clearly neither alien to each other nor to the reality that is the source of their experiences. Virtue can slumber, even in the midst of misfortune, but is the music of the soul, the harmony of the passions.  #RyanPhillippe 4 of 7

The World as known is the World persons construct, following the nature of their own theoretical interests, on the basis of the reality beyond their thought. If such cooperative interaction is possible, why, then, hold that any reality beyond finite things is nonmental? We grant that the case against nonmental material beings is not proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. However, if we think of nature as the energizing of a cosmic Person, we do know about the relation of mind to nature is more economically explained. You have become what you have always been, light flickering around peripheral vision, no words can speak of paths to be chosen. All trails that we trek shall lead us back to here because our love comes gain, just when I have broken down, I found that love can come again. You have to have faith and believe that deep within one, turn all the secret stones, forests and fields, breathing with blood and bones, nature is God willing in accordance with relational principles, hence nature dependably supports the orderly common World our own finite reasons construct in repose to it. God will wash away your tears, take away your pain, and wait alone for you. Keep you warm within the shelter of a World that we created. God, however, is not identical with the natural World. He is transcendent as well as immanent in relation to it.  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 7

And we are the same souls who never found our way back to the house, on the longest day, but we still listen to God talking because we need to believe that a change is coming through. We will stay lost in this World forever, forever lost in God. We will stay forever wanting God. And there are moments when we were taken by the beauty of the World so complete, but then it disappeared from view. Then, moving in circles, falling down like before. Missing paradise. God is transcendent as well as immanent in relation to the World. He is the unified, dynamic ground of nature, and he uses it for his purposes, inclusive of his interactions with finite persons. How, then, are finite person related to God? Finite persons are created by God and have relative, delegated autonomy. The real World, whose structure maintains and guides the constructive cognitive adjustments od persons, does not force their moral and appreciative responses. You crucify yourselves. Look at what has happened. When persons do not treat each other as persons in a realm that is morally purposeful, they fall short of what their own natures in God’s World can be. On that day, God took you up, it was now or never. And He savored all you were, on your road to nowhere. God created humans to be free, to work out the content of their freedom in a World order that at once limits and gives them opportunity for fulfillment.  #RyanPhillippe 6 of 7

It is only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake. The truth of nature may be changed by the garb it wears, but you have to understand that life is not a fashion theatre. Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.  Human freedom could not effect nothing in a World without order, for persons do not create the rational or moral principles by which they guide their thought and action in the given ultimate order. The Erewhonians hold that unalloyed virtue is not a thing to be immoderately indulged in. The most that can be truly said for virtue is that there is a considerable balance in its favor, and that it is on the whole a good deal better to be on its side than against it; but there is much pseudo-virtue going about, which is apt to let people in very badly before they find it out. Those humans are best who are not remarkable for vice or virtue. The natural World as known by persons is the objectification of the orderly interaction between finite wills and the cosmic Will. The ethical World is the objectification of the orderly, chosen, interaction among free, finite persons in the natural World God makes possible. The Universe is a realm of persons united both by God’s purposive action in nature and by the further moral unity created as persons freely respond to the reason, will, and love of the cosmic Person. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 7