1. Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and course to use it without buidance from another. Sapere Aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!" -- that is the motto of enlightenment.
First, as concerns the sources of metaphysical cognition, its very concept implies that they cannot be empirical. Its principles (including not only its basic propositions but also its basic concepts) must never be derived from experience. It must not be physical but metaphysical knowledge, i.e., knowledge lying beyond experience. It can therefore have for its basis neither external experience, which is the source of physics proper, nor internal, which is the basis of empirical psychology. It is therefore a priori cognition, coming from pure understanding and pure reason. p.11
From the Norman Kemp-Smith Transcendental Deduction (A) p. 143 We entitle the synthesis of the manifold in imagination transcendental, if without distinction of intuitions it is directed exclusively to the a priori combination of the manifold; and the unity of this synthesis is called tanscendental, if it is represented as a priori necessary in relation to the original unity of apperception. Since this unity of apperception underlies the possibility of all knowledge, the transcental unity of the synthesis of imagination is the pure form of all possible knowledge; and by means of it all objects of possible experience must be represented a priori. The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of imagination is the understanding; and this same unity, with reference to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the pure understanding.
For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterward arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished and scattered among the people, whose right it is. p.32
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau: 'The Social Contract' and Other Later Political Writings. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997.You know the saying that you have to visualize something before you can make it real? Well if Helen's…
Knowing so little of nature, and agreeing so ill about the meaning of the word law, it would be difficult for us to fix on a good definition of natural law.
But so long as power alone is on one side, and knowledge and understanding alone on the other, the learned will seldom make great objects their study, princes will still more rarely do great actions, and the peoples will continue to be, as they are, mean, corrupt and miserable.
1. For the better understanding of the first four books of this work, it is to be observed that what I distinguish by the name of virtue, in a republic, is the love of one's country, that is, the love of equality. it is not a moral, nor a Christian, but a political virtue; and it is the spring which sets the republican government in motion, as honour is the spring which gives motion to monarchy. Hence it is that I have distinguished the love of one's country, and of equality, by the appellation of political virtue.
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. As this opinion may appear somewhat extraordinary, it may not be improper to confirm it by some other considerations.
He spoke out very forthrightly against those who maintained that the authority of monarchs was unlimited. He maintained that monarchs cannot impose taxes without the consent of the people, and that they are more obliged than their subject to observe the laws of God and those of nature; and that the covenants which they make impose the same obligations on themselves as on their subjects. p.23-24