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Man is a universe within himself.

Man is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and directing hierarchies of the universe.

Man is the measure of all things.

On the spiritual theory, man consists essentially of a spiritual nature or mind intimately associated with a spiritual body or soul, both of which are developed in and by means of a material organism.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Man lives in a world of meaning.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

Man is the creature of circumstances.