For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time.
If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.
Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved.
Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil?
The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.
Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer’s throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.
The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people’s minds. Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to? How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody? How else can one change it? He who understands and forgives – where would he find a motive to act? Where would he not?
Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.
I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion.
Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability-except the order of a dead universr filled with a uniformly distributed gas.
The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.
To quote Dr. Ewer: ‘Behaviour will tend to be always a jump ahead of structure and so play a decisive role in the evolutionary process.’ In this light, evolution no longer appears as a tale told by an idiot, but rather as an epic recited by a stutterer-at times haltingly and painfully, then precipitating in bursts.
The comic effect of the satire is derived from the simultaneous presence, in the reader’s mind, of the social reality with which he is familiar, and of its reflections in the distorting mirror of the satirist. It focuses attention on abuses and deformities in society of which, blunted by habit, we were no longer aware; it makes us suddenly discover the absurdity of the familiar and the familiarity of the absurd.
This was written before the full extent of the holocaust was known, but that does not alter the fact that the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European –.
The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles-until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Com.
Thus experience, both of the exalted and trivial kind, indicates that the mind is particularly receptive to and suggestible by messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern, or accompanied by a rhythmic pattern.
Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle.
On successively higher levels of the hierarchy we find more complex, flexible and less predictable patterns of activity, while on successively lower levels we find more and more mechanised, stereotyped and predictable patterns. In the language of the physicist, a holon on a higher level of the hierarchy has more degrees of freedom than a holon on a lower level.
Coghill has shown that the motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of sensory innervation.
Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.