Show Us Not The Aim Without The

If The Creator Has A Purpose In Equipping Us With A Neck, He Surely Would Have Meant For Us To Stick It Out.

All "if" Statements About The Past Are As Dubious As Prophecies Of The Future Are. It Seems Fairly Plausible That If Alexander Or Ghengis Khan Had Never Been Born, Some Other Individual Would Have Filled His Place And Executed The Design Of The Hellenic Or Mongolic Expansion; But The Alexanders Of Philosophy And Religion, Of Science And Art, Seem Less Expendable; Their Impact Seems Less Determined By Economic Challenges And Social Pressures; And They Seem To Have A Much Wider Range Of Possibilities To Influence The Direction, Shape And Texture Of Civilizations.

As Modern Physics Started With The Newtonian Revolution, So Modern Philosophy Starts With What One Might Call The Cartesian Catastrophe. The Catastrophe Consisted In The Splitting Up Of The World Into The Realms Of Matter And Mind, And The Identification Of 'mind' With Conscious Thinking. The Result Of This Identification Was The Shallow Rationalism Of L' Esprit Cartesien, And An Impoverishment Of Psychology Which It Took Three Centuries To Remedy Even In Part.

Among All Forms Of Mentation, Verbal Thinking Is The Most Articulate, The Most Complex, And The Most Vulnerable To Infectious Diseases. It Is Liable To Absorb Whispered Suggestions, And To Incorporate Them As Hidden Persuaders Into The Code.

The Thing Represented Had To Pass Through Two Distorting Lenses: The Artist's Mind, And His Medium Of Expression, Before It Emerged As A Man-made Dream - The Two, Of Course, Being Intimately Connected And Interacting With Each Other.