[b]Henri Bergson
The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.[/b]
Obviously: more or less.
Darwin’s theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality.
You know where this takes me: contingency, chance and change.
It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That’s the objection. It is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has been precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists.
In other words, whatever that means.
Still, no doubt about it: point taken.
…the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.
Not that anyone ever really does. At least not to the satisfaction of everyone else.
It is impossible to consider the mechanism of our intellect and the progress of our science without arriving at the conclusion that between intellect and matter there is, in fact, symmetry, concord and agreement. On one hand, matter resolves itself more and more, in the eyes of the scholar, into mathematical relations, and on the other hand, the essential faculties of our intellect function with an absolute precision only when they are applied to geometry.
And, now, moving on to ethics…
We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
Considerably. But only regarding the parts that matter most.