New Horizons

The mind of man has an inborn bias towards unity. Hence the unity of ideas which even the anarchic self-realizer cannot escape. Hence, too, a critique of the history of ideas must always appear an angular if not arbitrary cross-section through the jungle of fact. If the mind of man was a machine we could take it to pieces, but because it is organic and even supratemporal, it is always more than a welter of faculties and even more than its history. So that if criticism is so specialized that it forgets that the whole mind is more than the sum of its parts it becomes geometrical and is an escape from the truth: geometry is a measure of matter and not of mind. Again, the reality the mind experiences is not a mere metaphor for something else that the mind in its otherness cannot reach, and not mind-stuff or a construction the mind has put on the real. The external world, and the whole of it, means everything to the mind: closing the mind to it is like closing the body to air; it is intellectual death. Unless we grow into the real, and the whole real too, we become unreal people: we not only stop seeing objectively, we stop being objective. The history of the ideas of unreal people is therefore a history of unrealities, and the critic who shows how they hang together in the unreal mind is proving again that there is method even in madness. If he forgets however that the mind is more than its history, he becomes a determinist who begs the question and equates mind and matter

Citation · Library science · New horizons · Computer Science · Philosophical and Cultural Analysis · Philosophical Thought and Analysis · Philosophy and Phenomenology Studies