Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 4 (p. 77)
Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)
“The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not”
which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.
par. 51 p.46
Psychology and Alchemy (1952)
“Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine.”
As quoted in Topoi : The Categorial Analysis of Logic (1979) by Robert Goldblatt, p. 13
“The mind resorts to reason for want of training.”
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
“There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.”
The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton (1959)
Context: There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.
“The goal, the pursuit of art is to move, like music does; to create sensations in our mind..”
1880's
