“[T]he most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols. …[E]volution has greatly enlarged the front lobes of the human brain, which govern the sense of the past and the future; and… they are probably the seat of our other images.”

—  Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

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Jacob Bronowski79
Polish-born British mathematician 1908–1974

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“The human being, on the other hand, is firmly located in a temporal process. He has an image of the past which extends back far beyond the limits of his own life and experience, and he likewise has an image of the future. Closely associated with the time structure of his image is the image of the structure of relationships. Because we are aware of time, we are also aware of cause and effect, of contiguity and succession, of cycles and repetition. The image of man is also characterized by a much greater degree of self-consciousness and of self-awareness than that of the lower animals. We not only know, but we know that we know. This reflective character of the human image is unique, and is what leads to philosophy.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 25

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“Human beings can imagine situations which are different from those in front of their eyes… because they make and hold in their minds images for absent things.”

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“The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding in the foreword of: Fred Polak (1972) The image of the future http://storyfieldteam.pbworks.com/f/the-image-of-the-future.pdf, p. V <br class="br">1970s

Jacob Bronowski photo

“[A]ll our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and allow the mind to manipulate them—things, concepts, ideas, everything that does not have a physical reality in front of us now.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

Jacob Bronowski photo

“The images play out for us events which are not present in our senses, and… create the future—a future that… may never come to exist in that form.”

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Jacob Bronowski photo

“The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

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“[T]he human past… belongs not only to (say) the Blackfeet or the Mormons, but to all of us. …[W]e humans cannot be considered as separate from the earth of our evolution. We, too, are "natural."”

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“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.”

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“Religion humanizes this universe, makes us feel important and loved. We are not animals governed by uncontrollable drives, animals that die for no apparent reason, but creatures made in the image of supreme being”

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“It is a terrible and awesome thing when a man sets out to create all other men in his own image. Such became the goal and all consuming ambition of Karl Marx. Not that he would have made each man equal to himself; in fact, it was quite the contrary. The image he hoped to construct was a great human colossus with Karl Marx as the brain and builder and all other men serving him as the ears and eyes, feet and hands, mouth and gullet. In other words, Marx surveyed the world and dreamed of the day when the whole body of humanity could be forced into a gigantic social image which conformed completely to Marx's dream of a perfect society.”

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