Popularity: 2
Vote:   | A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Altering in any perfectly sound physiological or surgical way the functionings of the body will certainly have secondary but far-reaching effects on the mind, and these secondary effects will be still unpredictable at the time when the physiological changes take place. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Anticipation of movement, through muscular innervation and memory, by its retention of nerve impulse images, extend the present to the limit of a second or so. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As experimentation becomes more complex, the need for the co-operation in it of technical elements from outside becomes greater and the modern laboratory tends increasingly to resemble the factory and to employ in its service increasing numbers of purely routine workers. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Bertrand Russell, in one of his Skeptical Essays, predicting the approaching end of the scientific age, suggests that people will turn from physics to metaphysics because the hope that the former held out is seen to be vain except to new, half-cultivated peoples. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | By the intimate intercommunication of minds, the very existence of the ego would be impaired for the first time. Some kind of equilibrium will have to be found between each partial and corporate personality. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Every time we play tennis we are prophets without knowing of the future position of the ball which is conceived of as present. In the human stage we have extended mostly backwards as memory, our immediate prevision being limited by lack of scientific knowledge. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Feeling, or at any rate, feeling-tones, will almost certainly be under conscious control a feeling-tone will be induced in order to favor the performance of a particular kind of operation. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | However they appear to the pessimist of the present day, it is not in specialization or complication that the chief danger to progress seems to lie it is in something much more deep-seated and much more elusive. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It is here that prediction is most difficult and most fascinating. Under the influence of psychology it may well be that, just as all the branches of science itself are coalescing into a unified world picture, so the human activities of art and attitudes of religion may be fused into one whole action-reaction pattern of man to reality. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is now rapidly increasing, but is not usually accepted as prevision because it is conscious and intellectual. However, prevision plainly tends to become more and more deductive, and, to the mechanized man, the immediately apprehended may include years or centuries of past and future. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is pretty clear that they are ineffective in stopping the course of thought at present, but they have not always been so in the past and we cannot be sure that they will not be so in the future. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It should be possible so to improve educational methods, that mental activity, the capacity to form new associations, should not be incompatible with the performance of routine work that is, every research worker should be potentially able to add to and modify the whole course of the research and suggestions. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Marxists have some way of analyzing the development of affairs which enables them to judge far in advance of scientific thinkers what the trend of social and economic development is to be. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Obviously certain considerable psychological displacements or perversions must occur to balance the physiological perversions. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Pedantry and bureaucracy - symptoms of an unintelligent respect for the past - are at present real dangers, but, once their genesis is understood, they can be made to vanish. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Perhaps after all it is hope that really determines whether an age is or is not creative. But the existence of hope in a society at any time itself depends on many unexplored psychological, economic and political causes. I do not think that the factors involved are of a mystical order, but that they require considerable disentangling. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Political and social events must also be effective, but not in a very obvious fashion. But political confusion and prolonged peace undoubtedly affect creative thought but whether they respectively hinder or help it is not at all certain. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Rationalism strove to make the super-ego the dominant partner; it never succeeded, not only because its standard was too high to allow any outlet for the primitive forces, but because it was itself too arbitrary, too tainted with distorted primitive wishes ever to be brought into correspondence with reality. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world - a world which would be less and less able to judge what the experiments were about. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Specialization is brought about by the wideness of the field in which science operates, but as we go more deeply into nature the intrinsic complication of the phenomena increases and the modes of thinking used in ordinary life become more inadequate to deal with them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | That prospect should please both sides it should satisfy the scientists in their aspirations towards further knowledge and further experience, and the humanists in their looking for the good life on earth. But somehow it fails by the very virtue of its being a possible and probable solutions on the lines of our own knowledge. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The consciousness of solidarity - and even more, the unconscious emotional identification with the group - is a terrific force binding humanity together, and so long as individual scientists have it, di-morphism would be impossible. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The problem is essentially that of communications to an army in action. After a rapid advance communications become disorganized, and there is a temporary halting until they are again in working order. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment for it of all present art, rather it will mean the completion of the transformation of art that has already begun. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The task which the scientists have undertaken_the understanding and control of nature and of man himself_is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society. In its endeavour, science is communism. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The uncritical acceptance of this, however, leads many into believing that Marxism is simply another providential teleology, that Marx had mapped necessary lines of social and economic development which men willy-nilly must follow. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | This we can vaguely adumbrate when we think of the conflicts involved between ego and sexual impulses, the latter attempting always to break the isolation of the former and reach out to another individual or a group. If it is once possible to achieve this reaching out of feeling, the results are bound to be enormous and perhaps overwhelming. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | To talk of the contribution of Marx to science seems almost superfluous, for Marx himself was a scientist. Starting from the observation and practice of the most difficult of them - the science of human society in its historic development - he had come to comprehend the whole range of sciences. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Up to the present the cumulative edifice of science has been erected by assistance as much from the practical world as from the learned, and scientists themselves have never formed an hereditary or even a closed caste. In two ways the progress of science depends upon non-scientific humanity. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Viewed from the standpoint of the present the carrying out of such a program of human development must seem a very pointless occupation; but it is doubtful whether the present civilization would appear to an educated Athenian as something worthy to mark the culmination of his efforts. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We do not really expect or want the probable; all, even the least religious, retain in their minds when they think of the future, an idea of the deus ex machina, of some transcendental, superhuman event which will, without their help, bring the universe to perfection or destruction. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | We shall be forced to attempt planned and directed research employing hundreds of workers for many years, and this cannot be done without risking the loss of independence and originality. This is a serious and fundamental obstacle but it may be overcome in two ways. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We shall have very sane reactionaries at all periods warning us to remain in the natural and primitive state of humanity, which is usually the last stage but one in their cultural history. But the secondary consequences of what men have already done - the reactionaries as much as any - will carry them away then as now. |