Organization And Pathology of Thought [antikvár]

PREFACE The knowledge that thinking has conquered for humanity is vast, yet our knowledge of thinking is scant. It might seem that thinking eludes its own searching eye. But this may be an illusion, and the eye is perhaps not searching but only staring, or is even blind, as legend has the divining Homer and Ossian; perhaps thinking is reverie, and it is luck that rewards the richly dreaming mind. But the truth would seem to lie somewhere in the middle, between a continuous searching and the blind abandon of dreams, between disciplined quest and the lucky find. Heraclitus said: "If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it." Pasteur said: "Luck rewards only the prepared mind." Whatever its nature, thinking comes to the point of invention, discovery, and creation only in some human beings; it serves most of us merely to the point of—at best—understanding what the few have created. And yet the dream-stuff out of which world-changing thought is made is present in all of us, in the sentence-fragments of the brain-injured, in the delusions of the schizophrenic, and in the babbling of the child. This is its enigma. Repeated experiences of this enigma seem to have set me to thinking about thinking. One is particularly clear in my memory: an algebra class in high school; the Professor is at the blackboard, deducing a theorem; he pauses before the next step and I try to anticipate it—unsuccessfully; he continues, and I understand. Disappointed and puzzled, I ask myself why I cannot foretell the step, when it is so self-evident after I see it done. I must have asked this question in a dim way countless times before, when impressed and hurt in pride by adult omniscience. But I have asked it continuously ever since: the attendant shame and bitterness may have faded; the curiosity and puzzlement have not. This compilation of papers may or may not seem justified by the Introduction. Its subjective justification is that these papers, when I encountered them, seemed to explain part of the enigma, and so I became fond of them. To me they still seem like gems, even if some are "in the rough." To my mind they grasp and convey something about thinking, even if often what they grasp and how they convey it does not constitute scientific, tested knowledge, and if often we do not yet possess even the methods to test them. The deter-