There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the successi...on of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing stric...t causal connections.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which--miraculously, it seems--merge into a si...gnificant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a current misconception which sees in Jung an early disciple of Freud who subsequently deserted his master. Nothing could... be more misleading. From the very beginning there were differences of procedure and of outlook that were bound to lead to divergent results. Freud's work is based on a scientific method restricted to the principle of causality: that is to say, it is assumed that everything that happens has an explanation in prior causes, and is merely the result of those causes. The world is a mechanism that can be taken to pieces and we can only understand how it works if we know how to dismantle and reassemble its constituent parts. Jung does not deny this causal principle, but he says it is inadequate to explain all the facts. In his view, we live and work, day by day, according to the principle of directed aim or purpose, as well as by the principle of causality. We are drawn onwards and our actions are significant for a future we cannot foresee, and will only be explicable when the final effect of the impulse becomes evident. In other words, life has a meaning as well as an explanation; a meaning, moreover, that we can never finally discover, for it is being extended all the time by the process of evolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The individual as such is never the mere result of law. In consequence, the causal explanation of an object never defines its indi...vidual and unique characters as such, but always its general characters. Consequently, if the and the expression of that will in any moment of our finite life possess characters, namely, precisely these individual and uniquely significant characters which no causal explanation can predetermine, then such acts of will, as significant expressions of purpose in our life, constitute precisely what ethical common sense has always meant by free acts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular nigh...t, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details.... But in history the matter is far otherwise.... Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History cannot, like physical science, deduce causal laws of general application. All attempts have failed to discover laws of "ca...use and effect" which are certain to repeat themselves in the institutions and affairs of men. The law of gravitation may be scientifically proved because it is universal and simple. But the historical law that starvation brings on revolt is not proved; indeed the opposite statement, that starvation leads to abject submission, is equally true in the light of past events. You cannot so completely isolate any historical event from its circumstances as to be able to deduce from it a law of general application. Only politicians adorning their speeches with historical arguments have this power; and even they never agree. An historical event cannot be isolated from its circumstances, any more than the onion from its skins, because an event is itself nothing but a set of circumstances, none of which will ever recur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »