In a normal person the motor and sensory nervous systems act as the windows of the individual personality.... [ellipsis in origina...l] The broken, many-stained and pictorial windows through which the light is struggling under disadvantages to harmonize itself with the physical world at large are found in three classes of persons--the mentally deficient, the morally deficient, and the insane. In these, the light is there, but the images, as in a broken cathedral window, are more or less shattered and confused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gif...ts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting...--intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corr...esponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory complete...ness. We need a science of description.... Criticism is ceremonial revivification.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the tr...iggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the ...meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the ...conditions of modern life--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, said good old Berkeley; but, according to most philosophers, he was wrong. Yet, obviou...sly, there are things for which the adage holds. Perception, trivially, to begin with. If elements of conscious awareness--pains, tickles, feelings of heat and cold, sensory qualia of colors, sounds, and the like--have any existence, it must consist in their being perceived by a subject.... This shows, of course, that such experiences are epiphenomenal, at least with respect to the physical world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Hindu scriptures, like the Buddhist, dwell ... on withdrawal from the realm of pleasure. The spiritually mature man is one who... "abandons desires," who "has lost desires for joys," who "withdraws, as a tortoise his limbs from all sides, his senses from the objects of sense." Hence the ideal man as depicted in the Bhagavad Gita: a man of discipline, who acts without worrying about the fruits of his action, a man who is unmoved by acclaim and by criticism.... That Hinduism and Buddhism sound so much alike is not shocking. The Buddha was born a Hindu. But he carried the theme of sensory indifference further, boiling it down to a severe maxim--life is suffering--and placing it in the center of his philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »