The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other p...eople.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here did she fall a tear. Here in this place I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb-of-grace.... Rue even for ruth here shortly shall be seen In the remembrance of a weeping queen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as th...e blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities--otherwise it would not be ...able to learn--but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representatio...ns, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached t...o each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works tha...t are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the body reacts in a purposeful way to wounds or infections or an abnormal way of living, so the psychic functions react t...o unnatural or injurious disturbances with appropriate means of defence. One of these purposeful reactions is the dream, in which the unconscious material constellated round a given conscious position is presented to the conscious mind in symbolic form. In this unconscious material are all those associations which have remained in the unconscious because they were only weakly emphasized but which nevertheless have sufficient energy to make themselves felt during sleep. Naturally the purposeful character of the dream-content cannot be directly seen from the manifest dream-content; it requires an analysis of this manifest content to reach the actual compensatory factors of the latent dream-content. But most physical defensive reactions are of the same scarcely recognizable and, so to speak, indirect nature, and their purposeful character also has only been recognized through deep investigation and exact observation. I might recall, for instance, the meaning of fever and the processes of suppuration in an infected wound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »