God Seems To Have Left The Receiver

The More Original A Discovery, The More Obvious It Seems Afterwards.

The Cell Door Slammed Behind Rubishov.

Coincidence May Be Described As The Chance Encounter Of Two Unrelated Causal Chains Which-miraculously, It Seems-merge Into A Significant 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.

All "if" Statements About The Past Are As Dubious As Prophecies Of The Future Are. It Seems Fairly Plausible That If Alexander Or Ghengis Khan Had Never Been Born, Some Other Individual Would Have Filled His Place And Executed The Design Of The Hellenic Or Mongolic Expansion; But The Alexanders Of Philosophy And Religion, Of Science And Art, Seem Less Expendable; Their Impact Seems Less Determined By Economic Challenges And Social Pressures; And They Seem To Have A Much Wider Range Of Possibilities To Influence The Direction, Shape And Texture Of Civilizations.

As Modern Physics Started With The Newtonian Revolution, So Modern Philosophy Starts With What One Might Call The Cartesian Catastrophe. The Catastrophe Consisted In The Splitting Up Of The World Into The Realms Of Matter And Mind, And The Identification Of 'mind' With Conscious Thinking. The Result Of This Identification Was The Shallow Rationalism Of L' Esprit Cartesien, And An Impoverishment Of Psychology Which It Took Three Centuries To Remedy Even In Part.