A meeting of minds

There are different roads that may be taken in our quest for knowledge. The road of formal education is the surest way to fame and fortune ; but is it always the road to enlightenment?

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The evolution that matters

History and the evolution of human consciousness.

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Common thinking

One of the most interesting writers of the twentieth century is Owen Barfield.  CS Lewis, who was no mean intellect himself, described him as the best of his unofficial tutors.  Barfield was destined for a brilliant academic career at Oxford but the early death of his father required him to take over the family law [...]

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I know that face

People are constantly talking of reality.  How often do we hear words such as : “get real” : “the reality is” : “it really is true”.  It is as if we believe that the human senses and the human mind possess a mystical quality that enables them to transcend the material world and take a [...]

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Ways of seeing

It’s always fun to analyse things.  We do analysis so readily because it is easy ; synthesis (imaginative thinking) is a lot harder.  Science makes such good progress because it involves mostly analysis. But, easy though it is, the results of analysis are still a puzzle.  For example, we might do a hundred experiments in [...]

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Evolving minds

Life can be precarious.  One useful realization to emerge from Darwin’s elegant theory of evolution is that creatures may evolve to become either generalists or specialists.  Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.  For example, one creature might become an omnivore.  An advantage here is that, if one kind of food becomes scarce, it has [...]

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Ideas

The life and times of ideas.

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The man who knew too much?

Sigmund Freud was a remarkable man.  Most people know that he was Jewish and born in Central Europe in the late nineteenth century.  The most productive part of his life was spent in Vienna.   He served in the German Army in WW1 and died in London just before WW2.  The socialists seem to have hated [...]

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Celestial fireworks

Bombs generally are unpleasant things ; that is why it is good to think about them.  A bomb going off in a remote and uninhabited place would attract little attention from the news media.  But a bomb exploding in a crowded public place would be of national and international concern ; it would be at [...]

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