Peter J. Cameron today presented in his weblog an excerpt
from Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy .
Another such excerpt —
"Taking words as the measure of things, instead of using
things as the measure of words, Hume imposed the discrete
and, so to say, pointilliste pattern of language upon the
continuum of actual experience — with the impossibly
paradoxical results with which we are all familiar. Most human
beings are not philosophers and care not at all for consistency
in thought or action. Thus, in some circumstances they take it
for granted that events are not 'loose and separate,' but coexist
or follow one another within the organized and organizing field
of a cosmic whole. But on other occasions, where the opposite
view is more nearly in accord with their passions or interests,
they adopt, all unconsciously, the Humian position and treat events
as though they were as independent of one another and the rest
of the world as the words by which they are symbolized. This is
generally true of all occurrences involving 'I,' 'me,' 'mine.'
Reifying the 'loose and separate' names, we regard the things as
also loose and separate — not subject to law, not involved in the
network of relationships, by which in fact they are so obviously
bound up with their physical, social and spiritual environment."
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy , on p. 156 of the
1947 Chatto & Windus (London) edition.
Those in search of an "organized and organizing field" might
consider the Galois field GF(64) — as embodied in the Chinese
classic I Ching … or, more recently, in the finite geometry PG(5,2) —
the natural habitat of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator.