Thought I’d share a little quote I came across today. While it is part of a humours paper, I thought it is quite true.
The most wonderful thing in the world, in our opinion, is the ability of the human mind to correlate many seemingly unrelated pieces of information into a jubilant whole. We are born ignorant, imprisoned by the islands of our personal experience; but intelligence, logic, and diligent study are like glorious seaworthy vessels which allow us to travel boundless and brilliant oceans. The great ambition of science is the piecing together of dissociated knowledge to create hard tempered theories, and then the bravely facing of their philosophical implications in order to begin the process anew. In this way we have climbed towards the brilliant truth, and have lifted our human state into the glory of an age of enlightenment.
–Benjamin K. Tippett, Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific, 2012, arXiv:1210.8144
Until next time, Stay Geeky,
–Canageek
it’s even cleverer than that.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
is the first paragraph from HP Lovecraft’s “The call of Cthulhu”.
I recognized the first part, but didn’t realize how close he had kept it to the original, thank you. He also used that first line in another of his books or something very, very similar. (The Shadow Over Innsmouth I think?)