I have been completing some study lately on how we think, where ideas come from, the sociology of knowledge, creativity, innovation and imagination. I stumbled upon the reference to this little treasure in the end notes of another book. I also have a policy of reading one book more than 10 years from the date of its publication for every fourth book I read. Once again, this guideline helps me embrace timeless literary treasures that I would likely overlook.

Excerpt from – The Silliman Lectures – Yale University – 1978 – “Knowledge and imagination are two inseparable aspects of the intellectual experience. The imaginative moment is as central to science as to poetry or to figurative art. The mind acts upon the natural world in the creation of knowledge in the same way as it acts on the elements of human sensibility in bringing forth a poem or a painting or a symphony.” – p x.

“The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on herself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of herself as a divine agent of change.”

Here are some other excerpts I thought were poignant:

Thinking of the human being as a special kind of animal ‘and of the animal as a special kind of engine. P.7

“Imagination” is a word which derives from the making of images in the mind, from what Wordsworth called “the inward eye.” But the very fact that Wordsworth could use such a phrase makes it very clear how much the intellectual activities of man are eye-conditioned. P.10

The sense of sight dominates our outlook on the outside world, whereas the sense of hearing is used by us largely in order to make contact with other people or with other living things. There is a very clear distinction in the way in which most of the time we use vision to give us information about the world and sound to give us information about other people in the world.  p.10-11

The world of science, however, is wholly dominated by the sense of sight.p.11

The place of the sense of sight in human evolution is cardinal.p.11

You must realize that not only does a machine go wrong every so often, but so does any apparatus that man or God can devise. P.15

But you must also realize that every machine of this sort always pays a price for the things it can do very cleverly-namely, by not being able to do other things. P.17-18.

It is sight which dominates this kind of sequence, how we think of things that appear in the mind. (imagination) – It is an ability which human beings possess and which no other animal shares with them. P.18

We pass knowledge to one another, that is, information which does not have the preprogrammed force of an instruction. Animal signals, by and large, are pure instruction. P. 43

I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the Universe. P. 58

We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness. P.58

No formal system embraces all the questions that can be asked. P. 80

Most of human sentences are In fact aimed at getting rid of the ambiguity which you unfortunately left trailing in the last sentence. P. 105

And that reorganization is the central act of imagination. The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. P. 109

He sees more ridiculous alternatives. P. 111 —-re: chess player

Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being very an imaginative speculation.” P. 112

We ask “Why do we know more now than we knew ten thousand years ago, or even ten years ago?” the answer is that it is by this constant adventure of taking the closed system and pushing its frontiers imaginatively into the open spaces where we shall make mistakes. p.113

You do not invent a new world s world system by being satisfied with what other people have told you about how the world works. 121

If you accept the fact that science is not a finished enterprise — that  knowledge is not a finished enterprise, that literature is not a finished enterprise. To go looking for the truth only has a point if the truth has not already been found. P. 121

And naturally if you suppose that the truth is a thing, that you could find it the way you could find your hat or your umbrella, then none of this makes sense, then you just look for a good finder. But that is not how truth is found. It is not how knowledge is created, and it is not how it works to quicken and leaven and create socia1 change. The kind of questioning personality that I am describing is one who is appropriate to our changing society only because he is the self-correcting mechanism. He is the thermostat built into the system. He is the man who says, “That is not right, we will try it another way.” P. 123

Jacob Bronowski – The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Yale University Press Copyright © 1978 by Yale University, p. 123.

A fascinating read that presents new twists on timeless truths. The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination is a treasure.