Chapter 1. Comprehensive Propensities |
I am enthusiastic
over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If
you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant
enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life
preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life
preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a
great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as
constituting the only means for solving a given problem. Our brains deal
exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to
discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each
and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give
knowledgeable advantage in all instances. . . . |