Lancelot Law Whyte Quotes

To rob man of his noblest faculty, the experience of and aspiration to perfection and unity in himself , we can now see to have been a truly hellish surgery.

The idealist seeks the security of a static harmony, and therefore considers every tension evil. Unitary man recognizes tension as an essential feature of the formative process operating in man. Man creates in resolving tensions, but never brings them to an end. The contrasts of past, present and future forms provide an inexhaustible source of tension. (p. 274)

A clue to the future must lie in the past... every scientist, and everyone with intellectual curiosity, can learn something useful from a brief study of the history of atomism.

Man set out on a two-thousand-year trial of a particular method of differentiation, adapting the structure of his mental processes, conscious and unconscious, to a certain general form. We need to consider only the most general characteristics of this form, and for the purpose of this analysis, there reduce to two. Thought may be either unitary or dualistic (since other pluralistic forms may be neglected), and it may be either process or static. These two pairs produce four combinations or types of thought: unitary-process, unitary-static, dualistic-process and dualistic-static. The first and the last are the most stable and common types; the unitary-static and dualistic-process forms are less frequent and may be regarded as anomalous forms appearing at times of transition. (p. 193-194)

Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But... they are traveling from: Democritan permanent particles and the Cartesian mind necessarily aware. ...they are both traveling away from the same point of origin and in the same general direction: from the isolation of supposedly permanent "substances" towards the identification of changing relations potentially affecting everything; briefly, from substance to changing relations and structures.

Did ever the history of the intellect so little conceal so much?

Every scientific generation, measured by its most vocal members, exaggerates the historical importance of its own members. ...there is a perpetual temptation to study the latest and to neglect the past.

Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the process of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become. (p. 1)

It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so, provided one takes the long view, for no one can see far ahead. Against a historical background, the layman can understand what is involved, for example, in the fascinating challenge of continuity and discontinuity expressed in the antithesis of field and particle.

The Christian fog of self deception still does its damage: we either deceive ourselves by pretending to believe or overreact into a contempt of all religion. So, away with the fog!

The term dissociation is here used for a condition in which the organizing process in an individual fail to develop one characteristic form, and two or more mutually incompatible systems of behavior compete for control. (p. 62)

The most productive novelties often spring, in thought as in biological evolution, from more primitive and simpler forms, rather than from differentiated ones which, through their elaboration, have become too specialized to be adaptable to new tasks.

The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that <nowiki>' </nowiki>t<nowiki> '</nowiki> (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration.

The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands.

Unitary man escapes these confusions through his recognition that one factor is of supreme importance: the maturity proper to man can only come through the experience of adult unity. This experience may come in many ways, but it means that the individual has, for the moment, outgrown the sense of any division, either within himself of from others, through a mature relations to at least one other person. Tension is inherent in the process, but tension does not become frustrating conflict if the overriding unity is realized. (p. 255)