Mental Models XX

“We perceive an image of truth, and possess only a lie.” (Blaise Pascal, “Pensées”, 1670)

"Our mental vision or conception of ideas is nothing but a revelation made to us by our Maker. When we voluntarily turn our thoughts to any object, and raise up its image in the fancy, it is not the will which creates that idea: It is the universal Creator, who discovers it to the mind, and renders it present to us.” (David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”, 1748)

"Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other." (Samuel Johnson, "The Rambler", 1750)

“This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.” (Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason”, 1781) 

“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” (William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, 1790)

"The identifying ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me." (David H Lawrence, "Art and Morality", 1925)

“We do not know why the imagination has accepted that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences seem really to correspond to something in the soul.” (Gilbert K Chesterton, “The Everlasting Man”, 1925)

“If we hang beautiful pictures on the walls of our souls, mental images that establish us in the habitual companionship of the highest that we know, and live with them long enough, we cannot will evil.” (Harry E Fosdick, “The Hope of the World”, 1933)

“Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity.” (Edmund Leach, "Brain-Twister”, 1967)