Mental Models XLIII

"We both are, and know that we are, and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these by some bodily sense, as we perceive the things outside of us of all which sensible objects it is the images resembling them, but not themselves which we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory, and which excite us to desire the objects. But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this." (Aurelius Augustinus, "The City of God", early 400s)

"The imagination is an eye where images remain forever." (Joseph Joubert, [Letter to Revd. Dr. Trusler] 1799) 

"There is a kind, I might almost say, of artistic satisfaction, when we are able to survey the enormous wealth of Nature as a regularly ordered whole - a kosmos, an image of the logical thought of our own mind." (Hermann von Helmholtz, "Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects", 1881) 

"I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current usage the term generally designates only a sound-image, a word, for example (arbor, etc.). One tends to forget that arbor is called a sign only because it carries the concept ‘tree’, with the result that the idea of the sensory part implies the idea of the whole." (Ferdinand de Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics", 1915) 

"Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images." (Thomas E Hulme, "Notes on Language and Style", 1929) 

"In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought." (Jean Piaget, "The Moral Judgment of the Child", 1932)

"What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature - outside of our arbitrariness- to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images […] The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical […] I am all for it to call this ‘organizing and regulating’ ‘archetypes’. It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes." (Wolfgang Pauli, [Letter to Markus Fierz], 1948) 

"My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc." (David Bohm,"Wholeness and the Implicate Order Wholeness and the Implicate Order", 1980) 

"Visual thinking is often driven more strongly by the conceptual knowledge we use to organize our images than by the contents of the images themselves. Chess masters are known for their remarkable memory for the pieces on a chessboard. But it's not because people with photographic memories become chess masters. The masters are no better than beginners when remembering a board of randomly arranged pieces. Their memory captures meaningful relations among the pieces, such as threats and defenses, not just their distribution in space."(Steven Pinker, "How the Mind Works", 1997)