On Images (1920-1929)

"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections." (Niels Bohr, 1920)

"By intuition is frequently understood perception, or the knowledge of actual reality, the apprehension of something as real. […] Intuition is the undifferentiated unity of the perception of the real and of the simple image of the possible." (Benedetto Croce, "The Essence of Æsthetic", 1921)

"The continuing effects of mental images and ideas that, later, emerge in memory actually take place in the sphere of our feelings. […] Our life of feelings – with its joys, pains, pleasures, displeasures, tensions, and relaxations – is the actual vehicle for the enduring qualities of the ideas and mental images that we can recall at a later stage." (Rudolf Steiner, "Education for Adolescents", 1921)

"Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe, creating it in the image of nature, submitting to the laws of nature, the laws which govern our own nature, our universe. The laws of gravity, of statics and of dynamics, impose themselves by a reductio ad absurdum: everything must hold together or it will collapse." (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], "Towards a New Architecture", 1923)

"Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician." (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], "Towards a New Architecture", 1923)

"The axioms and provable theorems (i.e. the formulas that arise in this alternating game [namely formal deduction and the adjunction of new axioms]) are images of the thoughts that make up the usual procedure of traditional mathematics; but they are not themselves the truths in the absolute sense. Rather, the absolute truths are the insights" (Einsichten) that my proof theory furnishes into the provability and the consistency of these formal systems." (David Hilbert; Die logischen Grundlagen der Mathematik", Mathematische Annalen 88" (1), 1923)

"The fundamental concepts of each science, the instruments with which it pro pounds its questions and formulates its solutions, are regarded no longer as passive images of something but as symbols created by the intellect itself." (Ernst Cassirer, "The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms", 1923)

"These symbols are so constituted that the necessary logical consequences of the image are always images of the necessary natural consequences of the imagined objects." (Ernst Cassirer, "The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms", 1923)

"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)

"The sciences bring into play the imagination, the building of images in which the reality, of the past is blended with the ideals for the future, and from the picture there springs the prescience of genius." (William J Mayo, "Contributions of Pure Science to Progressive Medicine", The Journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 84" (20), 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)

"We wish to obtain a representation of phenomena and form an image of them in our minds. Till now, we have always attempted to form these images by means of the ordinary notions of time and space. These notions are perhaps innate; in any case they have been developed by our daily observations. For me, these notions are clear, and I confess that I am unable to gain any idea of physics without them. […] I would like to retain this ideal of other days and describe everything that occurs in this world in terms of clear pictures." (Hendrik A Lorentz, [Fifth Solvay Conference] 1927)

"Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order." (George H Mead, 1929)

"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)