"[…] key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions." (Meyer H Abrams, "The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition", 1953)
"Science, then, is the attentive consideration of common experience; it is common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same order as that of ordinary perception; memory, and understanding. Its test is found, like theirs, in actual intuition, which sometimes consists in perception and sometimes in intent." (George Santayana,"The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress", 1954)
"The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and the nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large." (Aldous Huxley, "The Doors of Perception", 1954)
"When, for instance, I see a symmetrical object, I feel its pleasurable quality, but do not need to assert explicitly to myself, ‘How symmetrical!’. This characteristic feature may be explained as follows. In the course of individual experience it is found generally that symmetrical objects possess exceptional and desirable qualities. Thus our own bodies are not regarded as perfectly formed unless they are symmetrical. Furthermore, the visual and tactual technique by which we perceive the symmetry of various objects is uniform, highly developed, and almost instantaneously applied. It is this technique which forms the associative 'pointer.' In consequence of it, the perception of any symmetrical object is accompanied by an intuitive aesthetic feeling of positive tone." (George D Birkhoff, "Mathematics of Aesthetics", 1956)
"So-called common sense relies on programmed nonperception, concealment, or ridicule of everything that doesn’t fit into the conventional nineteenth century vision of a world that can be explained down to the last detail." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)
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