📓On Literature: On Images (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art." (Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus", 1942)

"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against." (Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451", 1954

"The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell  [...] Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated." (William S Burroughs, "Naked Lunch", 1959)

"We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshiping it with our attention." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

🪷On Mind: On Images (Unsourced)

"A theory is a purely mental image of how something should be." (Adrian Bejan)

"Every addition or improvement to our knowledge, of whatsoever kind, comes from an exercise of our powers of perception. In necessary inference my observation is directed to a creation of my own imagination, a sort of diagram or image in which are portrayed the facts given in the premises; and the observation consists in recognizing relations between the parts of this diagram which were not noticed in constructing it." (Charles S Peirce)

"Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations." (Carl G Jung)

"Just as the stone thrown into the water becomes the centre and cause of various circles, [so] the sound made in the air spreads out in circles and fills the surrounding parts with an infinite number of images of itself." (Leonardo da Vinci)

"Symbolism transforms the phenomenon into the idea, and the idea into an image in such a fashion that in the image the idea remains infinitely active and incommensurable, and if all languages were used to express it, it would still remain inexpressible." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections")

"The man of science will acts as if this world were an absolute whole controlled by laws independent of his own thoughts or act; but whenever he discovers a law of striking simplicity or one of sweeping universality or one which points to a perfect harmony in the cosmos, he will be wise to wonder what role his mind has played in the discovery, and whether the beautiful image he sees in the pool of eternity reveals the nature of this eternity, or is but a reflection of his own mind." (Tobias Dantzig)

"The World-honored One has taught [that meditation has] four kinds of content. The first is that content accompanied by images for reflection, the second is that content not accompanied by images for reflection, the third is that content which extends to the limit of the phenomenal, and the fourth is that content which fulfills duty." (Samdhinirmocana Sutra [Xuanzang's translation])

"Time is to eternity as an image is to its exemplar, and those things which are temporal bear a resemblance to those things which are eternal." (Nicholas of Cusa)

"To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas." (Ivars Peterson)

"We call it 'explanation', but it is 'description' which distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We describe better - we explain just as little who came before us [...] We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our image!" (Friedrich W Nietzsche)

"You know how the divine Simplicity enfolds all things. Mind is the image of this enfolding Simplicity. If, then, you called this divine Simplicity infinite Mind, it will be the exemplar of our mind. If you called the divine mind the totality of the truth of things, you will call our mind the totality of the assimilation of things, so that it may be a totality of ideas. In the divine Mind conception is the production of things; in our mind conception is the knowledge of things. If the divine Mind is absolute Being, then its conception is the creation of beings; and conception in the human mind is the assimilation of beings." (Nicholas of Cusa)

🪷On Mind: On Images (2009-2019)

"Presumably, one can become a mathematical genius only if one has an outstanding capacity for forming vivid mental represen­tations of abstract mathematical concepts - mental images that soon turn into an illusion, eclipsing the human origins of mathematical objects and endowing them with the semblance of an independent existence." (Stanislas Dehaene," The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics", 2011)

"The second law states that a general tendency in the universe" (as a closed system) is toward elimination of all differences. Thus, the ultimate state is sameness and randomness, a chaotic simplicity. Entropy" (S), the measure of randomness, will therefore always increase. However, we know that living systems are neg-entropic" (–S). They are able not only to negate this formidable process by differentiation, but also to move toward a predefined order, an organized complexity. Using the formula I = –S, which indicates that a neg-entropic system must have information, one might conclude that movement toward complexity and order is only possible if the system has a means of knowing and an internal image of what it wants to be." (Jamshid Gharajedaghi, "Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity A Platform for Designing Business Architecture" 3rd Ed., 2011)

"A theory is a purely mental image of how something should be. In other words, the thought in the dark" (with eyes closed) comes first, and the comparison with nature" (eyes open) comes later. If the imagined agrees with the real, then the theory is correct." (Adrian Bejan, [interview] 2012)

"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs. […] The concept of images is central to the theory. They represent visions held by individuals and organisations that constitute how they believe the world should exist. When considering individuals, the theory refers to these images as the value image, trajectory image and strategic image. The value image is based on an individual’s ethics, morals and beliefs. The trajectory images encompass the decision maker’s goals and aspirations. Finally, for each trajectory image, a decision maker may have one or more strategic images that contain their plans, tactics and forecasts for their goal. […] In an organisational decision-making setting, these images are referred to as culture, vision and strategy." (Christopher B Stephenson, "What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?", 2012)

"The concept of infinity embedded in fractals' identity provides an infinity of possibilities to explore in a single image. The repetition of a formula is the key to becoming more familiar with it. When trying a completely new formula, all fractal artists are engaged in the same activity - a random playing around." (Mehrdad Garousi, "The Postmodern Beauty of Fractals", Leonardo Vol. 45" (1), 2012)

"Information is recorded in vast interconnecting networks. Each idea or image has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of associations and is connected to numerous other points in the mental network." (Peter Russell, "The Brain Book: Know Your Own Mind and How to Use it", 2013)

"Thus, when we speak of a mathematical concept, we speak not of a single isolated mental image, but rather of a family of mutually correcting mental images. They are privately owned, but publicly checked, examined, corrected, and accepted or rejected. This is the role of the mathematical research community, how it indoctrinates and certifies new members, how it reviews, accepts or rejects proposed publication, how it chooses directions of research to follow and develop, or to ignore and allow to die. All these social activities are based on a necessary condition: that the individual members have mental models that fit together, that yield the same answers to test questions. A new branch of mathematics is established when consensus is reached about the possible test questions and their answers. That collection of possible questions and answers" (not necessarily explicit) becomes the means of accepting or rejecting proposed new members." (Reuben Hersh,"Mathematical Intuition: Poincaré, Pólya, Dewey" [in"The Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy" (CFL) Condition", 2013])

"To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively." (Edward O Wilson, "Letters to a Young Scientist", 2013)

"We identify and analyze distorting mental models that constitute experience in a manner that occludes the moral dimension of situations from view, thereby thwarting the first step of ethical decision-making. Examples include an unexamined moral self-image, viewing oneself as merely a bystander, and an exaggerated conception of self-sufficiency. These mental models, we argue, generate blind spots to ethics, in the sense that they limit our ability to see facts that are right before our eyes – sometimes quite literally, as in the many examples of managers and employees who see unethical behavior take place in front of them, but do not recognize it as such." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)

"Mental imagery is often useful in problem solving. Verbal descriptions of problems can become confusing, and a mental image can clear away excessive detail to bring out important aspects of the problem. Imagery is most useful with problems that hinge on some spatial relationship. However, if the problem requires an unusual solution, mental imagery alone can be misleading, since it is difficult to change one’s understanding of a mental image. In many cases, it helps to draw a concrete picture since a picture can be turned around, played with, and reinterpreted, yielding new solutions in a way that a mental image cannot." (James Schindler, "Followership", 2014)

"A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. […] Because the details of mental representations can differ dramatically from field to field, it’s hard to offer an overarching definition that is not too vague, but in essence these representations are preexisting patterns of information - facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on - that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations." (Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool," Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise", 2016)

"Geometric pattern repeated at progressively smaller scales, where each iteration is about a reproduction of the image to produce completely irregular shapes and surfaces that can not be represented by classical geometry. Fractals are generally self-similar" (each section looks at all) and are not subordinated to a specific scale. They are used especially in the digital modeling of irregular patterns and structures in nature." (Mauro Chiarella, "Folds and Refolds: Space Generation, Shapes, and Complex Components", 2016)

"Most of us have difficulty figuring probabilities and statistics in our heads and detecting subtle patterns in complex tables of numbers. We prefer vivid pictures, images, and stories. When making decisions, we tend to overweight such images and stories, compared to statistical information. We also tend to misunderstand or misinterpret graphics." (Daniel J Levitin, "Weaponized Lies", 2017)

"Images are generally resistant to change and ignore messages that do not conform to their internal settings. Sometimes, however, they do react and can alter in an incremental or even revolutionary manner. Humans can talk about and share their images and, in the symbolic universe they create, reflect upon what is and what might be." (Michael C Jackson, "Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity", 2019)

🪷On Mind: On Images (2000-2009)

"Because feeling does not have a form; it has to be treated like an inner sensation which can only be understood in terms of the images it triggers. These images do not, however, represent the feeling as such, for they are independently existing representations or fantasies that are merely associated at the moment of pleasure or pain." (Angelika Rauch, "The Hieroglyph of Tradition: Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant", 2000)

"To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect." (Dion Fortune," Spiritualism and Occultism", 2000)

"When we acquire a language we don’t simply learn how to use the correct words, grammar and conventions for speaking appropriately in context, we also acquire a ‘world view’: an implicit set of assumptions and presuppositions regarding how to understand the world, who and what we are within it, and everything else that is entailed in categorising our experience." (Michael Forrester," Psychology of the Image", 2000)

"When we talk of seeing an image, either in front of us or visualised with closed eyes, we invoke a range of metaphors and ideas which highlight the relationship between perception and imagery. For those of us with unimpaired vision, to see with ‘the mind’s eye’ conjures up a picture of perception where there is not a great deal of difference between an external or internal image." (Michael Forrester," Psychology of the Image", 2000)

"Quantum theory forces us to see the limits of our abilities to make images, to create metaphors, and push language to its ends. As we struggle to gaze into the limits of nature we dimly begin to discern something hidden in the dark shadows. That something consists of ourselves, our minds, our language, our intellect, and our imagination, all of which have been stretched to their limits." (F David Peat, "From Certainty to Uncertainty", 2002)

"We start from vague pictures or ideas […] which we encapsulate by rules, and then we discover that those rules persuade us to modify our mental images. We engage in a dialog between our mental images and our ability to justify them via equations. As we understand what we are investigating more clearly, the pictures become sharper and the equations more elaborate. Only at the end of the process does anything like a formal set of axioms followed by logical proofs" (E Brian Davies,"Science in the Looking Glass", 2003)

"If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant." (Edward R Tufte, "The cognitive style of PowerPoint", 2003)

"Science does not speak of the world in the language of words alone, and in many cases it simply cannot do so. The natural language of science is a synergistic integration of words, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps, equations, tables, charts, and other forms of visual and mathematical expression. [… Science thus consists of] the languages of visual representation, the languages of mathematical symbolism, and the languages of experimental operations." (Jay Lemke, "Teaching all the languages of science: Words, symbols, images and actions", 2003)

"We start from vague pictures or ideas […] which we encapsulate by rules, and then we discover that those rules persuade us to modify our mental images. We engage in a dialog between our mental images and our ability to justify them via equations. As we understand what we are investigating more clearly, the pictures become sharper and the equations more elaborate. Only at the end of the process does anything like a formal set of axioms followed by logical proofs" (E Brian Davies, "Science in the Looking Glass", 2003)

"Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image." (Antoni Tàpies, "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003", 2004)

"I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either." (Antoni Tàpies, "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003", 2004)

"A conceptual model is a mental image of a system, its components, its interactions. It lays the foundation for more elaborate models, such as physical or numerical models. A conceptual model provides a framework in which to think about the workings of a system or about problem solving in general. An ensuing operational model can be no better than its underlying conceptualization." (Henry N Pollack, "Uncertain Science … Uncertain World", 2005)

"Patterns experienced again and again become intuitions. […] Intuitive judgments are made by our use of imagery; intuition is the result of mental model building. […] The mental model used and the form of the intuition is dependent upon the question being answered." (Roger Frantz,"Two Minds", 2005)

"We must begin by distinguishing between visual mental imagery and visual perception: Visual perception occurs while a stimulus is being viewed, and includes functions such as visual recognition" (i. e., registering that a stimulus is familiar) and identification" (i. e., recalling the name, context, or other information associated with the object). Two types of mechanisms are used in visual perception: ‘bottom-up’ mechanisms are driven by the input from the eyes; in contrast, ‘top-down’ mechanisms make use of stored information" (such as knowledge, belief, expectations, and goals). Visual mental imagery is a set of representations that gives rise to the experience of viewing a stimulus in the absence of appropriate sensory input. In this case, information in memory underlies the internal events that produce the experience. Unlike afterimages, mental images are relatively prolonged." (Stephen M Kosslyn, "Mental images and the brain", Cognitive Neuropsychology 22, 2005)

"When a particular image appears in the mind's eye often enough it begins to connect apparently unrelated ideas leading to models and theories. […] Patterns experienced again and again become intuitions. […] Intuitive judgments are made by our use of imagery; intuition is the result of mental model building. […] The mental model used and the form of the intuition is dependent upon the question being answered." (Roger Frantz,"Two Minds", 2005)

"According to mental model theory, human reasoning relies on the construction of integrated mental representations of the information that is given in the reasoning problem's premises. These integrated representations are the mental models. A mental model is a mental representation that captures what is common to all the different ways in which the premises can be interpreted. It represents in small scale" how "reality" could be— according to what is stated in the premises of a reasoning problem. Mental models, though, must not be confused with images. A mental model often forms the basis of one or more visual images, but some of them represent situations that cannot be visualized. Instead, mental models are often likened to diagrams since, as with diagrams, their structure is analogous to the structure of the states of affairs they represent." (Carsten Held et al, "Mental Models and the Mind", 2006)

"But because of the way in which depictions represent, there is a correspondence between parts and spatial relations of the representation and those of the object; this structural mapping, which confers a type of resemblance, underlies the way images convey specific content. In this respect images are like pictures. Unlike words and symbols, depictions are not arbitrarily paired with what they represent." (Stephen Kosslyn et al," The Case for Mental Imagery", 2006)

"In mental model theory, it is assumed that information from long-term memory is used to generate a mental model. In an additional step, subjects sometimes use the produced model, supplemented by additional information from long-term memory, to generate an image. Whereas the mental model is basically a spatial representation and can contain symbols, the image is richer, it contains visual information. For that reason, a model can represent a set of alternative classes of situations; it cannot be visualized, in contrast to a visual image. This is the reason why mental models are a distinct form of mental representation." (Verena Gottschling, "Mental Models and the Mind", Advances in Psychology, 2006)

"Mathematicians have always needed to ‘see’ the complex concepts they work with in order to reason with them effectively. In the past, they conjured up mental images as best they could, but the wonders of computer graphics provide them with far more detailed pictures to think with." (Richard Palais and Luc Bernard, "2006 Visualization Project", 2006)

"Mental models can be literal representations of the external world" (as they often are with visual imagery) or arbitrary representations" (as they are with propositional, mathematical, or verbal models). In either case, they are explanatory or descriptive representations of the external world." (Gregory J Feist,"The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind", 2006)

"Metaphorizing is a manner of thinking, not a property of thinking. It is a capacity of thought, not its quality. It represents a mental operation by which a previously existing entity is described in the characteristics of another one on the basis of some similarity or by reasoning. When we say that something is" (like) something else, we have already performed a mental operation. This operation includes elements such as comparison, paralleling and shaping of the new image by ignoring its less satisfactory traits in order that this image obtains an aesthetic value. By this process, for an instant we invent a device, which serves as the pole vault for the comparison’s jump. Once the jump is made the pole vault is removed. This device could be a lightning-speed logical syllogism, or a momentary created term, which successfully merges the traits of the compared objects." (Ivan Mladenov, "Conceptualizing Metaphors: On Charles Peirce’s marginalia", 2006)

"Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again." (Thomas Merton, "Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton", 2006)

"We solve easy problems in routine ways, scarcely thinking about how we accomplish these - but when our usual methods don't work, we start to 'reflect' on what went wrong and find ourselves to be switching around in a network of 'models', each of which purports to represent some facet or aspect of ourselves, so that we end representing ourselves with a loosely connected collection of images, models, and anecdotes." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind", 2006)

"But notice, a subatomic particle is itself a holon [hole/parts]. And so is a cell. And so is a symbol, and an image, and a concept. What all of those entities are, before they are anything else, is a holon. So the world is not composed of atoms or symbols or cells or concepts. It is composed of holons." (Ken Wilber, "A Brief History of Everything", 2007)

"A mental model is an internal representation with analogical relations to its referential object, so that local and temporal aspects of the object are preserved. It comes somewhat close to the mental images people report having in their minds whilst processing information. The great advantage of the notion of mental models, however, is its ability to include the notion of a partner model and the notion of a situation model. Thus, mental models can build a bridge to the other two dimensions of communication, namely interaction and situation." (Gert Rickheit et al, "The concept of communicative competence" [in "Handbook of Communication Competence"], 2008)

"Images and pictures […] have played a key role in shaping our scientific picture of the world. […] Carefully constructed families of pictures can act as a calculus all their own. Like any successful systems of symbols, with an appropriate grammar they enlarge the number of things that we can do without consciously thinking." (John D Barrow, "Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science", 2008)

"When the words are used without mental image or concrete objects, we label them as metaphor. […] While concepts are being internalised, language is not only appropriated but metaphorised." (Lynne Cameron, "Metaphor in the construction of a learning environment", 2008)

"Images are not just minor variations on perception and thought, of negligible theoretical interest; they are a robust mental category in need of independent investigation." (Colin McGinn, Mindsight, 2009)

"[mental] images are sui generis, and should be added as a third great category of intentionality to the twin pillars of perception and cognition […] Neither is it at all obvious that images necessarily carry a [conceptual] thought component […] Images are not just minor variations on perception and thought, of negligible theoretical interest; they are a robust mental category in need of independent investigation." (Colin McGinn, Mindsight, 2009)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1990-1999)

"Images are defined to be information structures, with different kind of images representing different kind of information about what the actor is doing, why and how, and what kind of progress is being made." (Terence R. Mitchell & Lee R Beach, "Organizational behavior and human decision processes", 1990)

"'Mental models' are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior. […] Mental models focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world. [...] Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", 1990)

"[…] new insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works [...] images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations." (Peter M Senge, "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", 1990)

"Perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be 'interpreted' much like physical objects." (Ronald A. Finke, "Creative Imagery", 1990)

"A distinctive feature of mathematics, that feature in virtue of which it stands as a paradigmatically rational discipline, is that assertions are not accepted without proof. […] By proof is meant a deductively valid, rationally compelling argument which shows why this must be so, given what it is to be a triangle. But arguments always have premises so that if there are to be any proofs there must also be starting points, premises which are agreed to be necessarily true, self-evident, neither capable of, nor standing in need of, further justification. The conception of mathematics as a discipline in which proofs are required must therefore also be a conception of a discipline in which a systematic and hierarchical order is imposed on its various branches. Some propositions appear as first principles, accepted without proof, and others are ordered on the basis of how directly they can be proved from these first principle. Basic theorems, once proved, are then used to prove further results, and so on. Thus there is a sense in which, so long as mathematicians demand and provide proofs, they must necessarily organize their discipline along lines approximating to the pattern to be found in Euclid's Elements." (Mary Tiles,"Mathematics and the Image of Reason" , 1991)

"Hard though the scientists of mental imagery try, they cannot get around the fact that the representations they deal with are like pictures. […] The methods have to assume, and the experiments continually corroborate, that having imagery is somehow like perceptual seeing, and that it is somehow like seeing pictures. […] The minimal reason for this assumption is that people do naturally talk of seeing pictures before their mind’s eye." (Eva T H Brann,"The World of Imagination", 1991)

"The most persuasive positive argument for mental images as objects is [that] whenever one thinks one is seeing something there must be something one is seeing. It might be an object directly, or it might be a mental picture. [This] point is so plausible that it is deniable only at the peril of becoming arbitrary. One should concede that the question whether mental images are entities of some sort is not resolvable by logical or linguistic analysis, and believe what makes sense of experience." (Eva T H Brann,"The World of Imagination" , 1991)

"The vision and the core values inspire the creation of the image, but the core ideas are the stuff" of which the image is made. The core ideas that designers generated in the course of using the framework will have to be arranged in sets that enhance the creation of the image and the design of the system." " (Béla H Bánáthy, "Systems Design of Education", 1991)

"For a musician, visualization is the process of picturing in our minds eye what we hear in our mind's ear. Visualization is something we all do. In fact, putting a visual form before the mind's eye or forming a mental image is something that precedes most things that we do." (Jerry Bergonzi, "Melodic Structures", 1992)

"Mathematical modeling is about rules - the rules of reality. What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of ‘model’, is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors." (John L Casti, "Reality Rules: The Fundamentals", 1992)

"The popular image of mathematics as a collection of precise facts, linked together by well-defined logical paths, is revealed to be false. There is randomness and hence uncertainty in mathematics, just as there is in physics." (Paul Davis, "The Mind of God", 1992)

"It is astonishingly beautiful and interesting, how thought is absent when you have an insight. Thought cannot have an insight. It is only when the mind is not operating mechanically in the structure of thought that you have an insight. Having had an insight, thought draws a conclusion from that insight. And then thought acts and thought is mechanical. So I have to find out whether having an insight into myself, which means into the world, and not drawing a conclusion from it is possible. If I draw a conclusion, I act on an idea, on an image, on a symbol, which is the structure of thought, and so I am constantly preventing myself from having insight, from understanding things as they are." (Jiddu Krishnamurti," On Mind and Thought", 1993)

"A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible." (Diederick Aerts et al, "World views: From Fragmentation to Integration", 1994)

"A world view is a system of co-ordinates or a frame of reference in which everything presented to us by our diverse experiences can be placed. It is a symbolic system of representation that allows us to integrate everything we know about the world and ourselves into a global picture, one that illuminates reality as it is presented to us within a certain culture. […] A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible." (Diederick Aerts et al, World views: From Fragmentation to Integration", 1994)

"Every mathematician knows and can give many examples from his scientific work when it appears much more difficult to feel or 'see' a correct hypothesis than later to prove it. Visual images are particularlyo ften used in geometry and topology where one has to work with multidimensional objects which, in principle, do not always admit picturing in a three-dimensional space." (Anatolij Fomenko, "Visual Geometry and Topology", 1994)

"Geometrical intuition plays an essential role in contemporary algebro-topological and geometric studies. Many profound scientific mathematical papers devoted to multi-dimensional geometry use intensively the 'visual slang' such as, say, 'cut the surface', 'glue together the strips', 'glue the cylinder', 'evert the sphere' , etc., typical of the studies of two and three-dimensional images. Such a terminology is not a caprice of mathematicians, but rather a 'practical necessity' since its employment and the mathematical thinking in these terms appear to be quite necessary for the proof of technically very sophisticated results.(Anatolij Fomenko, "Visual Geometry and Topology", 1994)

"I believe that philosophy is part of literature, and not the reverse. Writing is not possible without images. Yet, images don't have to be descriptive; they can be concepts […]. Concepts are mental images." (Paul Virilio, [interview with Louise Wilson] 1994)

"[...] images are probably the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated and regardless of whether they are about a thing or a process involving things; or about words or other symbols, in a given language, which correspond to a thing or process. Hidden behind those images, never or rarely knowable by us, there are indeed numerous processes that guide the generation and deployment of those images in space and time. Those processes utilize rules and strategies embodied in dispositional representations. They are essential for our thinking but are not a content of our thoughts." (Antonio R Damasio, "Descartes' Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", 1994)

"Just as music comes alive in the performance of it, the same is true of mathematics. The symbols on the page have no more to do with mathematics than the notes on a page of music. They simply represent the experience." (Keith Devlin, "Mathematics: The Science of Patterns", 1994)

"Mental models are the images, assumptions, and stories which we carry in our minds of ourselves, other people, institutions, and every aspect of the world. Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see. Human beings cannot navigate through the complex environments of our world without cognitive ‘mental maps’; and all of these mental maps, by definition, are flawed in some way." (Peter M Senge et al, "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization", 1994)

"Modem geometry and topology take a special place in mathematics because many of the objects they deal with are treated using visual methods. […] Each mathematician has his own system of concepts of the intrinsic geometry of his" (specific) mathematical world and visual images which he associated with some or other abstract concepts of mathematics" (including algebra, number theory, analysis, etc.). It is noteworthy that sometimes one and the same abstraction brings about the same visual picture in different mathematicians, but these pictures born by imagination are in most cases very difficult to represent graphically, so to say, to draw." (Anatolij Fomenko, "Visual Geometry and Topology", 1994)

"A number is a process that has long ago been thingified so thoroughly that everybody thinks of it as a thing. It is just as feasible-though less familiar to most of us-to think of an operation or a function as a thing. For example, we might talk of square root" as if it were a thing- and I mean here not the square root of any particular number, but the function itself. In this image, the square-root function is a kind of sausage machine: you stuff a number in at one end and its square root pops out at the other." (Ian Stewart, "Nature's Numbers: The unreal reality of mathematics", 1995)

"The image of mathematics raised by this description of its basic objects is something like a tree, rooted in numbers and branching into ever more esoteric data structures as you proceed from trunk to bough, bough to limb, limb to twig…" (Ian Stewart, "Nature's Numbers: The unreal reality of mathematics", 1995)

"When we visually perceive the world, we do not just process information; we have a subjective experience of color, shape, and depth. We have experiences associated with other senses" (think of auditory experiences of music, or the ineffable nature of smell experiences), with bodily sensations" (e.g., pains, tickles, and orgasms), with mental imagery" (e.g., the colored shapes that appear when one tubs one's eyes), with emotion" (the sparkle of happiness, the intensity of anger, the weight of despair), and with the stream of conscious thought." (David Chalmers, "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience", Scientific American, 1995)

"Artificial intelligence comprises methods, tools, and systems for solving problems that normally require the intelligence of humans. The term intelligence is always defined as the ability to learn effectively, to react adaptively, to make proper decisions, to communicate in language or images in a sophisticated way, and to understand." (Nikola K Kasabov, "Foundations of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, and Knowledge Engineering", 1996)

"Generalization is the process of matching new, unknown input data with the problem knowledge in order to obtain the best possible solution, or one close to it. Generalization means reacting properly to new situations, for example, recognizing new images, or classifying new objects and situations. Generalization can also be described as a transition from a particular object description to a general concept description. This is a major characteristic of all intelligent systems." (Nikola K Kasabov, "Foundations of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, and Knowledge Engineering", 1996)

"If we are to have meaningful, connected experiences; ones that we can comprehend and reason about; we must be able to discern patterns to our actions, perceptions, and conceptions. Underlying our vast network of interrelated literal meanings" (all of those words about objects and actions) are those imaginative structures of understanding such as schema and metaphor, such as the mental imagery that allows us to extrapolate a path, or zoom in on one part of the whole, or zoom out until the trees merge into a forest." (William H Calvin, "The Cerebral Code", 1996)

"Our mental model of the way the world works must shift from images of a clockwork, machinelike universe that is fixed and determined, to the model of a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected, and full of living qualities." (Joseph Jaworski, "Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership", 1996)

"The logic of the emotional mind is associative; it takes elements that symbolize a reality, or trigger a memory of it, to be the same as that reality. That is why similes, metaphors and images speak directly to the emotional mind." (Daniel Goleman, "Emotional Intelligence", 1996)

"The power of images consists largely in the fact that they integrate different types of knowledge and experience." (David Gooding, "Creative Rationality", 1996)

"The role of science, like that of art, is to blend proximate imagery with more distant meaning, the parts we already understand with those given as new into larger patterns that are coherent enough to be acceptable as truth. Biologists know this relation by intuition during the course of fieldwork, as they struggle to make order out of the infinitely varying patterns of nature." (Edward O Wilson, "In Search of Nature", 1996)

"The seemingly stable scene you normally see is really a mental model that you construct - the eyes are actually darting all around, producing a retinal image as jerky as an amateur video, and some of what you thought you saw was instead filled in from memory." (William H Calvin, "How Brains Think", 1996)

"Discourses are ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic of practice: a cluster" (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society. These discursive formations, as they are known, define what is and is not appropriate in our formulation of, and our practices in relation to, a particular subject or site of social activity." (Stuart Hall, "Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices", 1997)

"Ideas about organization are always based on implicit images or metaphors that persuade us to see, understand, and manage situations in a particular way. Metaphors create insight. But they also distort. They have strengths. But they also have limitations. In creating ways of seeing, they create ways of not seeing. There can be no single theory or metaphor that gives an all-purpose point of view, and there can be no simple correct theory" for structuring everything we do. The challenge facing modern managers is to become accomplished in the art of using metaphor to find new ways of seeing, understanding, and shaping their actions." (Gareth Morgan, "Imaginization", 1997)

"Suppose the reasoning centers of the brain can get their hands on the mechanisms that plop shapes into the array and that read their locations out of it. Those reasoning demons can exploit the geometry of the array as a surrogate for keeping certain logical constraints in mind. Wealth, like location on a line, is transitive: if A is richer than B, and B is richer than C, then A is richer than C. By using location in an image to symbolize wealth, the thinker takes advantage of the transitivity of location built into the array, and does not have to enter it into a chain of deductive steps. The problem becomes a matter of plop down and look up. It is a fine example of how the form of a mental representation determines what is easy or hard to think." (Steven Pinker, "How the Mind Works", 1997)

"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)

"We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible." (Lewis H Lapham, "Waiting For The Barbarians", 1997)

"Intuition isn't direct perception of something external. It's the effect in the mind/brain of manipulating concrete objects - at a later stage, of making marks on paper, and still later, manipulating mental images. This experience leaves a trace, an effect, in your mind/brain." (Reuben Hersh, "What Is Mathematics, Really?", 1998)

"Specialization, once a maneuver methodically to collect information, now is a manifestation of information overloads. The role of information has changed. Once justified as a means of comprehending the world, it now generates a conflicting and contradictory, fleeting and fragmentation field of disconnected and undigested data." (Stelarc, From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-human Entities, 1998)

"According to the representational format claim, images constitute a class of mental models that is particularly suited to represent visually perceptible information. More specifically, an image can be conceived of as a viewer centered projection of an underlying mental model which, in turn, represents spatiotemporal aspects of external objects or events. Unlike propositional or network representations, images depict, rather than describe, a particular state of affairs." (Gert Rickheit & Lorenz Sichelschmidt, "Mental Models: Some Answers, Some Questions, Some Suggestions", 1999)"

"Cultural archetypes are the unconscious models that help us make sense of the world: they are the myths, narratives, images, symbols, and files into which we organize the data of our life experience" (Clotaire Rapaille,"Cultural Imprints", Executive Excellence Vol. 16 (10), 1999)

"Imagining the unseeable is hard, because imagining means having an image in your mind. And how can you have a mental image of something you have never seen? Like perception itself, the models of science are embedded inextricably in the current worldview we call culture." (K C Cole, "First You Build a Cloud and Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life", 1999)

"In order to be able to embrace a multitude of external situations, mental models must cope with a variety of representational formats - from quasi-verbal propositions to quasi-pictorial images. " (Gert Rickheit & Lorenz Sichelschmidt, "Mental Models: Some Answers, Some Questions, Some Suggestions", 1999)

"Metaphors can have profound signi?cance because, as images or ?gures, they allow the mind to grasp or discover unsuspected ideal and material relationships between objects." (Giuseppe Del Re, "Cosmic Dance", 1999)

"The spirit of mathematics and the essence of its beauty is remarkably fragile, because mathematics is about ideas and about thought. Mathematics takes place in the mind, and no two minds are the same. After many years of study and work, a mathematician may stumble on a vast and beautiful vista that unifies and simplifies many things that once appeared disparate and complicated. Mathematicians can share a beautiful mathematical vista with one another, but there is no camera that can easily capture an image of such a vista to convey it in full to people who have not trudged along many of the same trails." (Silvio Levy,"The Eightfold Way: The Beauty of Klein’s Quartic Curve", 1999)

"Within image theory, it is suggested that important components of decision-making processes are the different 'images' that a person may use to evaluate choice options. Images may represent a person's principles, goals, or plans. Decision options may then match or not match these images and be adopted, rejected, considered further, depending on circumstances." (Deborah J Terry & Michael A Hogg, "Attitudes, Behavior, and Social Context: The Role of Norms and Group Membership", 1999)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1980-1989)

"A mental image occurs when a representation of the type created during the initial phases of perception is present but the stimulus is not actually being perceived; such representations preserve the perceptible properties of the stimulus and ultimately give rise to the subjective experience of perception." (Stephen M Kosslyn, "Image and Mind", 1980)

"It is erroneous to equate image representations with mental photographs, since this would overlook the fact that images are composed from highly processed perceptual encodings." (Stephen Kosslyn, "Image and Mind", 1980)

"Like pictures, images seem to depict information about interval spatial extents. The scanning experiments support the claim that portions of images depict corresponding portions of the represented objects, and that the spatial relations between portions of the image index the spatial relations between the corresponding portions of the imaged objects." (Stephen Kosslyn," Image and Mind", 1980)

"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)

"[…] statistics is the science that deals with distributions and proportions in actual" (large but finite) classes" (also called ‘populations’, ‘aggregates’, ‘ensembles’) of actual things." (Bas C van Frassen,"The Scientic Image", 1980)

"These organizational processes result in our perceptions being structured into units corresponding to objects and properties of objects. It is these larger units that may be stored and later assembled into images that are experienced as quasi-pictorial, spatial entities resembling those evoked during perception itself [...] It is erroneous to equate image representations with mental photographs, since this would overlook the fact that images are composed from highly processed perceptual encodings." (Stephen Kosslyn, "Image and Mind", 1980)

"This is why thought as power which has not always existed, is born from an outside [duration] more distant than an external world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts an inside, an un thinkable or unthought, deeper than any internal world. […] Thought outside itself and this unthought within thought." (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 2: The Time-Image", 1980)

"What is in the present is what the image ‘represents‘, but not the image itself which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships from which the variable present only flows. […] What is specific in the image, as soon as it is creative, is to make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow them - selves to be reduced to the present." (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 2: The Time-Image", 1980)

"A person who thinks by images becomes less and less capable of thinking by reasoning, and vice versa. The intellectual process based on images is contradictory to the intellectual process of reasoning that is related to the word. There are two different ways of dealing with an object. They involve not only different approaches, but even more important, opposing mental attitudes. This is not a matter of complementary processes, such as analysis and synthesis or logic and dialectic. These processes lack any qualitative common denominator." (Jacques Ellul, "The Humiliation of the Word", 1981)

"Mathematics associates new mental images with […] physical abstractions; these images are almost tangible to the trained mind but are far removed from those that are given directly by life and physical experience." (Yuri I Manin, "Mathematics and Physics", 1981)

"That is to say, intuition is not a direct perception of something existing externally and eternally. It is the effect in the mind of certain experiences of activity and manipulation of concrete objects" (at a later stage, of marks on paper or even mental images). As a result of this experience, there is something" (a trace, an effect) in the pupil's mind which is his representation of the integers. But his representation is equivalent to mine, in the sense that we both get die same answer to any question you ask - or if we get different answers, we can compare notes and figure out what's right. We do this, not because we have been taught a set of algebraic rules, but because our mental pictures match each other." (Philip J Davis & Reuben Hersh, "The Mathematical Experience", 1981)

"The formalist makes a distinction between geometry as a deductive structure and geometry as a descriptive science. Only the first is regarded as mathematical. The use of pictures or diagrams, or even mental imagery, all are non- mathematical. In principle, they should be unnecessary. Consequently. he regards them as inappropriate in a mathematics text, perhaps even in a mathematics class." (Philip J Davis & Reuben Hersh, "The Mathematical Experience", 1981)

"The thinking person goes over the same ground many times. He looks at it from varying points of view - his own, his arch-enemy’s, others’. He diagrams it, verbalizes it, formulates equations, constructs visual images of the whole problem, or of troublesome parts, or of what is clearly known. But he does not keep a detailed record of all this mental work, indeed could not. […] Deep understanding of a domain of knowledge requires knowing it in various ways. This multiplicity of perspectives grows slowly through hard work and sets the state for the re-cognition we experience as a new insight." (Howard E Gruber, "Darwin on Man", 1981)

"Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information." (David Marr, "Vision", 1982)

"External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?" (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 1: The Movement Image", 1983)

"Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life." (Sam Keen, "The Passionate Life", 1983)

"Since mental models can take many forms and serve many purposes, their contents are very varied. They can contain nothing but tokens that represent individuals and identities between them, as in the sorts of models that are required for syllogistic reasoning. They can represent spatial relations between entities, and the temporal or causal relations between events. A rich imaginary model of the world can be used to compute the projective relations required for an image. Models have a content and form that fits them to their purpose, whether it be to explain, to predict, or to control." (Philip Johnson-Laird, "Mental models: Toward a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness", 1983)

"The physicist […] engages in complex and difficult calculations, involving the manipulating of ideal, mathematical quantities that, at first glance, are wholly lacking in the music of the living world and the beauty of the resplendent cosmos. It would seem as if there exists no relationship between these quantities and reality. Yet these ideal numbers that cannot be grasped by one's senses, these numbers that only are meaningful from within the system itself, only meaningful as part of abstract mathematical functions, symbolize the image of existence. […] As a result of scientific man's creativity there arises an ordered, illumined, determined world, imprinted with the stamp of creative intellect, of pure reason and clear cognition. From the midst of the order and lawfulness we hear a new song, the song of the creature to the Creator, the song of the cosmos to its Maker." (Joseph B Soloveitchik, "Halakhic Man", 1983)

"The thing and the perception of the thing are one amid the same thing, one and the same image, but related in one or other of two systems of reference. The thing is the image as it is in itself, as it is related to all the other images to whose action it completely submits and on which it reacts immediately. But the perception of the thing is the same image related to another special image which frames it, and which only retains a partial action from it, and only reacts to it mediately." (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 1: The Movement Image", 1983)

"In medical science arguments are going on between behaviorists who perceive the function of brain as a multitude of simple and unconscious conditioned reflexes, and cognitivists who insist that humans sensing the surrounding world create its mental image which can be considered as memory of facts." (Yevgeniy Chazov, "Tragedy and Triumph of Reason", 1985)

"That is to say, intuition is not a direct perception of something existing externally and eternally. It is the effect in the mind of certain experiences of activity and manipulation of concrete objects" (at a later stage, of marks on paper or even mental images)." (Philip J Davis & Reuben Hersh,"The Mathematical Experience", 1985)

"Any system that insulates itself from diversity in the environment tends to atrophy and lose its complexity and distinctive nature." (Gareth Morgan, "Images of Organization", 1986)

"Organizations are complex and paradoxical phenomena that can be understood in many different ways. Many of our taken-for-granted ideas about organizations are metaphorical, even though we may not recognize them as such. For example, we frequently talk about organizations as if they were machines designed to achieve predetermined goals and objectives, and which should operate smoothly and efficiently. And as a result of this kind of thinking, we often attempt to organize and manage them in a mechanistic way, forcing their human qualities into a background role. By using different metaphors to understand the complex and paradoxical character of organizational life, we are able to manage and design organizations in ways that we may not have thought possible before." (Gareth Morgan, "Images of Organization", 1986)

"An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking." (Gilles Deleuze,"Dialogues II", 1987)

"[...] modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas." (Ivars Peterson, "The Mathematical Tourist", 1988)

"To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas." (Ivars Peterson, "The Mathematical Tourist", 1988)

"What were the needs that led me to single out a few of these monsters, calling them fractals, to add some of their close or distant kin, and then to build a geometric language around them? The original need happens to have been purely utilitarian. That links exist between usefulness and beauty is, of course, well known. What we call the beauty of a flower attracts the insects that will gather and spread its pollen. Thus the beauty of a flower is useful - even indispensable - to the survival of its species. Similarly, it was the attractiveness of the fractal images that first brought them to the attention of many colleagues and then of a wide world." (Benoît B Mandelbrot, "Fractals and an Art for the Sake of Science", Leonardo [Supplemental Issue], 1989)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1970-1979)

"Science is a product of man, of his mind; and science creates the real world in its own image." (Frank E Egler, "The Way of Science", 1970)

"The eye projects and focuses the inner image" (idea) onto the physical world in the same manner that a motion picture camera transfers an image onto a screen. The mouth creates words. The ears create sound. The difficulty in understanding this principle is due to the fact that we’ve taken it for granted that the image and sound already exist for the senses to interpret. Actually the senses are the channels of creation by which idea is projected into material expression." (Jane Roberts, "The Seth Material", 1970)

"Each of us uses models constantly. Every person in his private life and in his business life instinctively uses models for decision making. The mental image of the world around you which you carry in your head is a model. […] A mental image is a model. All our decisions are taken on the basis of models." (Jay W Forrester, "Counter-Intuitive Behaviour of Social Systems", Technological Review 73, 1971)

"The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system." (Jay W Forrester, "Counter-Intuitive Behaviour of Social Systems", Technological Review 73, 1971)

"Images apparently occupy a curious position somewhere between the statements of language, which are intended to convey a meaning, and the things of nature, to which we only can give a meaning." (Ernst Gombrich, "Symbolic Images", 1972)

"The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images." (Kenneth E Boulding, [foreword] 1972)

"There are two subcategories of holist called irredundant holists and redundant holists. Students of both types image an entire system of facts or principles. Though an irredundant holist's image is rightly interconnected, it contains only relevant and essential constitents. In contrast, redundant holists entertain images that contain logically irrelevant or overspecific material, commonly derived from data used to 'enrich' the curriculum, and these students embed the salient facts and principles in a network of redundant items. Though logically irrelevant, the items in question are of great psychological importance to a 'redundant holist', since he uses them to access, retain and manipulate whatever he was originally required to learn." (Gordon Pask, "Learning Strategies and Individual Competence", 1972)

"The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them." (Kenneth Boulding, "Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior", 1973)

"The social system tends to be dominated by images [...] especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Toward a General Social Science", 1974)

"The unconscious reveals its meaning imaginatively, through symbols and images, and it speaks [...] a basically mythological language." (Morton Kelsey, "Myth, History & Faith", 1974)

"Imagination is the outreaching of mind […] the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to ‘dream dreams and see visions’" (Rollo May, "The Courage to Create", 1975)

"Whenever the Eastern mystics express their knowledge in words - be it with the help of myths, symbols, poetic images or paradoxical statements-they are well aware of the limitations imposed by language and 'linear' thinking. Modern physics has come to take exactly the same attitude with regard to its verbal models and theories. They, too, are only approximate and necessarily inaccurate. They are the counterparts of the Eastern myths, symbols and poetic images, and it is at this level that I shall draw the parallels. The same idea about matter is conveyed, for example, to the Hindu by the cosmic dance of the god Shiva as to the physicist by certain aspects of quantum field theory. Both the dancing god and the physical theory are creations of the mind: models to describe their authors' intuition of reality. " (Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism", 1975)

"All knowledge, the sociologist could say, is conjectural and theoretical. Nothing is absolute and final. Therefore all knowledge is relative to the local situation of the thinkers who produce it: the ideas and conjectures that they are capable of producing: the problems that bother them; the interplay of assumptions and criticism in their milieu; their purposes and aims; the experiences they have and the standards and meanings they apply." (David Bloor, "Knowledge and Social Imagery", 1976)

"Imagining is not perceiving, but images are indeed derivatives of perceptual activity. In particular, they are the anticipatory phases of that activity, schemata that the perceiver has detached from the perceptual cycle for other purposes." (Ulrich Neisser, "Cognition and Reality" 1976)

"The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye." (Shana Alexander, "Talking Woman", 1976)

"Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full […]" (Théophile de Donder, 1977)

"The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem." (Kenneth Boulding," Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution", 1978)

"[...] it seems (to many) that we cannot account for perception unless we suppose it provides us with an internal image" (or model or map) of the external world, and yet what good would that image do us unless we have an inner eye to perceive it, and how are we to explain its capacity for perception? It also seems (to many) that understanding a heard sentence must be somehow translating it into some internal message, but how will this message be understood: by translating it into something else? The problem is an old one, and let’s call it Hume’s Problem, for while he did not state it explicitly, he appreciated its force and strove mightily to escape its clutches." (Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical essays on mind and psychology", 1978)

"Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it also is our means of forming images in the mind. The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of the objects in the world. We see the forms in our mind’s eye and we see these very forms in the world. We could not do one of these things if we could not do the other" (Mary Warnock, "Imagination", 1978)

"Many people believe that reasoning, and therefore science, is a different activity from imagining. But this is a fallacy […] Reasoning is constructed with movable images just as certainly as poetry is." (Jacob Bronowski, "Visionary Eye", 1978)

"Reasoning is constructed with movable images just as certainly as poetry is." (Jacob Bronowski, "Visionary Eye", 1978)

"The cognitive map is not a picture or image which 'looks like' what it represents; rather, it is an information structure from which map-like images can be reconstructed and from which behaviour dependent upon place information can be generated." (John O'Keefe & Lynn Nadel, "The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map", 1978)

"The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem." (Kenneth Boulding, "Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution", 1978)

"The image is our attempt to reach the non-existent or absent object in our thoughts as we concentrate on this or that aspect of it, its visible appearance, its sound, its smell. […] The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of objects in the world." (Mary Warnock, "Imagination", 1978)

"We may not speak of the image as a thing, like a canvas only in our heads. But we may say that in thinking with images we are thinking analogically, or by means of representations, just as we are when we look at somebody’s portrait rather than at himself. […] The image is our attempt to reach the non-existent or absent object in our thoughts as we concentrate on this or that aspect of it, its visible appearance, its sound, its smell. […] The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of objects in the world." (Mary Warnock, "Imagination", 1978)

"Information is recorded in vast interconnecting networks. Each idea or image has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of associations and is connected to numerous other points in the mental network." (Peter Russell, "The Brain Book: Know Your Own Mind and How to Use it", 1979)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1960-1969)

"By a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language." (Carl G Jung, "The Structure And Dynamics Of The Psyche", 1960)

"The ‘self-image’ is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)

"This other world is the so-called physical world image; it is merely an intellectual structure. To a certain extent it is arbitrary. It is a kind of model or idealization created in order to avoid the inaccuracy inherent in every measurement and to facilitate exact definition." (Max Planck, "The Philosophy of Physics", 1963)

"It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts […]." (Clive S Lewis, "The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature", 1964)

"They [archetypes] are, at the same time, both images and emotions. One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects are simultaneous. When there is merely the image, then there is simply a word picture of little consequence. But by being charged with emotion, the image gains numinosity" (or psychic energy); it becomes dynamic, and consequences of some kind must flow from it." (Carl G Jung,"Man and His Symbols", 1964)

"This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood." (Herbert Marcuse, "One-Dimensional Man", 1964)

"Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. […] As the mind explores the symbols it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason." (Carl G Jung, "Man and His Symbols", 1964)

"This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking - in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. […] Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols." (Alan W. Watts," The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", 1966)

"Images tell us nothing, either right or wrong, about the external world. […] It is just because forming images is a voluntary activity that it does not instruct us about the external world. […] When we form an image of something we are not observing. The coming and going of the pictures is not something that happens to us. We are not surprised by these pictures, saying ‘Look!’ " (Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Zettel", 1967)

"The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image. […] When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing." (Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics [Semiologie Graphique], 1967)

"The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Reach of Imagination", 1967) 

"To analyse graphic representation precisely, it is helpful to distinguish it from musical, verbal and mathematical notations, all of which are perceived in a linear or temporal sequence. The graphic image also differs from figurative representation essentially polysemic, and from the animated image, governed by the laws of cinematographic time. Within the boundaries of graphics fall the fields of networks, diagrams and maps. The domain of graphic imagery ranges from the depiction of atomic structures to the representation of galaxies and extends into the spheres of topography and cartography." (Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics [Semiologie Graphique], 1967)

"To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Reach of Imagination", 1967)

"Graphic representation constitutes one of the basic sign-systems conceived by the human mind for the purposes of storing, understanding, and communicating essential information. As a 'language' for the eye, graphics benefits from the ubiquitous properties of visual perception. As a monosemic system, it forms the rational part of the world of images. […] Graphics owes its special significance to its double function as a storage mechanism and a research instrument." (Jacques Bertin, "Semiology of graphics" ["Semiologie Graphique"], 1967) 

"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)

"A manifold can be given by specifying the coordinate ranges of an atlas, the images in those coordinate ranges of the overlapping parts of the coordinate domains, and the coordinate transformations for each of those overlapping domains. When a manifold is specified in this way, a rather tricky condition on the specifications is needed to give the Hausdorff property, but otherwise the topology can be defined completely by simply requiring the coordinate maps to be homeomorphisms." (Richard L Bishop & Samuel I Goldberg, "Tensor Analysis on Manifolds", 1968)

"A thought that is born within thought, an act of thought engendered within its own genealogy, neither given through innateness, nor presupposed in reminiscence, is a thought without image." (Gilles Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", 1968)

"The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image." (Gilles Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", 1968)

"More than a burial ground for unacceptable ideas and wishes, the unconscious is the spawning ground of intuition and insight, the source of humor, of poetic imagery, and of scientific analogy." (Judith Groch, "The Right to Create", 1969)

"The machine rules. Human life is rigorously controlled by it, dominated by the terribly precise will of mechanisms. These creatures of man are exacting. They are now reacting on their creators, making them like themselves. They want well-trained humans; they are gradually wiping out the differences between men, fitting them into their own orderly functioning, into the uniformity of their own regimes. They are thus shaping humanity for their own use, almost in their own image." (Paul A Valéry, "Fairy Tales for Computers", 1969)

"Visual thinking calls, more broadly, for the ability to see visual shapes as images of the patterns of forces that underlie our existence - the functioning of minds, of bodies or machines, the structure of societies or ideas." (Rudolf Arnheim, "Visual Thinking", 1969)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1950-1959)

"Speaking roughly, a homology theory assigns groups to topological spaces and homomorphisms to continuous maps of one space into another. To each array of spaces and maps is assigned an array of groups and homomorphisms. In this way, a homology theory is an algebraic image of topology. The domain of a homology theory is the topologist’s field of study. Its range is the field of study of the algebraist. Topological problems are converted into algebraic problems." (Samuel Eilenberg &Norman E Steenrod, "Foundations of Algebraic Topology", 1952)

"The process of understanding in nature, together with the joy that man feels in understanding, i.e., in becoming acquainted with new knowledge, seems therefore to rest upon a correspondence, a coming into congruence of preexistent internal images of the human psyche with external objects and their behavior. […] the place of clear concepts is taken by images of strongly emotional content, which are not thought but are seen pictorially, as it were, before the minds eye." (Wolfgang Pauli, "Der Einfluss archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Kepler", 1952)

"Despite all the richness of what men have learned about the world of nature, of matter and of space, of change and of life, we carry with us today an image of the giant machine as a sign of what the objective world is really like." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"A symbol, therefore, may have no effect and indeed ordinarily will have no effect on the image of the immediate future around one. It does produce an effect, however, of what might be called the image of the image, on the image of the future, on the image of the past, on the image of the potential or even of the image of the possible." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"Because of the extended time image and the extended relationship images, man is capable of ‘rational behavior,’ that is to say, his response is not to an immediate stimulus but to an image of the future filtered through an elaborate value system. His image contains not only what is, but what might be." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"I have suggested that one of the basic theorems of the theory of the image is that it is the image which in fact determines what might be called the current behavior of any organism […] The image acts as a field. The behavior consists in gravitating toward the most highly valued part of the field." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"Out of our image we predict the messages which will return to us as a result of our acts. If this prediction is fulfilled the image is confirmed, if it is not fulfilled the image must be changed. This is the essence of the logical-positivist view that definitions must be operational and hypotheses must be testable as an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"The correct analogy to the image of the organization in the organism is what might be called the genetic image. As far as the genetics of organisms is concerned, it is the image of the cell that is important, not the image of the organization as a whole. Because of this fact, an organization, although it is an open system, is an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"The problem of the transformation of images is of great importance in the theory of economic development. […] The problem here is that of the initiation and imitation of superior processes. Both these phenomena require transformation of the image; a new process always starts as a new image, as a new idea. The process itself is merely a form of transcription of the new image." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"Within the confines of my abstraction, for instance, it is clear that the problem of truth and validity cannot be solved completely, if what we mean by the truth of an image is its correspondence with some reality in the world outside it. The difficulty with any correspondence theory of truth is that images can only be compared with images. They can never be compared with any outside reality. The difficulty with the coherence theory of truth, on the other hand, is that the coherence or consistency of the image is simply not what we mean by its truth." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"The unconscious [...] is always empty - or, more accurately, it is as alien to mental images as is the stomach to the foods which pass through it." (Claude Levi-Strauss, "Structural Anthropology", 1958)

"The implication of game theory, which is also the implication of the third image, is, however, that the freedom of choice of any one state is limited by the actions of the others." (Kenneth Waltz, "Man, the State, and War", 1959)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1940-1949)

"In perception, a knowledge forms itself slowly; in the [mental] image the knowledge is immediate. We see now that the image is a synthetic act which unites a concrete, nonimagined, knowledge to elements which are more actually representative. The image teaches nothing: it is organized exactly like the objects which do produce knowledge, but it is complete at the very moment of its appearance. […] Thus, the object presents itself in the image as having to be apprehended in a multiplicity of synthetic acts. Due to this fact, and because its content retains a sensible opacity, like a phantom, because it does not involve either essences or generating laws but only an irrational quality, it gives the impression of being an object of observation: from this point of view the image appears to be more like a perception than a concept." (Jean-Paul Sartre,"The Psychology of Imagination", 1940)

"It is by abstraction that one can separate movements, knowledge, and affectivity. And the analysis is, here, so far from being a real dismemberment that it is given only as probable. One can never effectively reduce an [mental] image to its elements, for the reason that an image, like all other psychic syntheses, is something more and different from the sum of its elements. […] We will always go from image to image. Comprehension is a movement which is never-ending, it is the reaction of the mind to an image by another image, to this one by another image and so on, in principle to infinity." (Jean-Paul Sartre,"The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination", 1940)

"[…] the image is an act which envisions an absent or non-existent object as a body, by means of a physical or mental content which is present only as an 'analogical representative' of the object envisioned." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Psychology of Imagination", 1940)

"The image serves neither as illustration nor as support for thought. It is in no way different from thought […] What we ordinarily designate as thinking is a consciousness which affirms this or that of its objects but without realizing the qualities on [sic] the object. The image, on the contrary, is a consciousness that aims to produce its object: it is therefore constituted by a certain way of judgment and feeling of which, we do not become conscious as such but which we apprehend on the intentional object as this or that of its qualities. In a word: the function of the image is symbolic." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Psychology of Imagination", 1940)

"Thus, the object presents itself in the image as having to be apprehended in a multiplicity of synthetic acts. Due to this fact, and because its content retains a sensible opacity, like a phantom, because it does not involve either essences or generating laws but only an irrational quality, it gives the impression of being an object of observation: from this point of view the image appears to be more like a perception than a concept." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Psychology of Imagination", 1940)

"[…] inner images are rather psychic manifestations of the archetypes which, however, would also have to put forth, create, condition anything lawlike in the behavior of the corporeal world. The laws of this world would then be the physical manifestations of the archetypes. […] Each law of nature should then have an inner correspondence and vice versa, even though this is not always directly visible today." (Wolfgang Pauli, [letter to Markus Fierz] 1948)

"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)

"When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images'. The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively [...] But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts." (Wolfgang Pauli, [Letter to Markus Fierz] 1948)

"The crucial problem is that of describing what is ‘seen in the mind’s eye’ and what is ‘heard in one’s head’. What are spoken of as ‘visual images’, ‘mental pictures’ […] are commonly taken to be entities which are genuinely found existing and found existing elsewhere than in the external world. So minds are nominated for their theaters." (Gilbert Ryle, "The Concept of Mind", 1949)

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined." (Albert Einstein [in a letter to Jaque Hadamard, "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field", 1949])

"The crucial problem is that of describing what is ‘seen in the mind’s eye’ and what is ‘heard in one’s head’. What are spoken of as ‘visual images’, ‘mental pictures’, ‘auditory images’ and, in one use, ‘ideas’ are commonly taken to be entities which are genuinely found existing and found existing elsewhere than in the external world. So minds are nominated for their theatres." (Gilbert Ryle, "The Concept of Mind", 1949)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1920-1929)

"A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision." (Paul Klee, "Creative Credo", 1920)

"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)

🪷On Mind: On Images (1910-1919)

"Psychology tells us that the habit of forming clear images is an important one, and that all the higher forms of knowledge depend upon the accuracy with which concepts are formed." (Edith M Buell, "Word pictures as a means of mental development", American Annals of the Deaf Vol. 57 (5), 1912)

"For thought raised on specialization the most potent objection to the possibility of a universal organizational science is precisely its universality. Is it ever possible that the same laws be applicable to the combination of astronomic worlds and those of biological cells, of living people and the waves of the ether, of scientific ideas and quanta of energy? .. Mathematics provide a resolute and irrefutable answer: yes, it is undoubtedly possible, for such is indeed the case. Two and two homogenous separate elements amount to four such elements, be they astronomic systems or mental images, electrons or workers; numerical structures are indifferent to any element, there is no place here for specificity." (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science" Vol. I, 1913)

"Thus the essence of memory is not constituted by the image, but by having immediately before the mind an object which is recognised as past." (Bertrand Russell, "Theory of Knowledge" , 1913)

"Would it be possible for a 'mental image' , perception or idea, to correspond to a 'physical object', if the parts of the former were not combined in the same order as the parts of the latter? […] The more fully the similarity of two mental images is 'recognized' , i.e., the more elements of both images are brought to identity in the consciousness, the greater the extent they are associated 'by similarity'." (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science" Vol. I, 1913)

"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)

"Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently the 'world images' that have been created by 'ideas' have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. 'From what' and 'for what' one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget, 'could be' redeemed, depended on one's image of the world." (Max Weber, "The Social Psychology of the World Religions", 1915)