02 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Importance of Leisure in Science
Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson's enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.
But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not ...29 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Empirical Mind-Cure
There are plenty of persons to-day — “scientists” or
“positivists,” they are fond of calling themselves — who will tell
you that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion
to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened
examples has long since left behind and outgrown. If you ask them
to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for
primitive thought everything is conceived of under the form of
personality. The savage thinks tha...Science looks for empirical evidence, and religion has some empirical evidence for the positive effects of religion on the mind.