Earthseed 56-60

56. When vision fails When vision failsDirection is lost. When direction is lostPurpose may be forgotten. When purpose is forgottenEmotion rules alone. When emotion rules alone,Destruction…destruction. ? = ? 57. Self is Self is.Self is body and bodilyperception. Self is thought, memory,belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Selflearns, discovers, becomes. Selfshapes. Self adapts. Self invents itsown reasons for being. To shapeGod, shape Self. ? = ? 58. Immortal Life Take comfort.Each move towar...

 An Eloquent Description of Science and Wonder

As I gathered information for this book, I was continually reminded of the reality that science, rooted as it is in the certainties of the physical world, is a process that necessarily unfolds over time. In school, science classes tend to work according to this linear model; there's a “beginning, middle, and end” to science investigations, no matter how hard teachers may fight the “cookbook” reductionism that threatens true scientific inquiry. Yet, in probing further, I came to understand tha...

 We Must Act Without All the Facts

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.

 The Platonic School Believed Nothing Was Knowable

A caution must also be given to the understanding against the intemperance which systems of philosophy manifest in giving or withholding assent, because intemperance of this kind seems to establish idols and in some sort to perpetuate them, leaving no way open to reach and dislodge them. This excess is of two kinds: the first being manifest in those who are ready in deciding, and render sciences dogmatic and magisterial; the other in those who deny that we can know anything, and so introduce...

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But we also have some more direct evidence for the idea that children learn like scientists. Alison and Virginia Slaughter, one of her students, looked at three-year-old children who didn't yet fully understand belief—children who still said they had always thought that there were pencils in the candy box. Then, over the course of a few weeks, Virginia gave the children systematic evidence that their predictions were false. She told them firmly that they hadn't said pencils at all, they had s...