Yes, beautiful Chesterton quotation, Ben N.
I loved the "Tommy opened the door" example; and also "This proves
that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and
amazement." That "almost prenatal leap" is our genetic heritage, and why we
are prepared already at birth to leap into intersocial musical dialogue
with the mother/caretaker, as Malloch and Trevathen's research with
newborns has demonstrated. They found "precise formulation in terms of
three parameters: pulse, quality, and narrative,” which are revealed in
turn taking interactions with mothers, and charted through spectrographs
and pitch plots. And all of it from the days to weeks old subcortical brain!
I agree with Gary F's post on Peirce's view of the mindedness in
matter. Peirce claimed elsewhere, all matter is mind hidebound with habit.
His claim for a psycho-physical universe and critique of necessitarianism
as incapable of adequately explaining variegating life remains a challenge
to materialism and its denial of thirdness.
Helmut, you seem to be denying Peirce's claim that things are involved
in thirdness as well as having their secondness. On another level, your
characterization of "stone age peoples" ignores the nature of semiotic
animism, which involves the livingness of things in relationships, not in
isolate substances. That great stone mountain genuinely moves me, and my
feeling of wonder genuinely involves me, the mountain, and the living
relationship between us. Our minds live and learn in our transactions,
which really involve the objects of those transactions, internal or
external.
Perhaps resonating somewhere between the Peirce and Chesterton
quotations, though not the same as either's perspective, is this statement
on the wonder inherent in life by D H Lawrence:
“When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder.
Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are
based on wonder. Love without wonder is a sensational affair, and power
without wonder is mere force and compulsion.
The one universal element in consciousness which is fundamental to
life is the element of wonder. You cannot help feeling it in a bean as it
starts to grow and pulls itself out of its jacket. You cannot help feeling
it in the glisten of the nucleus of the amoeba. You recognize it,
willy-nilly, in an ant busily tugging at a straw; in a rook, as it walks
the frosty grass.
They all have their obstinate will. But they all live with a sense of
wonder. Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all
are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious
element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is
our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense.
Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something
you don’t know, and what you don’t know is nothing to you. But there is
more than one way of knowing. Even the real scientist works in the sense of
wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his
wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly
didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any
religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion.
Both are wonderless and are productive of boredom, endless boredom.”
Gene Halton
Salzburg
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