Charles Fort, Lo!: “If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts.”
The means to make steam engines existed centuries before the age of steam. Ground glass lenses existed long before anyone put one in front of the other to make a telescope. The first people of the Americas had wheels—on toys, not carts. Great music could happen sooner (it usually doesn’t rely on new inventions).
I am convinced we are drowning in miraculous solutions to weighty problems and we are simply overlooking them. If I knew how to prepend ‘steam engine time,’ I assure you I would do so.
Charles Fort, Lo!: “If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts.”
The means to make steam engines existed centuries before the age of steam. Ground glass lenses existed long before anyone put one in front of the other to make a telescope. The first people of the Americas had wheels—on toys, not carts. Great music could happen sooner (it usually doesn’t rely on new inventions).
I am convinced we are drowning in miraculous solutions to weighty problems and we are simply overlooking them. If I knew how to prepend ‘steam engine time,’ I assure you I would do so.