Quotessence
Home / Books / All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life

All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life

Book by David Bentley Hart · 1 quotes · Epistemology, Language, Merge

Filter quotes by topic

AllEpistemologyLanguageMergePhylosophyPsychologyScience

All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life Quotes

“There are no doubt brain-states associated with every experience, transcendent or mundane; why, then, should the trivial truth that mystical or contemplative insight is correlated with a distinctive set of neural activities be taken as evidence that such insight is merely a psychological state, without a real object? By that logic, the reality that there’s a brain-state associated with hearing a performance of Bach means that I can’t believe in the objective reality of that music. Whatever the case may be, I know this: to imagine that a “science of mind”—a science of irreducible first-person experience—is possible in terms purely of the third-person facts of neurophysiology, without reference to what mental interiority discloses to itself about itself, is worse than folly. The only “science of mind” that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental would be something like the contemplative disciplines proper to the great mystical traditions of the world’s religions. There can be no real science of mind that’s not, to put it bluntly, a spiritual science.”

SciencePsychologyEpistemologyPhylosophy
Book:All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life
Create image