Arthur Koestler

1:The super-ego is that part of the personality which is soluble in alcohol
~ Arthur Koestler,

2:The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. ~ Arthur Koestler,

3:The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it. ~ Arthur Koestler,

4:Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth. ~ Arthur Koestler, Ghost in the Machine,

5:This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcending element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the harmony of the spheres, the origin of life, the equations of a unified field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power, the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life'.

This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond. ~ Arthur Koestler,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Die in silence. ~ Arthur Koestler,

2:He who becomes dizzy is lost. ~ Arthur Koestler,

3:Honor is decency without vanity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

4:The jester is brother to the sage. ~ Arthur Koestler,

5:Brain-washing starts in the cradle. ~ Arthur Koestler,

6:Good things can be created from bad. ~ Arthur Koestler,

7:Two half truths do not make a truth. ~ Arthur Koestler,

8:The cell door slammed behind Rubishov. ~ Arthur Koestler,

9:We cannot unthink unless we are insane. ~ Arthur Koestler,

10:in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon— ~ Donnie Eichar,

11:A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist. ~ Arthur Koestler,

12:The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood. ~ Arthur Koestler,

13:Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality. ~ Arthur Koestler,

14:History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. ~ Arthur Koestler,

15:True creativity often starts where language ends. ~ Arthur Koestler,

16:Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. ~ Arthur Koestler,

17:A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar. ~ Arthur Koestler,

18:Complexity of thought is no measure of originality. ~ Arthur Koestler,

19:The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country. ~ Arthur Koestler,

20:Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

21:Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust. ~ Arthur Koestler,

22:Hay dos clases de valentía: la del valiente y la del cobarde ~ Arthur Koestler,

23:I went to a lecture of [Arthur Koestler ] once, I never met him. ~ Nat Hentoff,

24:Much depends on asking the right question at the right time. ~ Arthur Koestler,

25:Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. ~ Arthur Koestler,

26:Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom. ~ Arthur Koestler,

27:the artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices. ~ Arthur Koestler,

28:The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical ~ Arthur Koestler,

29:Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears. ~ Arthur Koestler,

30:Courage is to never let your actions be influenced by your fears. ~ Arthur Koestler,

31:In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark. ~ Arthur Koestler,

32:The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. ~ Arthur Koestler,

33:Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. ~ Arthur Koestler,

34:History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations ~ Arthur Koestler,

35:In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot. ~ Arthur Koestler,

36:Immersion in the group mind is a kind of poor man's self-transcendence. ~ Arthur Koestler,

37:Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics... ~ Arthur Koestler,

38:Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face. ~ Arthur Koestler,

39:God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out. ~ Arthur Koestler,

40:Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. ~ Arthur Koestler,

41:El valor consiste en no permitir que tus temores influyan sobre tus actos. ~ Arthur Koestler,

42:Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved. ~ Arthur Koestler,

43:One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions. ~ Arthur Koestler,

44:one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident. ~ Arthur Koestler,

45:The super-ego is that part of the personality which is soluble in alcohol
~ Arthur Koestler,

46:In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean. ~ Arthur Koestler,

47:Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh; ~ Arthur Koestler,

48:The roads that lead man to knowledge are as wondrous as that knowledge itself. ~ Arthur Koestler,

49:The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex. ~ Arthur Koestler,

50:The chain, thus unified, now reached from God's throne down to the meanest worm. ~ Arthur Koestler,

51:The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost. ~ Arthur Koestler,

52:Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture ~ Arthur Koestler,

53:The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. ~ Arthur Koestler,

54:The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. ~ Arthur Koestler,

55:Specialization, in morphogenesis as in other fields, exacts its price in creativity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

56:What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler ~ Arthur Koestler,

57:One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up. ~ Arthur Koestler,

58:Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect. ~ Arthur Koestler,

59:Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem. ~ Arthur Koestler,

60:The curse of 'spherism' upon man's vision of the universe lasted for two thousand years. ~ Arthur Koestler,

61:The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million. ~ Arthur Koestler,

62:Tardé muchos años en descubrir que el inquieto viajero solo tenía una meta: huir de sí mismo ~ Arthur Koestler,

63:But where is the jury who decides whether devotion is of the 'right' or the 'misguided' kind? ~ Arthur Koestler,

64:The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. ~ Arthur Koestler,

65:The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. ~ Arthur Koestler,

66:The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. ~ Arthur Koestler,

67:En la ecuación social, el valor de una sola vida es cero; en la ecuación cósmica, es infinito. ~ Arthur Koestler,

68:The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction. ~ Arthur Koestler,

69:The crimes of a caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. ~ Arthur Koestler,

70:The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo. ~ Arthur Koestler,

71:The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. ~ Arthur Koestler,

72:El odio, como el amor, solo florece donde hay algo en común, donde existe un común denominador. ~ Arthur Koestler,

73:The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums. ~ Arthur Koestler,

74:Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five ~ Arthur Koestler,

75:The humorist thrives on deformity; the artist deforms the world to recreate it in his own image. ~ Arthur Koestler,

76:and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception ~ Arthur Koestler,

77:The Copernican system was not a truly heliocentric one; it was a vacuo-centric system, so to speak. ~ Arthur Koestler,

78:...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep. ~ Arthur Koestler,

79:Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. ~ Arthur Koestler,

80:Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud? ~ Arthur Koestler,

81:We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. ~ Arthur Koestler,

82:If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out. ~ Arthur Koestler,

83:The eight sin, deadlier than all- self transcendence through misplaced devotion-is not included in the list. ~ Arthur Koestler,

84:Every creative act involves... a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief. ~ Arthur Koestler,

85:Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. ~ Arthur Koestler,

86:Coghill has shown that the motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of sensory innervation. ~ Arthur Koestler,

87:The integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies. ~ Arthur Koestler,

88:There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew). ~ Arthur Koestler,

89:Aggressiveness is not the main trouble with the human species, but rather an excess capacity for fanatical devotion. ~ Arthur Koestler,

90:[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print. ~ Arthur Koestler,

91:The distinction between true and false applies to ideas, not to emotions; an emotion can be cheap, but never untrue. ~ Arthur Koestler,

92:You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.

'No, I didn’t. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'. ~ Arthur Koestler,

93:Dreaming could be described as a de-differentiation of reasoning-matrices and even, up to a point, of personal identity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

94:The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer. ~ Arthur Koestler,

95:Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware. ~ Arthur Koestler,

96:The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it. ~ Arthur Koestler,

97:An emotionally maladjusted species , we have the uncanny power of turning every blessing, including language, into a curse. ~ Arthur Koestler,

98:I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes. ~ Arthur Koestler,

99:If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways. ~ Arthur Koestler,

100:Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale... ~ Arthur Koestler,

101:Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil? ~ Arthur Koestler,

102:There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it. ~ Arthur Koestler,

103:The Régime did not want Communists; it wanted robots. It will take at least a generation to change them back into humans again. ~ Arthur Koestler,

104:They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. ~ Arthur Koestler,

105:Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be. ~ Arthur Koestler,

106:History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes. ~ Arthur Koestler,

107:Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse. ~ Arthur Koestler,

108:To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras. ~ Arthur Koestler,

109:To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like paté de foie gras. ~ Arthur Koestler,

110:To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind. ~ Arthur Koestler,

111:The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it. ~ Arthur Koestler,

112:Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit. ~ Arthur Koestler,

113:We are indeed a blind race,' wrote a contemporary scientist, 'and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours. ~ Arthur Koestler,

114:Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth. ~ Arthur Koestler,

115:The HAHA reaction signals the collision of bisociated contexts, the AHA reaction signals their fusion, the AH reaction their juxtaposition. ~ Arthur Koestler,

116:The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word-hamavec-for poet and inventor. ~ Arthur Koestler,

117:The superimposition of two systems: thought and metre,' wrote Proust, 'is a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of beauty. ~ Arthur Koestler,

118:The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated. ~ Arthur Koestler,

119:there are no frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins, and the uomo universale of the Renaissance was a citizen of both. ~ Arthur Koestler,

120:All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines. ~ Arthur Koestler,

121:the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness. ~ Arthur Koestler,

122:Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends. ~ Arthur Koestler,

123:The jokes in the previous section can all be described as universes of discourse colliding, frames getting entangled, or contexts getting confused. ~ Arthur Koestler,

124:Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which - miraculously, it seems - merge into a significant event. ~ Arthur Koestler,

125:Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species. ~ Arthur Koestler,

126:A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time. ~ Arthur Koestler,

127:İnsanların elde edip tutmayı başarabilecekleri bireysel özgürlüğün miktarı onların politik olgunluğuna bağlıdır.

Gün ortasında karanlık s.164 ~ Arthur Koestler,

128:No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not. ~ Arthur Koestler,

129:What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.’(Arthur Koestler) ~ Tony Judt,

130:In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done. ~ Arthur Koestler,

131:Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass. ~ Arthur Koestler,

132:The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. ~ Arthur Koestler,

133:The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it. ~ Arthur Koestler,

134:The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement. ~ Arthur Koestler,

135:Theoretical physics is no longer concerned with things, but with the mathematical relations between abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things. ~ Arthur Koestler,

136:This 'ruthless' determination of morphogenetic fields to assert their individuality reflects, in our terminology, the self-assertive principle in development. ~ Arthur Koestler,

137:.....while language facilitates communication within the group, it also crystallises cultural differences, and actually heightens the barriers between groups. ~ Arthur Koestler,

138:Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness. ~ Arthur Koestler,

139:Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth. ~ Arthur Koestler, Ghost in the Machine,

140:At the level of ego-psychology', wrote Mowrer in his survey on 'Motivation' in the Annual Review for 1952, 'there may be said to be only one master motive: anxiety. ~ Arthur Koestler,

141:Helen Spurway concluded from the evidence of homology that the organism has only 'a restricted mutation spectrum' which 'determines its possibilities of evolution'. ~ Arthur Koestler,

142:Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are ~ Arthur Koestler,

143:Resistance to innovation is clearly demonstrated, not by the ignorant masses, but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and the monopoly of learning. ~ Arthur Koestler,

144:Conscience renders one as unfit for the revolution as a double chin. Conscience eats through the brain like a cancer, until the whole of the grey matter is devoured. ~ Arthur Koestler,

145:In folklore and popular literature the Artist is traditionally represented as an inspired dreamer-a solitary figure, eccentric, impractical, unselfish, and quixotic. ~ Arthur Koestler,

146:But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution. ~ Arthur Koestler,

147:O progresso da ciência, tal como uma antiga trilha no deserto, está juncado pelos descolorados esqueletos de teorias rejeitadas, que um dia pareceram ter vida eterna. ~ Arthur Koestler,

148:At each step biochemical triggers and feedbacks determine which of the alternative developmental pathways among several possibles a group of cells will actually follow. ~ Arthur Koestler,

149:The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills. ~ Arthur Koestler,

150:Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. ~ Arthur Koestler,

151:I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality. ~ Arthur Koestler,

152:We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error had its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation. ~ Arthur Koestler,

153:Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view ~ Arthur Koestler,

154:The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers. ~ Arthur Koestler,

155:I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s. ~ Nat Hentoff,

156:The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life. ~ Arthur Koestler,

157:Let me repeat: the principle mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property. ~ Arthur Koestler,

158:There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy. ~ Arthur Koestler,

159:Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations. ~ Arthur Koestler,

160:Every creative act – in science, art, or religion – involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted beliefs. ~ Arthur Koestler,

161:The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use. ~ Arthur Koestler,

162:but since every created being is ultimately an emanation of God, partaking of His Essence in a measure diminishing with distance, the soul will always strive upward, to its source. ~ Arthur Koestler,

163:This was written before the full extent of the holocaust was known, but that does not alter the fact that the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European – ~ Arthur Koestler,

164:Humour is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes. ~ Arthur Koestler,

165:Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view ~ Arthur Koestler,

166:Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means. ~ Arthur Koestler,

167:Freedom of the will is a metaphysical question outside the scope of this book; but considered as a subjective datum of experience, 'free will' is the awareness of alternative choices. ~ Arthur Koestler,

168:[Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon". ~ Nat Hentoff,

169:Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious. ~ Arthur Koestler,

170:... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait. ~ Alan Garner,

171:History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. ~ Arthur Koestler,

172:Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself. Boredom sets into boring minds. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. ~ Arthur Koestler,

173:When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived ~ Arthur Koestler,

174:You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons...This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence. ~ Arthur Koestler,

175:Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle. ~ Arthur Koestler,

176:By feeding back information on the lie of the land to the gene-complex, the cytoplasm thus co-determines which genes should be active and which should be temporarily or permanently switched off. ~ Arthur Koestler,

177:Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious. ~ Arthur Koestler,

178:I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned. ~ Arthur Koestler,

179:War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars. ~ Arthur Koestler,

180:The sex-drive in the Freudian system is essentially something to be disposed of -through the proper channels or by sublimation; pleasure is derived not from its pursuit, but from getting rid of it. ~ Arthur Koestler,

181:Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system. ~ Arthur Koestler,

182:For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time. ~ Arthur Koestler,

183:If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey. ~ Arthur Koestler,

184:The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism. ~ Arthur Koestler,

185:Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. ~ Arthur Koestler,

186:The popular image of the Magician has certain features in common with that of the Artist: both are unselfishly devoted to lofty tasks-which frequently overlapped in the uomo universale of the Renaissance. ~ Arthur Koestler,

187:If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures. ~ Arthur Koestler,

188:The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality. ~ Arthur Koestler,

189:Thus experience, both of the exalted and trivial kind, indicates that the mind is particularly receptive to and suggestible by messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern, or accompanied by a rhythmic pattern. ~ Arthur Koestler,

190:The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes. ~ Arthur Koestler,

191:man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination. ~ Arthur Koestler,

192:The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past. ~ Arthur Koestler,

193:The exercise of a skill is always under the dual control (a) of a fixed code of rules (which may be innate or acquired by learning) and (b) of a flexible strategy, guided by environmental pointers- the lie of the land. ~ Arthur Koestler,

194:Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization. ~ Arthur Koestler,

195:Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed. ~ Arthur Koestler,

196:If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some builtin mental disorder which drives him toward self-destruction.” —Arthur Koestler ~ Will Tuttle,

197:Could some similar paradox be responsible for the crisis in modern physics - some unconscious blockage which prevents us from seeing the 'obvious', and compels us to persist in our own version of wavemechanical double-think? ~ Arthur Koestler,

198:...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. ~ Arthur Koestler,

199:Hierarchies are 'dissectible' into their constituent branches, on which the holons form the 'nodes'. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises is called its 'depth', and the number of holons on any given level its 'span'. ~ Arthur Koestler,

200:Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over. ~ Arthur Koestler,

201:Laughter is a luxury reflex which could arise only in a creature whose reason has gained a degree of autonomy from the urges of emotion, and enables him to perceive his own emotions as redundant-to realize that he has been fooled. ~ Arthur Koestler,

202:From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the infinite, was the principle inspiration of that winged and flat-footed creature, the scientist. ~ Arthur Koestler,

203:Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning. ~ Arthur Koestler,

204:The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other. ~ Arthur Koestler,

205:In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment. ~ Arthur Koestler,

206:In 1960 an anecdote in the form of an imaginary dialogue circulated in the satellite countries of the East:

'Tell me, Comrade, what is capitalism?'
'The exploitation of man by man.'
'And what is Communism?'
'The reverse. ~ Arthur Koestler,

207:Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a process which has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree. ~ Arthur Koestler,

208:Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate. ~ Arthur Koestler,

209:Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code. ~ Arthur Koestler,

210:From the psychological point of view, the self-asserting emotions, derived from emergency reactions, involve a narrowing of consciousness; the participatory emotions an expansion of consciousness by identificatory processes of various kinds. ~ Arthur Koestler,

211:The memoir did in fact get him a professorship at the Lycee in Lyon. It was called Considerations of the Mathematical Theory of Games of Chance, and demonstrated, among other things, the habitual gamblers are, in the long run, bound to lose. ~ Arthur Koestler,

212:In my youth I regarded the Universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we are able to decipher a small fragment. ~ Arthur Koestler,

213:znany autor Arthur Koestler napisał z pogardą, że zachwycający się zwycięstwami Finów Francuzi przypominają mu „zboczonego impotenta, czerpiącego satysfakcję z podglądania erotycznych wyczynów innych mężczyzn, których sam nie jest w stanie naśladować”. ~ Anonymous,

214:in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern. ~ Arthur Koestler,

215:...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religeous faith or political conviction. ~ Arthur Koestler,

216:Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer's throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite. ~ Arthur Koestler,

217:I have already thought it over,' said Rubashov. 'I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don't want to play this game anymore. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell. ~ Arthur Koestler,

218:Consciousness in this view is an emergent quality, which evolves into more complex and structured states in phylogeny, as the ultimate manifestation of the Integrative Tendency towards the creation of order out of disorder, of 'information' out of 'noise'. ~ Arthur Koestler,

219:...the cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality- the projection of its conflicts, prejudice and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky. ~ Arthur Koestler,

220:Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them. ~ Arthur Koestler,

221:All great works of literature contain variations and combinations, overt or implied, of such archetypal conflicts inherent in the condition of man, which first occur in the symbols of mythology, and are restated in the particular idiom of each culture and period. ~ Arthur Koestler,

222:But the revival of a dynamic psychology which reinstated the academic respectability of such terms as curiosity, exploratory drive, purpose, only came about when experimental evidence showed that even in the rat the urge to explore may prevail over hunger and fear. ~ Arthur Koestler,

223:And yet, by three incorrect steps and their even more correct defence, Kepler stumbled on the correct law. It is perhaps the most amazing sleep-walking performance in the history of science-except for the manner in which he found his First Law, to which we now turn. ~ Arthur Koestler,

224:Philosophy is the gaseous state of thought, Science its liquid state, Religion its rigid state. In all three states doubts are expressed regarding the necessity, and even the possibility, of absolute death. We shall discuss this doubt only in its liquid state. . . . ~ Arthur Koestler,

225:Thus the pure archetypal harmonies, and their echoes, the musical consonances, are generated by dividing the circle by means of construable, regular polygons; wheras the 'unspeakable' polygons produce discordant sounds, and are useless in the scheme of the universe. ~ Arthur Koestler,

226:We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later. ~ Arthur Koestler,

227:The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation. The way out of the cul-de-sac is either a revolutionary departure towards new horizons, or the rediscovery of past techniques, or a combination of both ~ Arthur Koestler,

228:When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence. ~ Arthur Koestler,

229:Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man. ~ Arthur Koestler,

230:In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology. ~ Arthur Koestler,

231:The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books - they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air. ~ Arthur Koestler,

232:The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air. ~ Arthur Koestler,

233:To this day, in spite of great efforts, Lamarckism has failed to produce conclusive evidence to prove that acquired characters are transmitted to the offspring; and it seems fairly certain that, while experience does affect heredity, it does not do so in this simple and direct way. ~ Arthur Koestler,

234:The moment attention is focused on a normally automatized part-function such as ennunciating consonants, the matrix breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the performance is paralyzed-like the centipede who was asked in which order he moved his hundred legs, and could walk no more. ~ Arthur Koestler,

235:One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists. ~ Arthur Koestler,

236:You, Comrade Rubashov, have just used the same arguments as this women’s delegation from Manchester. You, of course, know better than these women. So one may wonder at your using the same arguments. But then, you have something in common with them: you were given a watch as a child…. ~ Arthur Koestler,

237:God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together. ~ Arthur Koestler,

238:The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer. ~ Arthur Koestler,

239:The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem. ~ Arthur Koestler,

240:The working of the central nervous system is a hierarchic affair in which functions at the higher levels do not deal directly with the ultimate structural units, such as neurons or motor units, but operate by activating lower patterns that have their own relatively autonomous structural unity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

241:When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion. ~ Arthur Koestler,

242:If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality. ~ Arthur Koestler,

243:The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible. ~ Arthur Koestler,

244:The fact that his discoveries are found in it once more side by side with his fantasies, does not detract from its value. It is precisely this overlapping of two universe of thought, which gives the Epitome, as it does to the whole of Kepler's life and work, its unique value to the history of ideas. ~ Arthur Koestler,

245:When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history. ~ Arthur Koestler,

246:The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi. ~ Arthur Koestler,

247:The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text. ~ Arthur Koestler,

248:man who has in equal degree the character of both classes, since he attains to the lowest member of the class above bodies, namely, the human soul, which is at the bottom of the series of intellectual beings - and is said, therefore, to be the horizon and boundary line of things corporeal and incorporeal. ~ Arthur Koestler,

249:Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability-except the order of a dead universr filled with a uniformly distributed gas. ~ Arthur Koestler,

250:Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred. ~ Arthur Koestler,

251:Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas. ~ Arthur Koestler,

252:It is obvious', says Hadamard, 'that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas....The Latin verb cogito for "to think" etymologically means "to shake together". St. Augustine had already noticed that and also observed that intelligo means "to select among". ~ Arthur Koestler,

253:The history of cosmic theories, in particular, may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias; and the manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker's performance than an electronic's brain. ~ Arthur Koestler,

254:To quote Dr. Ewer: 'Behaviour will tend to be always a jump ahead of structure and so play a decisive role in the evolutionary process.' In this light, evolution no longer appears as a tale told by an idiot, but rather as an epic recited by a stutterer-at times haltingly and painfully, then precipitating in bursts. ~ Arthur Koestler,

255:The same make of organelles functions in the cells of mice and men; the same make of contractile protein serves the motion of amoeba and of the pianist's fingers; the same four chemical units constitute the alphabet of heredity throughout the animal and plant kingdoms-only the words are different for every creature. ~ Arthur Koestler,

256:We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked... ~ Arthur Koestler,

257:It is perhaps significant that the German word for the Creator is Schopfer, and for certain schopfen-'to scoop' in the sense of drawing water in buckets from a well. The Creator is thus visualized as creating the world out of His own depth, and the creative mind with a small c is supposed to apply a similar procedure. ~ Arthur Koestler,

258:The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations. ~ Arthur Koestler,

259:There is a strangely consistent parallel between Copernicus' character, and the humble, devious manner in which the Copernican revolution entered through the back door of history, preceded by the apologetic remark: 'Please don't take seriously - it is all meant in fun, for mathematicians only, and highly improbable indeed. ~ Arthur Koestler,

260:It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him,six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer. ~ Arthur Koestler,

261:There is, for example, the hoary problem why the skin on the soles of our feet is so much thicker than elsewhere. If the thickening occurred after birth as a result of stress, wear and tear, there would be no problem. But the skin of the sole is already thickened in the embryo which has never walked, bare-foot or otherwise. ~ Arthur Koestler,

262:For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the
earth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was a
politically suspect quantity, the `I' a suspect quality. The Party did not
recognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitude
of one million divided by one million. ~ Arthur Koestler,

263:The decisive turning points in the history of every art-form are discoveries which show the characteristic features already discussed: they uncover what has always been there; they are 'revolutionary', that is, destructive and constructive; they compel us to revalue our values and impose a new set of rules on the eternal game. ~ Arthur Koestler,

264:What made Newton's postulate nevertheless a modern Law of Nature, was his mathematical formulation of the mysterious entity to which it referred. And that formulation Newton deduced from the discoveries of Kepler - who had intuitively glimpsed gravity, and shied away from it. In such crooked ways does the tree of science grow. ~ Arthur Koestler,

265:The inner censor of the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorizes his own conscience into submission;he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality. ~ Arthur Koestler,

266:The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people's minds. Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to? How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody? How else can one change it? He who understands and forgives -- where would he find a motive to act? Where would he not? ~ Arthur Koestler,

267:Only once did he remark when the starter,which he was trying to open,literally fell to pieces in his hands,:'If you would write for those filthy boulevard papers,monsieur,you could soon buy a Chevrolet'(which was quite unture:In France the prostitutes of the pen were just as badly rewarded as their colleagues on the street corners). ~ Arthur Koestler,

268:Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not. ~ Arthur Koestler,

269:The habits and learning potentialities of all species are fixed within the narrow limits which the structure of its nervous system and organs permits; those of homo sapiens seem unlimited precisely because the possible uses of the evolutionary novelty in his skull were quite out of proportion with the demands of his natural environment. ~ Arthur Koestler,

270:Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination. ~ Arthur Koestler,

271:One method of economy is 'leaving out' - firstly, everything that by the writer's standards is irrelevamt, in the second place everything that is obvious, i.e. which the reader can and should supply out of his own imagination. 'The more bloody good stuff you cut out the more bloody good your novel will be,' Hemingway advised a young writer. ~ Arthur Koestler,

272:Our White - Whites were a mixed crowd,including a well - known doctor,owner of a chateau near Versailles,an opera singer with an enormous belly and a chaplainbass;a homosexual architect with a beard,two night club porters,and a lawyer who sold Jewish refugees visas for a Central American Republic,which on arrival turned out to be non valid. ~ Arthur Koestler,

273:Forgery is just the most dramatic example of the importance of origin. Arthur Koestler described a friend who owned a drawing that she first took to be a reproduction. When she later discovered that it was an original by Picasso, she displayed it more prominently, claimed that she saw it differently, and enjoyed it more. For her, its value went up. ~ Paul Bloom,

274:The cause of the party’s defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease… but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? ~ Arthur Koestler,

275:The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time. ~ Arthur Koestler,

276:With you, thought Rubashov and looked at the whitewashed wall behind which the other stood—in the meantime he had
probably lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke against the wall — with you I have no accounts to settle. To you I owe
no fare. Between you and us there is no common currency and no common language. ... Well, what do you want now? ~ Arthur Koestler,

277:In his later years Faraday withdrew almost completely from social contacts, refusing even the presidency of the Royal Academy because of its too worldly disposition. The inhuman self-denials imposed by his creed made Faraday canalize his ferocious vitality into the pursuit of science, which he regarded as the only other permissible form of divine worship. ~ Arthur Koestler,

278:On successively higher levels of the hierarchy we find more complex, flexible and less predictable patterns of activity, while on successively lower levels we find more and more mechanised, stereotyped and predictable patterns. In the language of the physicist, a holon on a higher level of the hierarchy has more degrees of freedom than a holon on a lower level. ~ Arthur Koestler,

279:The book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count. ~ Nat Hentoff,

280:Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future. ~ Arthur Koestler,

281:But the history of science teaches that most discoveries were made by several people independently from each other, at more or less the same time; and this fact alone (apart from all other considerations) is sufficient to show that when the time is ripe for a given type of invention or discovery, the favourable chance event which sparks it off is bound to occur sooner or later. ~ Arthur Koestler,

282:Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque. ~ Arthur Koestler,

283:If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats. ~ Arthur Koestler,

284:The humorist has solved his problem by joining two incompatible matrices together in a paradoxical synthesis. His audience, on the other hand, has its expectations shattered and its reason affronted by the impact of the second matrix on the first; instead of fusion there is collision; and in the mental disarray which ensues, emotion, deserted by reason, is flushed out in laughter. ~ Arthur Koestler,

285:For the same reason, he insisted on treating the sun as the centre of his system not only in the physical but in the geometrical sense, by making the distances and positions of the planets relative to the sun (and not relative to the earth or the centre C) the basis of his computations. The shift of emphasis, which was more instinctive than logical, became a major factor in his success. ~ Arthur Koestler,

286:I am trying to stress a point which they do not sufficiently emphasize, or tend to overlook altogether-namely, that the organism is not a mosaic aggregate of elementary physico-chemical processes, but a hierarchy in which each member, from the sub-cellular level upward, is a closely integrated structure, equipped with self-regulatory devices, and enjoys an advanced form of self-government. ~ Arthur Koestler,

287:I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion. ~ Arthur Koestler,

288:The conditions for original thinking are when two or more streams of research begin to offer evidence that they may converge and so in some manner be combined. It is the combination which can generate new directions of research, and through these it may be found that basic units and activities may have properties not before suspected which open up a lot of new questions for experimental study. ~ Arthur Koestler,

289:History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves. ~ Arthur Koestler,

290:Illusion, then, is the simultaneous presence and interaction in the mind of two universes, one real, one imaginary. It transports the spectator from the trivial present to a plane remote from self-interest and makes him forget his own preoccupations and anxieties; in other words, it facilitates the unfolding of his participatory emotions, and inhibits or neutralizes his self-asserting tendencies. ~ Arthur Koestler,

291:El marxismo, como el freudianismo ortodoxo, como el catolicismo, es un sistema cerrado. El sistema cerrado excluye la posibilidad de la argumentación objetiva, mediante dos procedimientos relacionados entre sí: a) de acuerdo con las reglas escolásticas, se quita todo valor probatorio a los hechos; b) se invalidan las objeciones desplazando la discusión al motivo psicológico que provoca la objeción. ~ Arthur Koestler,

292:I have coined the term 'bisociation' in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane', as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed. ~ Arthur Koestler,

293:In Germany, Martin Heidegger turned against his former mentor Edmund Husserl, but later Heidegger's friends and colleagues turned their backs on him. In France, Gabriel Marcel attacked Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre fell out with Camus, Camus fell out with Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty fell out with Sartre, and the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler fell out with everyone and punched Camus in the street. ~ Sarah Bakewell,

294:The two together-intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis-are the essence of the aesthetic experience. The first constitutes the moment of truth; the second provides the experience of beauty. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible process-that 'earthing' process where 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, as it were, attainable there' (Carlyle). ~ Arthur Koestler,

295:Thus one should not underestimate ripeness as a factor facilitating discoveries which, as the saying goes, are 'in the air'-meaning, that the various components which will go into the new synthesis are all lying around and only waiting for the trigger-action of chance, or the catalysing action of an exceptional brain, to be assembled and welded together. If one opportunity is missed, another will occur. ~ Arthur Koestler,

296:The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links. ~ Arthur Koestler,

297:The comic effect of the satire is derived from the simultaneous presence, in the reader's mind, of the social reality with which he is familiar, and of its reflections in the distorting mirror of the satirist. It focuses attention on abuses and deformities in society of which, blunted by habit, we were no longer aware; it makes us suddenly discover the absurdity of the familiar and the familiarity of the absurd. ~ Arthur Koestler,

298:It is impossible to decide whether a particular detail of the Pythagorean universe was the work of the master, or filled in by a pupil a remark which equally applies to Leonardo or Michelangelo . But there can be no doubt that the basic features were conceived by a single mind; that Pythagoras of Samos was both the founder of a new religious philosophy, and the founder of Science, as the word is understood today. ~ Arthur Koestler,

299:He found out that those processes wrongly known as “monologues” are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other against all grammatical rules, addresses him as “I” instead of “you”, in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be localized in time and space. ~ Arthur Koestler,

300:Progress in the apparently most rational of human pursuits was achieved in a highly irrational manner, epitomized by Gauss' 'I have had my solutions for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them'. The mind, owing to its hierarchic organization, functions on several levels at once, and often one level does not know what the other is doing; the essence of the creative act is bringing them together. ~ Arthur Koestler,

301:In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet. ~ Arthur Koestler,

302:I merely wish to point out that some of the major break-throughs in the history of science represent such dramatic tours de force, that 'ripeness' seems a very lame explanation, and 'chance' no explanation at all. Einstein discovered the principle of relativity 'unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before'; the plum was overripe, yet for half a century nobody came to pluck it. ~ Arthur Koestler,

303:... on the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared belief-systems. It is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group-psychology. ~ Arthur Koestler,

304:Every good joke contains an element of the riddle-it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging-which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation. ~ Arthur Koestler,

305:The integrative powers of life are manifested in the phenomena of symbiosis between organelles, in the varied forms of partnership within the same species or between different species; in the phenomena of regeneration, in lower species, of complete individuals from their fragments; in the re-formation of scrambled embryonic organs, etc. The self-assertive tendency is equally ubiquitous in the competitive struggle for life. ~ Arthur Koestler,

306:Why, if evolution were a free for all, restrained only by selection for fitness, why did Australia not produce some of the bug-eyed monsters of science fiction? The only moderately unorthodox creation of that isolated island in a hundred million years are the kangaroos and wallabies; the rest of its fauna consists of rather poor replicas of more efficient placental types-vatiations on a limited number of archetypal themes. ~ Arthur Koestler,

307:No man is an island- he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole, looking outward as a dependent part. His self-assertive tendency is the dynamic manifestation of his unique wholeness, his autonomy and independence as a holon. Its equally universal antagonist, the integrative tendency, expresses his dependence on the larger whole to which he belongs: his 'part-ness.'. ~ Arthur Koestler,

308:...Una vez hubo un matemático que dijo que el álgebra era una ciencia para la gente perezosa, puesto que uno no conoce el valor de X,pero opera con él como si lo conociese. En nuestro caso, X representa a las masas anónimas, al pueblo. La política es el arte de hacer operaciones con esta X sin preocuparse por conocer su naturaleza real, mientras que hacer historia consiste en dar a X el valor exacto que debe tener en la ecución. ~ Arthur Koestler,

309:The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles-until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Com ~ Arthur Koestler,

310:A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder straps of its uniform—and in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?

A second, smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

311:Now microbes seem to have an enormous mutation rate (or some other method of hereditary adaptation), for, within a few years, they have evolved new drug-resistant strains. We humans cannot perform such evolutionary feats. But we can simulate major adaptive mutations by adding iodine to the drinking water, or by putting drops into the eyes of the newborn, to protect them from enemies against which our natural defences are inadequate. ~ Arthur Koestler,

312:In other words, evolution is neither a free-for-all, nor the execution of a rigidly predetermined computer programme. It could be compared to a musical composition whose possibilities are limited by the rules of harmony and the structure of the diatonic scales-which, however, permit an inexhaustible number of original creations. Or it could be compared to the game of chess obeying fixed rules but with equally inexhaustible variations. ~ Arthur Koestler,

313:The myopic child, who sometimes saw the world doubled or quadrupled, became the founder of modern optics (the word 'dioptries' on the oculist's prescription is derived from the title of one of Kepler's books); the man who could only see clearly at a short distance, invented the modern astronomical telescope. We shall have occassion to watch the working of this magic dynamo, which transforms pain into achievement and curses into blessings. ~ Arthur Koestler,

314:Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. ~ Arthur Koestler,

315:That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, muck later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process. ~ Arthur Koestler,

316:Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands. ~ Arthur Koestler,

317:War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars; and loyalty is a noble thing. I do not mean, of course, that loyalty must necessarily be expressed in group violence-merely that it is a precondition of it; that self-transcending devotion, all through history, has acted as a catalyst for secondary aggression. ~ Arthur Koestler,

318:that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. ~ Arthur Koestler,

319:In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka. ~ Arthur Koestler,

320:As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. ~ Arthur Koestler,

321:Since we cannot in the foreseeable future expect the necessary change in human nature to arise by way of a spontaneous mutation, that is, by natural means, we must induce it by artificial means. We can only hope to survive as a species by developing techniques which supplant biological evolution. We must search for a cure for the schizophysiology inherent in man's nature, and the resulting split in our minds, which led to the situation in which we find ourselves. ~ Arthur Koestler,

322:I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system. ~ Arthur Koestler,

323:The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process. ~ Arthur Koestler,

324:Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet. ~ Arthur Koestler,

325:Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia, Hermann Hesse's Glimpse Into Chaos, Edmund Husserl's The Crisis in European Science, Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, René Guenon's The Reign of Quantity, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Colin Wilson's The Outsider—the list could go on. ~ Gary Lachman,

326:The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him feel that he is a part of some larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self. This psychological urge to belong, to participate, to commune is as primary and real as its opposite. The all-important question is the nature of that higher entity of which the individual feels himself a part. ~ Arthur Koestler,

327:When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong. ~ Arthur Koestler,

328:One conclusion which emerged from this imaginary operation was that all changes in electric and magnetic force (for instance, those caused by an oscillating circuit) sent waves spreading through space; and that these waves had the same transverse character, and the same speed, as light. 'We can scarcely avoid the inference', he wrote in a monumental sentence, 'that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. ~ Arthur Koestler,

329:Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majoram gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith, or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal? ~ Arthur Koestler,

330:The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern. ~ Arthur Koestler,

331:Each morphogenetic field or organ primordium displays the holistic character of an automous unit, a self-regulating holon. If half of the field's tissue is cut away, the remainder will form not half an organ but a complete organ. If, at a certain stage of its development, the eye-cup is split into several isolated parts, each fragment will form a smaller, but normal, eye; and even the artificially scrambled and filtered cells of a tissue will, as we have seen (page 69), re-form again. ~ Arthur Koestler,

332:The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion. ~ Arthur Koestler,

333:In fact, the animal does not merely adapt to the environment, but constantly adapts the environment to itself. It eats environment, drinks environment, fights and mates environment, burrows and builds in the environment; and even in observing environment, it modifies, dismantles, analyses, and reassembles it after its own fashion, converting 'noise' into 'information'. 'Perception', Woodworth wrote, 'is always driven by a direct, inherent motive which might be called "the will to perceive". ~ Arthur Koestler,

334:......the integration of matrices is not a simple operation of adding together. It is a process of mutual interference and cross-fertilization, in the course of which both matrices are transformed in various ways and degrees. Hidden axioms, implied in the old codes, suddenly stand revealed and are subsequently dropped; the rules of the game are revised before they enter as sub-rules into the composite game. When Einstein bisociated energy and matter, both acquired a new look in the process. ~ Arthur Koestler,

335:Numbers are eternal while everything else is perishable; they are of the nature not of matter, but of mind; they permit mental operations of the most surprising and delightful kind without reference to the coarse external world of the senses-which is how the divine mind must be supposed to operate. The ecstatic contemplation of geometrical forms and mathematical laws is therefore the most effective means of purging the soul of earthly passion, and the principle link between man and divinity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

336:Lo que distingue al rebelde crónicamente indignado del revolucionario consciente es que el primero es capaz de cambiar de causa y el segundo, no. El rebelde dirige su indignación de pronto contra esta injusticia, de pronto contra aquella; el revolucionario es un hombre que odia con método, que ha reunido toda su capacidad de odio en un solo objeto. El rebelde siempre tiene algún rasgo quijotesco; el revolucionario es un burócrata de la utopía. El rebelde es entusiasta; el revolucionario, fanático. ~ Arthur Koestler,

337:but the odd fact is that Copernicus had hit on the ellipse which is the form of all planetary orbits - had arrived at it for the wrong reasons and by faulty deduction - and having done so, promptly dropped it: the passage is crossed out in the manuscript, and is not contained in the printed edition of the Revolutions. The history of human thought is full of lucky hits and triumphant eurekas; it is rare to have on record one of the anti-climaxes, the missed opportunity which normally leaves no trace. ~ Arthur Koestler,

338:I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society-he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

339:Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian. ~ Arthur Koestler,

340:I was less angry at [Carl] Armstrong, though I was angry at the people who came to his trial: Dan Ellsberg, who ordinarily I respected a lot; Philip Berrigan; the guy who teaches at Princeton still - I can't remember his name. And they were saying - well, they were saying, really, what Arthur Koestler had people saying on "Darkness at Noon." The means were unfortunate and, sadly, someone died, but the end is what is important and this was a great symbolic - something or other - sign against the war in Vietnam. ~ Nat Hentoff,

341:As we ascend to the hierarchies of living matter, we find, even on the lowest level observable through the electron microscope, sub-cellular structures-organelles-of staggering complexity. And the most striking fact is that these minuscule parts of the cell function as self-governing wholes in their own right, each following its own statute-book of rules. One type of organelles look as quasi-independent agencies after the cell's growth; others after its energy supply, reproduction, communications, and so on. ~ Arthur Koestler,

342:Cigarettes to be fetched for me from the canteen,' said Rubashov.
'Have you got prison vouchers?'
'My money was taken from me on my arrival,' said Rubashov.
'Then you must wait until it has been changed for vouchers.'
'How long will that take in this model establishment of yours?' asked Rubashov.
'You can write a letter of complaint,' said the old man.
'You know quite well that I have neither paper nor pencil,' said Rubashov.
'To buy writing materials you have to have vouchers,' said the warder. ~ Arthur Koestler,

343:Theories of ethics based on enlightened self-interest fail to provide an answer why a man should sacrifice his life in the defence of his family-not to mention country, liberty, beliefs. The fact that men have always been prepared to die for (good, bad, or futile) causes, proves that the self-transcending tendencies are as basic to his mental organization as the others. And since the individual cannot survive without some form of social integration, self-preservation itself always implies a component of self-transcendence. ~ Arthur Koestler,

344:Huxley was haunted by the fear that this 'Final Revolution', brought about by the combined effect of drugs and the mass media, could create 'within a generation or so for entire societies a sort of painless concentration camp of the mind, in which people will have lost their liberties in the enjoyment of a dictatorship without tears'. In other words, Huxley advocated the use of mescaline and other psychedelic drugs, to guide us along the eightfold path towards cosmic consciousness, mystic enlightenment, and artistic creativity, ~ Arthur Koestler,

345:The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears…. ~ Arthur Koestler,

346:Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head. ~ Arthur Koestler,

347:Matrices vary in flexibility from reflexes and more or less automatized routines which allow but a few strategic choices, to skills of almost unlimited variety; but all coherent thinking and behaviour is subject to some specifiable code of rules to which its character of coherence is due-even though the code functions partly or entirely on unconscious levels of the mind, as it generally does. A bar-pianist can perform in his sleep or while conversing with the barmaid; he has handed over control to the automatic pilot, as it were. ~ Arthur Koestler,

348:The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in. ~ Arthur Koestler,

349:Did there realy exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, form the top of the mountain spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one’s goal before one’s eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night. ~ Arthur Koestler,

350:Apparently in some birds such as thrushes, warblers, pippits, the whole song is genetically 'built in' and can be but slightly modified by learning; while in others, for instance the skylark, it is mainly learned. In Chaffinches Thorpe has shown that 'while the basic pattern of the song is innate, all the finer detail and much of the pitch and rhythm have to be acquired by learning.' We have another example of a 'roughed in' pattern whose details are filled in later by that particular type of 'feedback' process which constitutes learning. ~ Arthur Koestler,

351:One branch after another of chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river as it approaches the estuary-to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose its identity, and evaporate into the clouds; the final act of the great vanishing process, and the beginning, one hopes, of a new cycle. It has been said that we know more and more about less and less. It seems that the more universal the 'laws' which we discover, the more elusive they become, and that the ultimate consummation of all rivers of knowledge is in the cloud of unknowing. ~ Arthur Koestler,

352:Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful. In the outline of history published by the Party for the evening classes for adults, it is emphasized that during the first few centuries the Christian religion realized an objective progress for mankind. Whether Jesus spoke the truth or not, when he asserted he was the son of God and of a virgin, is of no interest to any sensible person. It is said to be symbolical, but the peasants take it literally. We have the same right to invent useful symbols which the peasants take literally. ~ Arthur Koestler,

353:All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations. ~ Arthur Koestler,

354:The ribosomes, for instance, which manufacture proteins, rival in complexity any chemical factory. The mitochondria are power plants which extract energy from food by a complicated chain of chemical reactions involving some fifty different steps: a single cell may have up to five thousand such power plants. Then there are the centrosomes, with their spindle apparatus, which organises the incredible choreography of the cell dividing into two; and the DNA spirals of heredity, coiled up in the inner sanctum of the chromosomes, working their even more potent magic. ~ Arthur Koestler,

355:Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,

356:Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact...but it needs light from heaven above to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student is accustomed to seeing. ~ Arthur Koestler,

357:The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of noting; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole. Man's knowledge of the changes of the tides and the phases of the moon is as old as his observation that apples fall to earth in the ripeness of time. Yet the combination of these and other equally familiar data in Newton's theory of gravity changed mankind's outlook on the world. ~ Arthur Koestler,

358:For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a symbolic model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All he knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do is to perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of expression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen, man has a metaphorical consciousness. Any attempt to get a direct grasp at naked reality is self-defeating; Urania, too, like the other muses, always has a last veil left to fold in. ~ Arthur Koestler,

359:If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

360:Among other members of our cell I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Founder and Director of the Sex-Pol. (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called 'The Function of the Orgasm,' in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds. ~ Arthur Koestler,

361:Israel’s rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us. ~ Arthur Koestler,

362:Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy. ~ Arthur Koestler,

363:The only way out of this cul-de-sac seems to be to substitute for genetic atomism, which has so drastically broken down, the concept of the genetic micro-hierarchy, with its own built-in rules, that permit a great amount of variation, but only in limited directions on a limited number of themes. This really amounts to the revival of an ancient idea which goes back to Goethe-and even further to Plato. The point is worth a short historical digression-which may make it clear why the concept of homology has such great importance not only for the biologist, but also for the philosopher. ~ Arthur Koestler,

364:Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can. ~ Arthur Koestler,

365:Generally speaking, words like 'agent of,' 'Democracy,' 'Freedom,' etc. meant something quite different in Party usage from what they meant in general usage; and as, furthermore, even their Party meaning changed with each shift of the line, our polemical methods became rather like the croquet game of the Queen of Hearts, in which the hoops moved about the field and the balls were live hedgehogs. With this difference, that when a player missed his turn and the Queen shouted 'Off with his head,' the order was executed in earnest. To survive, we all had to become virtuosos of Wonderland croquet. ~ Arthur Koestler,

366:Thus after electricity and magnetism had been united, both were now united to light. Electro-magnetic radiations came to be regarded as rapid alternations of electrical and magnetic stresses in space, where each change in the electric stress gives rise to a magnetic stress, which again gives rise to an electric stress and so on. Soon the range of these radiations was shown to comprise not only the visible spectrum between the ultra-violet and the infra-red of radiant heat, but to extend to the ultra-short gamma rays of radioactivity, and to the kilometre-long waves used in radio-communication. ~ Arthur Koestler,

367:Only geniuses preserve their infantile voracity for 'becauses'-and the naive hope that there are real answers to every question. 'Why is the moon round? Why does the apple fall from the tree? Why are there five planets instead of twenty , and why do they move as they do? Why does milk go sour? Why could the dairymaid not get the pox? Why is the colour of a sailor's blood in the tropics a brighter red than in Hamburg? Why did the frog's legs twitch?' One of the hallmarks of genius is that he has never lost the habit of asking foolish questions like these- each of which led to a momentous discovery. ~ Arthur Koestler,

368:It is a process running in circles-in circles which get narrower, like the coils of a spiral, as the cell becomes more and more specialised. The genes control the activities of the cell by relatively simple coded instructions which are spelt out in the complex operations of the cell-body. But the activities of the genes are in turn guided by feedbacks from the cell-body, which is exposed to the hierarchy of environments. this contains, apart from the chemical triggers, a number of other factors in the 'epigenetic landscape' which are relevant to the cell's future, and about which the genes must be informed. ~ Arthur Koestler,

369:There is an enormous body of literature, fiction and nonfiction, written about the period 1933–1945, so Alan Furst’s recommendations for reading in that era are very specific. He often uses characters who are idealistic intellectuals, particularly French and Russian, who become disillusioned with the Soviet Union but still find themselves caught up in the political warfare of the period. “Among the historical figures who wrote about that time,” Furst says, “Arthur Koestler may well be ‘first among equals.’ ” Furst suggests Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as a classic story of the European intellectual at midcentury. ~ Alan Furst,

370:This experience of partness within a dynamic whole leads to a temporary suspension of individual responsibility-which is replaced by unconditional subordination to the 'controlling centre', the leader of the crowd. It further entails the temporary effacement of all self-assertive tendencies: the total surrender of the individual to the collectivity is manifested in altruistic, heroic, self-sacrificing acts-and at the same time in bestial cruelty towards the enemy or victim of the collective whole. This is a further example of the self-transcending emotions serving as catalysts or triggers for their opponents. ~ Arthur Koestler,

371:The satirist's most effective weapon is irony. Its aim is to defeat the opponent on his own ground by pretending to accept his premises, his values, his methods of reasoning, in order to expose their implicit absurdity. 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Irony purports to take seriously what it does not; it enters into the spirit of the other person's game to demonstrate that its rules are stupid or vicious. It is a subtle weapon, because the person who wields it must have the imaginative power of seeing through the eyes of his opponent, of projecting himself into the other's mental world. ~ Arthur Koestler,

372:They were aware that the symbols of mythology and the the symbols of mathematical science were different aspects of the same, indivisible Reality. They did not live in a 'divided house of faith and reason'; the two were interlocking, like ground-plan and elevation on an architect's drawing. It is a state of mind very difficult for twentieth-century man to imagine- or even to believe that it could ever have existed. It may help to remember though, that some of the greatest pre-Socratic sages formulated their philosophies in verse; the unitary source of inspiration of prophet, poet, and philosopher was still taken for granted. ~ Arthur Koestler,

373:Beauty is a function of truth, truth a function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the lived experience of the creative act-and of its re-creative echo in the beholder-they are inseparable as thought is inseparable from emotion. They signal, one in the language of the brain, the other of the bowels, the moment of the Eureka cry, when 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite'-when eternity is looking through the window of time. Whether it is a medieval stained-glass window or Newton's equation of universal gravity is a matter of upbringing and chance; both are transparent to the unprejudiced eye. ~ Arthur Koestler,

374:While serving one of his countless sentences of imprisonment, he was given ex-wrestler Paul as cell companion. Paul was at that time a dock worker; he was in jail for having, during a strike riot, remembered his professional past and applied the grip known as a double Nelson to a policeman. This grip consisted in passing one's arms through the opponent's armpits from behind, locking one's hands behind his neck,
and pressing his head down until the neck vertebra began to crack. In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done. ~ Arthur Koestler,

375:Matrices vary from fully automatized skills to those with a high degree of plasticity; but even the latter are controlled by rules of the game which function below the level of awareness. These silent codes can be regarded as condensations of learning into habit. Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behaviour; they also have a tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables him to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation-the defeat of habit by originality. ~ Arthur Koestler,

376:These waves, then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, travelling through a non-medium in multi-dimensional non-space, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man's question after the nature of reality. The waves that seem to constitute matter are interpreted by some physicists as completely immaterial 'waves of probability' marking out 'disturbed areas' where an electron is likely to 'occur'. They are as immaterial as the waves of depression, loyalty, suicide, and so on, that sweep over a country ' From here there is only one step to calling them abstract, mental, or brain waves in the Universal Mind - without irony. ~ Arthur Koestler,

377:The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment. ~ Arthur Koestler,

378:Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometric love. ~ Arthur Koestler,

379:There were so many who wished to speak. For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such was her law. The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her, neither did she care what went on in his head and his heart. The Party knew only one crime: to swerve from the course laid out; and only one punishment: death. Death was no mystery in the movement: there was nothing exalted about it: it was the logical solution to political divergences. ~ Arthur Koestler,

380:A curious fact about inductors is that they seem to be organ-specific but not species-specific. The optic cup of a frog transplanted under a salamander embryo's skin will cause it to produce a lens; the primary organizer of the salamander will induce brain structures not only in frogs but even in fish; and the organizer of a frog, even of a fish, can induce secondary embryos in the obliging salamander. But the induced embryo will be a salamander, not a frog or a fish; and the frog-skin transplanted on to the salamander's head will form a frog-mouth, not a salamander-mouth. In this respect, too the evocator seems to act merely as a trigger-releaser on the genetic potential of the cell. ~ Arthur Koestler,

381:For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings of her course. Her course had many twists and windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such was her law. The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her, neither did she care what went on in his head and his heart. The Party knew only one crime: to swerve from the course laid out; and only one punishment: death. Death was no mystery in the movement; there was nothing exalted about it: it was the logical solution to political divergences ~ Arthur Koestler,

382:The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of living organisms-in other words, the fact that the molecules of living matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical, are in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other-or like right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to the left, 'right-handed' molecules to the right; life substances are thus 'optically active'. Why this should be so we still do not quite know; but it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic is as distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'. ~ Arthur Koestler,

383:The cause of the Party’s defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife anew sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voices is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked… ~ Arthur Koestler,

384:There is only a limited number of plots, recurring down the ages, derived from an even more limited number of basic patterns-the conflicts, paradoxes, and predicaments inherent in man's condition. And if we continue the stripping game, we find that all these paradoxes and predicaments arose from conflicts between incompatible frames of experience or scales of value, illuminated in consciousness by the bisociative act. In this final illumination Aristotle saw 'the highest form of learning' because it shows us that we are 'men, not gods'; and he called tragedy 'the noblest form of literature' because it purges suffering from its pettiness by showing that its causes lie in the inescapable predicaments of existence. ~ Arthur Koestler,

385:When 'consciousness' is unawares transferred from great things to small' - which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter-the result will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the trivial planes meet; he 'sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero perish or a sparrow fall'. The scientist's attitude is basically similar in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal event and a general law of nature - Newton's apple or the boiling kettle of James Watt. ~ Arthur Koestler,

386:The Harmony of the World is the continuation of tye Cosmic Mystery, and the climax of his lifelong obsession. What Kepler attempted here is, simply, to bare the ultimate secret of the universe in an all-embracing synthesis of geometry, music, astrology, astronomy, and epistemology. It was the firat attempt of this kind since Plato, and it is the last to our day. After Kepler, fragmentation of experience sets in again, science is divorced from religion, religion from art, substance from form, matter from mind.

The work is divided into five books. The first two deal with the concept of harmony in mathematics; the following three with the applications of this concept to music, astrology, and astronomy, in that order. ~ Arthur Koestler,

387:The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same
time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to
choose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that he
should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish
good and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and
treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a
wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could
not be stopped or influenced - and the Party demanded that the wheel
should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was
somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out. ~ Arthur Koestler,

388:The differentiation of organ systems, organ parts, etc, is a stepwise affair which has been compared to the way a sculptor carves a statue out of a block of wood. With each step in the development the functions assigned to each group of cells become more precise, and more of its genetic potential is suppressed-until in the end most cells lose even their basic freedom to divide. By the time the fertilized ovum has developed into an adult organism, the individual cell has been reduced from totipotentiality to almost nullipotentiality. It still carries the coded blue-print of the whole organism in its chromosomes, but all, except that tiny fraction of the code which regulates its specialized activities, has been permanently switched off. ~ Arthur Koestler,

389:Let me repeat: to talk of 'directiveness' , or purpose in this limited sense, in ontogeny, has become respectable once more; but to apply these terms to phylogeny is still considered heretical (or at least in bad taste). But phylogeny is an abstraction, which only acquires a concrete meaning when we realise that 'phylogeny, evolutionary descent, is a sequence of ontogenies', and that 'the course of evolution is through changes in ontogeny'. The quotations in the previous sentence are actually also by Simpson and contain the answer to his own conundrum about the Purposer behind the purpose. The Purposer is each and every individual organism, from the inception of life, which struggled and strove to make the best of its limited opportunities. ~ Arthur Koestler,

390:All efforts of persuasion by reasoned argument rely on the implicit assumption that homo sapiens, though occasionally blinded by emotion, is a basically rational animal, aware of the motives of his own actions and beliefs-an assumption which is untenable in the light of both historical and neurological evidence. All such appeals fall on barren ground; they could take root only if the ground were prepared by a spontaneous change in human mentality all over the world-the equivalent of a major biological mutation. Then, and only then, would mankind as a whole, from its political leaders down to the lonely crowd, become receptive to reasoned argument, and willing to resort to those unorthodox measures which would enable it to meet the challenge. ~ Arthur Koestler,

391:Different types of cells (brain cells, muscle cells, etc.) differ from each other in the structure and chemistry of their cell-bodies. The differences are due to the interaction between gene-complex cell-body and the cell's environment. In each growing and differentiating tissue a different portion of the total gene-complex is active-only that branch of the gene-hierarchy which is concerned with the functions assigned to the tissue in question; the remainder of teh genes is 'switched off'. And if we inquire into the nature of the agency which switches genes on and off, we find once more the familiar devices of triggers and feedbacks. The 'triggers' are the chemical 'inducers', 'organisers', 'operators' and 'repressors', etc. already mentioned. ~ Arthur Koestler,

392:They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled. Where were they? Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each received a charge of lead. Some in the forehead, some in the back of the neck. Only two or three of them were left over, scattered throughout the world, worn out. ~ Arthur Koestler,

393:Neither mystic insights, nor philosophic wisdom, nor creative power can be provided by pill or injection. The psycho-pharmacist cannot add to the faculties of the brain-but he can, at best, eliminate obstructions and blockages which impede their proper use. He cannot aggrandise us-but he can, within limits, normalise us; he cannot put additional circuits into the brain, but he can, again within limits, improve the co-ordination between existing ones, attenuate conflicts, prevent the blowing of fuses, and ensure a steady power supply. That is all the help we can ask for-but if we were able to obtain it, the benefits to mankind would be incalculable; it would be the 'Final Revolution' in a sense opposite to Huxley's-the break-through from maniac to man. ~ Arthur Koestler,

394:Or one can visualize the process as follows: as the planet approaches the sun, its speed increases. It shoots past the sun, but as it does so, the clutching hand of gravity swings it round - as a running child grabbing at a maypole is swung around it - so that it now continues in the opposite direction. If its velocity on the approach-run had been exactly the amount required to prevent it from falling into the sun, it would continue in a circle. But as it was slightly greater, the receding run will carry it into an elongated path, which the planet pursues at slackening speed in the teeth of the sun's attraction, as it were, gradually curving inward; until, after passing the aphelion, the curve again approaches the sun and the whole cycle starts again. ~ Arthur Koestler,

395:The 'magic' of organ-regenerations, and of unconscious guidance in creativity, both owe their striking character to the sudden re-activation of (morphogenetic or psychogenetic) potentials which are normally under restraint in the adult individual. The period of incubation may be compared to the catabolic phase in organ-regeneration: the former releases pre-conceptual, intuitive modes of ideation from the censorship imposed by the conscious mind; the latter triggers off embryonic growth-processes equally inhibited by the mature organism. The contact-guidance of nerves towards their end-organs and the revival of other pre-natal skills, provide enticing parallels to the unconscious gradients and ancient 'waterways' which mediate the underground rendezvous of ideas. ~ Arthur Koestler,

396:The new territory opened up by the impetuous advance of a few geniuses, acting as a spearhead, is subsequently occupied by the solid phalanxes of mediocrity; and soon the revolution turns into a new orthodoxy, with its unavoidable symptoms of one-sidedness, over-specialization, loss of contact with other provinces of knowledge, and ultimately, estrangement from reality. We see this happening-unavoidably, it seems-at various times in the history of various sciences. The emergent orthodoxy hardens into a 'closed system' of thought, unwilling or unable to assimilate new empirical data or to adjust itself to significant changes in other fields of knowledge; sooner or later the matrix is blocked, a new crisis arises, leading to a new synthesis, and the cycle starts again. ~ Arthur Koestler,

397:I don't approve of mixing ideologies," Ivanov continued. "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community--which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible. ~ Arthur Koestler,

398:We cannot get away from the infinite. It stares us in the face whether we look at atoms or stars, or at the becauses behind the becauses, stretching back through eternity. Flat-earth science has no more use for it than the flat-earth theologians had in the Dark Ages; but a true science of life must let infinity in, and never lose sight of it. In two earlier books I have tried to show that throughout the ages the great innovators in the history of science had always been aware of the transparency of phenomena towards a different order of reality, of the ubiquitous presence of the ghost in the machine -even such a simple machine as a magnetic compass or a Leyden jar. Once a scientist loses the sense of mystery, he can be an excellent technician, but he ceases to be a savant. ~ Arthur Koestler,

399:To sum up: at various stages of embryonic development, and at various structural levels, we find different biochemical mechanisms, but analogue principles at work. At every stage and level the game is played according to fixed rules but with flexible strategies (although their flexibility is normally hidden from the eye and revealed only by the transplantation and grafting techniques of experimental embryology). The overall rules of the game are laid down in the complete set of instructions operative at any level at any time is triggered off by messages from the inter- and extra-cellular environment, which vary in character according to structural level and developmental stage: fertilizing agents, cytoplasmic feedbacks, direct-contact evocators, hormones, and other catalysts. ~ Arthur Koestler,

400:The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process. It leads not only to a reevaluation of the problem itself, but often to a synthesis of much wider consequences, brought about by a fusion of the two previously unrelated frames of reference. In our case, the orbit of Mars became the unifying link between the two formerly seperate realms of physics and cosmology. ~ Arthur Koestler,

401:There are no new themes in literature, as there are no new human instincts; but every age provides new variations and sublimations, new settings and a different set of rules for fighting the old battles all over again. To quote G.W. Brandt: 'There is basically only a limited number of plots; they can be seen, in different guises, recurring down the ages. The reason is in life itself. Human relationships, whilst infinitely varied in detail, reveal-stripped down to fundamentals-a number of repetitive patterns. Writers straining to invent a plot entirely fresh have known this for a long time. Goethe quoted Gozzi's opinion that there were only thirty-six tragic situations-and he added that Schiller, who believed that there were more, had not even succeeded in finding as many as that. ~ Arthur Koestler,

402:It seems to me that there should be only allusions. The contemplation of objects, the volatile image of the dreams they evoke, these make the song: the Parnassians [the classicist movement of Leconte de Lisle, Heredia, etc.] who make a complete demonstration of the object thereby lack mystery; they deprive the [reader's] mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates. To name the thing means forsaking three quarters of a poem's enjoyment-which is derived from unraveling it gradually, by happy guesswork: to suggest the thing creates the dream. Symbols are formed when this secret is used to perfection: to evoke little by little, the image of an object in order to demonstrate a mood; or, conversely, to choose an object and to extract from it a mood, by a series of decipherings.) ~ Arthur Koestler,

403:The Russells arrive at the same conclusion: "There is certainly no evidence from mamamalian behaviour that social aggression is more prevalent or intense among carnivores than among herbivores. And as for humans: "There is certainly no evidence that social violence has been more prevalent or intense in carnivorous hunting than in vegetarian agricultural societies. Hunting people have sometimes been extremely war-like; but no human group has produced more peaceful communities than some of the Eskimos, who have been carnivorous hunters, presumably, since the Old Stone Age.' The Samurai, on the other hand, were strict vegetarians; and so were the Hindu mobs in India which massacred their Moslem brethren whenever given a chance. It was not the eating of reindeer-steaks which caused the Fall. ~ Arthur Koestler,

404:We are in the habit of visualizing .. the history of science as a steady, cumulative process,.. where each epoch adds some new item of knowledge to the legacy of the past, making the temple of science grow brick by brick to ever greater height.. In fact, .. the philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness and amnesia. The great discoveries .. were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.. Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes' time. ~ Arthur Koestler,

405:The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music which, through discordant tensions, through sincopes and cadenzas, as it were (as men employ them in imitation of those natural discords), progresses towards certain pre-designed, quasi six-voiced clausuras, and thereby sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time. It is, therefore, no longer surprising that man, in imitation of his creator, has at last discovered the art of figured song, which was unknown to the ancients. Man wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time within a short hour, by an artful symphony for several voices, to obtain a sample test of the delight of the Divine Creator in His Works, and to partake of his joy by making music in the imitation of God. ~ Arthur Koestler,

406:In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and precepts of life, we may be tempted to reverse the game, and to paint a picture of the founders of the Academy and the Lyceum as two frightened men standing in the self-same Cave, facing the wall, chained to their places in a catastrophic age, turning their back on the flame of Greece's heroic era, and throwing grotesque shadows which are to haunt mankind for a thousand years and more. ~ Arthur Koestler,

407:But again the facts did not tally with the scheme, and had to be explained away by ingenious reasoning. The 15-sided polygon, for instance, is construable, but does not produce a musical consonance. Moreover, the number of construable polygons is infinite, but Kepler only needed seven harmonic relations for his scale (octave, major and minor sixth, fifth, fourth, major, and minor third). Also, the harmonies had to be arranged into a hierarchy of varying degrees of 'knowability', or perfection. Kepler devoted as much labour to this fantastic enterprise as to the determination of the orbit of Mars. In the end he succeeded, to his own satisfaction, in deriving all his seven harmonies, by certain complicated rules of the game, from his perfect polygons. He had traced back the laws of music to the Supreme Geometer's mind. ~ Arthur Koestler,

408:I have shown experimentally that any group of bulbar or spinal nerve cells taken from vertebrates, if deprived of their structural bonds of restraining influences and allowed to undergo a certain degree of degradation, will display permanent automatic, rhythmic, synchronized activity of remarkable regularity. Rhythmic activity, therefore, seems a basic property of pools of nervous elements.
....The rhythm is not something generated through an input rhythm, but is itself a primary rhythm which may be released and even speeded up or retarded by the input, but is not derived from the input. So we have experimental evidence that rhythmic automatism, autonomy of pattern, and hierarchical organization are primary attributes of even the simplest nervous systems, and I think that this unifies our ciew of the nervous system. ~ Arthur Koestler,

409:But at keast we know that the Brotherhood was both a scientific academy and a monastic order; that its members led an ascetic communal life where all property was shared, thus anticipating the Essenes and the primitive Christian communities. We know that much of their time was spent in contemplation, and that initiation into the higher mysteries of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine depended upon the purification of spirit and body, which the aspirant had to achieve by abstinences and examinations of conscience. Pythagoras himself, like St. Francis, is said to have preached to animals; the whole surviving tradition indicates that his disciples, while engaged in number-lore and astronomical calculations, firmly believed that a true scientist must be a saint, and that the wish to become one was the motivation of his labours. ~ Arthur Koestler,

410:Projection' in this technical sense means that the processes which take place in the retina and the brain are experienced as taking place not where they actually do take place, but yards or miles away. (This becomes at once obvious when one remembers that very low-pitched sounds are experienced-correctly-as reverberations inside the ear, and dazzling flashes, again correctly, as occurring in the retina.) Similarly, when you drive a nail into the wall you are aware, not that the handle has struck your palm, but that its head has struck the nail, as if the hammer had become part of your body. These are not inventions of psychologists to make the simple appear as complicated, but examples of our tendency to confuse what happens in the self with what happens outside it-a kind of 'perceptual symbiosis' between ego and environment. ~ Arthur Koestler,

411:Ivanov- "Up to now , all revolutions have been made by moralizing diletantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent..."

"Yes," said Rubashov. "So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Artic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. ... ~ Arthur Koestler,

412:It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.

It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast. ~ Arthur Koestler,

413:Genetic atomism is dead. Hereditary stability and hereditary change are both based, not on a mosaic of genes, but on the action of the gene-complex 'as a whole'. But this face-saving expression-which is now coming into increased use-is empty, like so many other holistic formulations, unless we interpolate between the gene-complex as a whole, and the individual gene, a hierarchy of genetic sub-assemblies-self-regulating holons of heredity, which control the development of organs, and also control their possible evolutionary modifications, by canalising the effects of random mutations. A hierarchy with its built-in, self-regulatory safeguards is a stable affair. It cannot be pulled in here, pulled out there, like Patou belabouring his model. It is capable of variation and change, but only in co-ordinated ways and only in limited directions. ~ Arthur Koestler,

414:The highly civilized apes swung gracefully from bough to bough; the Neanderthaler was uncouth and bound to the earth. The apes, saturated and playful, lived in sophisticated playfulness, or caught fleas in philosophic contemplation; the Neanderthaler trampled gloomily through the world, banging around with clubs. The apes looked down on him amusedly from their tree tops and threw nuts at him. Sometimes horror seized them: they ate fruits and tender plants with delicate refinement; the Neanderthaler devoured raw meat, he slaughtered animals and his fellows. He cut down trees that had always stood, moved rocks from their time-hallowed place, transgressed every law and tradition of the jungle. He was uncouth, cruel, without animal dignity – from the point of view of the highly civilized apes, a barbaric relapse of history. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon ~ John N Gray,

415:It was not individual aggression which got out of hand, but devotion to the narrow social group with which the individual identified himself to the hostile exclusion of all other groups. It is the process we have discussed before: the integrative tendency, manifested in primitive forms of identification, serving as a vehicle for the aggressive self-assertiveness of the social holon.

To put it in a different way: to man, intra-specific differences have become more vital than intra-specific affinities; and the inhibitions which in other animals prevent intra-specific killing, work only within the group. In the rat it is the smell which decides who is friend or foe. In man, there is a terrifyingly wide range of criteria, from territorial possession through ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological differences, which decide who stinks and who does not. ~ Arthur Koestler,

416:Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space. ~ Arthur Koestler,

417:What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people...." And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either, But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one's goal before one's eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night. ~ Arthur Koestler,

418:When the Babylonians began to chart the stars, they first of all grouped them together into constellations of lions, virgins, archers, and scorpions-shaped them into sub-assemblies, celestial holons. The first calendar-makers wove the linear thread of time into the hierarchic pattern of solar days, lunar months, stellar years, Olympic cycles. Similarly, the Greek astronomers broke up homogenous space into the hierarchy of the eight heavenly spheres, each equipped with its clockwork of epicycles.

We cannot help interpreting Nature as an organisation of parts-within-parts, because all living matter and all stable inorganic systems have a part-within-part architecture, which lends them articulation, coherence, and stability; and where the structure is not inherent or discernible, the mind provides it by projecting butterflies into the ink-blot and camels into the clouds. ~ Arthur Koestler,

419:Thus, when the eye-cups (the future retina), which grow out of the brain at the end of two stalks (the future optic nerves), make physical contact with the surface, the skin over the contact area folds into the concave cups and differentiates into transparent lenses (see arrows on the right of the diagram). The eye-cup induces the skin to form a lens, and the lens in its turn induces adjacent tissues to form a transparent horny membrane, the cornea. Moreover, if an eye-cup is transplanted under the skin on the belly of a frog embryo, the skin over it will obligingly differentiate into a lens. We may regard this obligingness or 'docility' of embryonic tissue, its readiness to differentiate into the kind of organ best suited to the tissue's position in the growing organism, as a manifestation of the integrative tendency, of the part's subordination to the interests of the whole. ~ Arthur Koestler,

420:A fact, once discovered, leads an existence of its own, and enters into relations with other facts of which their discoverers have never dreamt. Apollonius of Perga discovered the laws of the useless curves which emerge when a plane intersects a cone at various angles: these curves proved, centuries later, to represent the paths followed by planets, comets, rockets, and satellites.

One cannot escape the feeling [wrote Heinrich Herz] that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.

This confession of the discoverer of radio-waves sounds suspiciously like an echo of Kepler, echoing Plato, echoing Pythagoras: 'Methinks that all of nature and the graceful sky are set into symbols in geomatriam. ~ Arthur Koestler,

421:It would indeed seem more expedient to treat the history of thought in terms borrowed from biology..(, with) "evolution" .. a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection, and by the dead-ends of overspecialization and rigid inadaptability.. New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast majority of them are useless crank theories, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. The process of "natural selection", too, has its equivalent in mental evolution: among the multitude of new concepts which emerge only those survive which are well adapted to the period's intellectual milieu. A new theoretical concept will live or die according to whether it can come to terms with this environment.. ~ Arthur Koestler,

422:Thus only the pattern is cosmically determined, not any particular event; within that pattern, man is free. In his later years, this Gestalt concept of cosmic destiny became more abstract and purified from dross. The individual soul, which bears the potential imprint of the entire sky, reacts to the light coming from the planets according to the angles they form with each other, and the geometrical harmonies or disharmonies that result - just as the ear reacts to the mathematical harmonies of music, and the eye to the harmonies of colour. This capacity of the soul to act as a cosmic resonator has a mystic and a causal aspect: on the one hand it affirms the soul's affinity with the anima mundi, on the other, it makes it subject to strictly mathematical laws. At this point, Kepler's particular brand of astrology merges into his all-embracing and unifying Pythagorean vision of the Harmony of the Spheres. ~ Arthur Koestler,

423:Lastly, the vast number of existing animal species (about one million) and the small number of major classes (about fifty) and of major phyla or divisions (about ten), could be compared with the vast number of works of literature and the small number of basic themes or plots. All works of literature are variations on a limited number of leitmotivs, derived from man's archetypal experiences and conflicts, but adapted each time to a new environment-the costumes, conventions and language of the period. Not even Shakespeare could invent an original plot. Goethe quoted with approval the Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi, according to whom there are only thirty-six tragic situations. Goethe himself thought that there were probably even less; but their exact number is a well-kept secret among writers of fiction. A work of literature is constructed out of thematic holons-which, like homologue organs, need not even have a common ancestor. ~ Arthur Koestler,

424:No man is an island-he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole, looking outward as a dependent part. His self-assertive tendency is the dynamic manifestation of his unique wholeness, his autonomy and independence as a holon. Its equally universal antagonist, the integrative tendency, expresses his dependence on the larger whole to which he belongs: his 'part-ness'. The polarity of these two tendencies, or potentials, is one of the leitmotivs of the present theory. Empirically, it can be traced in all phenomena of life; theoretically, it is derived from the part-whole dichotomy inherent in the concept of the multi-layered hierarchy; its philosophical implications will be discussed in later chapters. For the time being let me repeat that the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness. ~ Arthur Koestler,

425:But it was Poincare who wrote that what guided him in his unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations' which yield new discoveries was 'the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of number, of forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all mathematicians know.' The greatest among mathematicians and scientists, from Kepler to Einstein, made similar confessions. 'Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics', wrote G.H. Hardy in his classic, A Mathematician's Apology. Jacques Hadamard, whose pioneer work on the psychology of invention I have quoted, drew the final conclusion: "The sense of beauty as a "drive" for discovery in our mathematical field, seems to be almost the only one.' And the laconic pronouncement of Dirac, addressed to his fellow-physicists, bears repeating: 'It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. ~ Arthur Koestler,

426:But it is doubtful whether it is permissible to say that the electron 'occupies space' at all. Atoms have the capacity of swallowing energy and of spitting out energy - in the form of light rays, for instance. When a hydrogen atom, the simplest of all, with a single electron-planet, swallows energy, the planet jumps from its orbit to a larger orbit - say, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars; when it emits energy, it jumps back into the smaller orbit. But these jumps are performed by the planet without it passing through the space that separates the two orbits. It somehow de-materializes in orbit A and re-materializes in orbit B. Moreover, since the amount of 'action' performed by the hydrogen electron while going once round its orbit is the indivisibly smallest quantum of action (Planck's basic constant 'h'), it is meaningless to ask at what precise point of its orbit the electron is at a given moment of time. It is equally everywhere. ~ Arthur Koestler,

427:In his reply Pasteur explained that although an inescapable conclusion of thinking, the notion of infinity is incomprehensible to human reason-indeed more incomprehensible than all the miracles of religion: 'I see everywhere in the world the inevitable expression of the concept of infinity. The idea of God is nothing more than one form of the idea of infinity. So long as the mystery of the infinite weighs on the human mind, so long will temples be raised to the cult of the infinite, whether God be called Brahmah, Allah, Jehovah or Jesus....The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language-the word 'enthusiasm'-en theos-a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within-an ideal of beauty and who obeys it, an ideal of art, of science. All are lighted by reflection of the infinite. ~ Arthur Koestler,

428:In the early days of genetics, a gene could be 'dominant' or 'recessive', and that was about all there was to it; but gradually more and more terms had to be added to the vocabulary: repressors, apo-repressors, co-repressors, inducers, modifier genes, switch genes, operator genes which activate other genes, and even genes which regulate the rate of mutations in genes. Thus the action of the gene-complex was originally conceived as the unfolding of a simple linear sequence like that on a tape-recorder or the Behaviourist's conditioned-reflex chain; whereas it is now gradually becoming apparent that the genetic controls operate as a self-regulating micro-hierarchy, equipped with feedback devices which guide their flexible strategies. This not only protects the growing embryo against the hazards of ontogeny; it would also protect it against the evolutionary hazards of phylogeny, or random mutations in its own hereditary materials-the blind antics of the monkey at the typewriter. ~ Arthur Koestler,

429:Experience teaches,” said Gletkin, “that the masses must be given for all difficult and complicated processes a simple, easily grasped explanation. According to what I know of history, I see that mankind could never do without scapegoats. I believe it was at all times an indispensable institution; your friend Ivanov taught me that it was of religious origin. As far as I remember, he explained that the word itself came from a custom of the Hebrews, who once a year sacrificed to their god a goat, laden with all their sins.” Gletkin paused and shoved his cuffs into place. “Besides, there are also examples in history of voluntary scapegoats. At the age when you were given a watch, I was being taught by the village priest that Jesus Christ called himself a lamb, which had taken on itself all sin. I have never understood in what way it could help mankind if someone declares he is being sacrificed for its sake. But for two thousand years people have apparently found it quite natural. ~ Arthur Koestler,

430:It had a strange resemblance to Kafka's novel,The Trial- that dream-like allegory of a man who,having received a mysterious convocation to attend his 'trial",strives and struggles in vain to find out where the trial would be held and what it would be about; wherever he inquires he receives non - commital,elusive replies,as if everybody has joined in a secret conspiracy:the closer he gets to his aim,the farther it recedes,like the transparent walls of a dream:and the story ends abruptly,as it began,in tormenting suspense.The High Court which Kafka's hero is unable to find is his own conscience:but what was the symbolic meaning of all these nut-cracker-faced,nail-biting,pimpled,slimy features,spinning their spider webs of intrigue and sabotage in the bureaux of the French Administration?Perhaps I was really guilty,I and my like:perhaps our guilt was the past,the guilt of having forseen the catastrophe and yet failed to open the eyes of the blind.But if we were guilty-who were they to sit in judgement over us? ~ Arthur Koestler,

431:Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history? Not to mention the legions of those who die of under-nourishment and tuberculosis in coal and quicksilver mines, rice-fields and cotton plantations. No one takes any notice of them; nobody asks why or what for; but if here we shoot a few thousand objectively harmful people, the humanitarians all over the world foam at the mouth. Yes, we liquidated the parasitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year—only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself? ~ Arthur Koestler,

432:It was Owen who defined 'homologous organs' as 'the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function'. While he tirelessly demonstrated the multitude of such organs in the animal kingdom, he attributed them to the parsimony of the divine Designer-just as Kepler had attributed his planetary laws to the ingenuity of the divine Mathematician.

But whatever the beliefs of these men, the concept of homology came to stay, and became a cornerstone of modern evolutionary theory. Animals and plants are made out of homologous organelles like the mitochondria, homologous organs like gills and lungs, homologous limbs such as arms and wings. They are the stable holons in the evolutionary flux. The phenomena of homology implied in fact the hierarchic principle in phylogeny as well as in ontogeny. But the point was never made explicit, and the principles of hierarchic order hardly received a cursory glance. This may be why the inherent contradictions of the orthodox theory could pass so long unnoticed. ~ Arthur Koestler,

433:All this refers to one aspect only of the evolution of reptiles; needless to say, countless other essential transformations of structure and behaviour were required to make the new creatures viable. The changes could have been gradual-but at each step, however small, all the factors involved in the story had to cooperate harmoniously. The liquid store in the egg makes no sense without the shell. The shell would be useless, in fact murderous, without the allantois and without the tin-opener. Each change, taken in isolation, would be harmful, and work against survival. You cannot have a mutation A occurring alone, preserve it by natural selection, and then wait a few thousand or million years until mutation B joins it, and so on, to C and D. Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all interdependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to commonsense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation. ~ Arthur Koestler,

434:And just as rhythm is not an artificial embellishment of language but a form of expression which predates language, so visual images and symbols are not fanciful embroideries of concepts, but precursors of conceptual thought. The artist does not climb a ladder to stick ornaments on a facade of ideas-he is more like a pot-holer in search of underground rivers. To quote Kretschmer for the last time: 'Such creative products of the artistic imagination tend to emerge from a psychic twilight, a state of lessened consciousness and diminished attentivity to external stimuli. Further, the condition is one of "absent-mindedness" with hypnoidal over-concentration on a single focus, providing an entirely passive experience, frequently of a visual character, divorced from the categories of space and time, and reason and will. These dreamlike phases of artistic creation evoke primitive phylogenetic tendencies towards rhythm and stylization with elemental violence; and the emergent images thus acquire in the very act of birth regular form and symmetry. ~ Arthur Koestler,

435:This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcending element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the harmony of the spheres, the origin of life, the equations of a unified field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power, the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life'.

This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond. ~ Arthur Koestler,

436:This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcending element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the harmony of the spheres, the origin of life, the equations of a unified field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power, the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life'.

This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond. ~ Arthur Koestler,

437:It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. . . .

Perhaps later, much later, the new movement would arise—with new flags, a new spirit knowing of both: of economic fatality and the “oceanic sense.” Perhaps the members of the new party will wear monks’ cowls, and preach that only purity of means can justify the ends. Perhaps they will teach that the tenet is wrong which says that a man is the quotient of one million divided by one million, and will introduce a new kind of arithmetic based on multiplication: on the joining of a million individuals to form a new entity which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop a consciousness and an individuality of its own, with an “oceanic feeling” increased a millionfold, in unlimited yet self-contained space.

Rubashov broke off his pacing and listened. The sound of muffled drumming came down the corridor. ~ Arthur Koestler,

438:In the first place, a new synthesis never results from a mere adding together of two fully developed branches in biological or mental evolution. Each new departure, each reintegration of what has become separated, involves the breaking down of the rigid, ossified patterns of behaviour and thought. Copernicus failed to do so; he tried to mate the heliocentric tradition with orthodox Aristotelian doctrine, and failed. Newton succeeded because orthodox astronomy had already been broken up by Kepler and orthodox physics by Galileo; reading a new pattern into the shambles, he united them in a new conceptual frame. Similarly, chemistry and physics could only become united after physics had renounced the dogma of the indivisibility and impermeability of the atom, thus destroying its own classic concept of matter, and chemistry had renounced its doctrine of ultimate immutable elements. A new evolutionary departure is only possible after a certain amount of de-differentiation, a cracking and thawing of the frozen structures resulting from isolated, over-specialized development. ~ Arthur Koestler,

439:But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress several meanings or allusions into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It is certainly an essential ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the great monologues in Finnegans Wake is overcharged with allusions and implications. To revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands that the stepping stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough apart to require a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him feel like a runner in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and aggravated by a mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce would perhaps be the perfect writer-of the perfect reader existed. ~ Arthur Koestler,

440:When one thinks of 'matrices' and 'codes' it is sometimes helpful to bear these figures in mind. The matrix is the pattern before you, representing the ensemble of permissible moves. The code which governs the matrix can be put into simple mathematical equations which contain the essence of the pattern in a compressed, 'coded' form; or it can be expressed by the word 'diagonals'. The code is the fixed, invariable factor in a skill or habit; the matrix its variable aspect. The two words do not refer to different entities, they refer to different aspects of the same activity. When you sit in front of the chessboard your code is the rule of the game determining which moves are permitted, your matrix is the total of possible choices before you. Lastly, the choice of the actual move among the variety of permissible moves is a matter of strategy, guided by the lie of the land-the 'environment' of other chessmen on the board. We have seen that comic effects are produced by the sudden clash of incompatible matrices: to the experienced chess player a rook moving bishopwise is decidedly 'funny'. ~ Arthur Koestler,

441:What a mess,” [Rubashov] said, “what a mess we have made of our golden age.”

Ivanov smiled. “Maybe,” he said happily. “Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent. . . .”

“Yes,” said Rubashov. “. . . So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death . . . .

“We all thought one could treat history like one experiments in physics. The difference is that in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once. . . . Comrade Bogrov will not come to life again.”

“And what follows?” asked Ivanov. “Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil? We vouch for every act with our heads—more cannot be expected of us. In the opposite camp they are not so scrupulous. Any old idiot of a general can experiment with thousands of living bodies; and if he makes a mistake, he will at most be retired. ~ Arthur Koestler,

442:Leaving controversial issues aside, the first and main purpose of this book may be summed up by a phrase of Laplace: “If we were able to make an exact catalogue of all particles and forces which are active in a speck of dust, the laws of the universe at large would hold no more mysteries for us”. On a medium-sized school globe the State of Israel occupies not much more space than a speck of dust; and yet there is hardly a political, social or cultural problem whose prototype cannot be found in it, and found in a rare concentration and intensity. The very smallness of this country of about three-quarters of a million souls makes it easy to survey trends which in other nations appear confused and diluted by size. The fact that it so often was in the past, and is again in the present, in the focus of global conflicts and passions, makes the speck of dust glow in a phosphorescent light. The fact that it is a State of Jews, and of Jews of the most conscious and intense type, makes the microscopic processes in this microscopic country reflect laws of universal validity: for Jewry is not a question of race—“it is the human condition carried to its extreme”. ~ Arthur Koestler,

443:Poincare was equally specific: 'It may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked a propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know. The useful combinations [of ideas] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility.' Max Planck, the father of quantum theory wrote in his autobiography that the pioneer scientist must have 'a vivid intuitive imagination for new ideas not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.' The quotations could be continued indefinitely, yet I cannot recall any explicit statement to the contrary by any eminent mathematician or physicist.

Here, then, is the apparent paradox. A branch of knowledge which operates predominantly with abstract symbols, whose entire rationale and credo are objectivity, verifiability, logicality, turns out to be dependent on mental processes which are subjective, irrational, and verifiable only after the event. ~ Arthur Koestler,

444:[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.
Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive! ~ Arthur Koestler,

445:Let the chromosomes be represented by the keyboard of a grand piano-a very grand piano with thousands of keys. Then each key will be a gene. Every cell in the body carries a microscopic but complete keyboard in its nucleus. But each specialised cell is only permitted to sound one chord, according to its specialty-the rest of its genetic keyboard has been inactivated by scotch tape. The fertilised egg, and the first few generations of its daughter cells, had the complete keyboard at their disposal. But succesive generations have, at each 'point of no return', larger and larger areas of it covered by scotch tape. In the end, a muscle cell can only do one thing: contract-strike a single chord.

The scotch tape is known in the language of genetics as the 'repressor'. The agent which strikes the key and activates the gene is an 'inducer'. A mutated gene is a key which has gone out of tune. When quite a lot of key have gone quite a lot out of tune, the result, we were asked to believe, was a much improved, wonderful new melody- a reptile transformed into a bird, or a monkey into a man. It seems that at some point the theory must have gone wrong.

The point where it went wrong was the atomistic concept of the gene. ~ Arthur Koestler,

446:We have seen how laughter is sparked off by the collision of matrices; discovery, by their integration; aesthetic experience by their juxtaposition. Snobbery follows neither of these patterns; it is a hotchpotch of matrices, the application of the rules of one game to another game. It uses a clock to measure weight, and a thermometer to to measure distance. The creative mind perceives things in a new light, the snob in a borrowed light; his pursuits are sterile, and his satisfactions of a vicarious nature. He does not aim at power; he merely wants to rub shoulders with those who wield power, and bask in their reflected glory. He would rather be a tolerated hanger-on of an envied set than a popular member of one to which by nature he belongs. What he admires in public would bore him when alone, but he is unaware of it. When he reads Kirkegaard, he is not moved by what he reads, he is moved by himself reading Kirkegaard-but he is blissfully unaware of it. His emotions do not derive from the object, but from extraneous sources associated with it; his satisfactions are pseudo-satisfactions, his triumphs self-delusions. He has never travelled in the belly of the whale; he has opted for the comforts of sterility against the pangs of creativity. ~ Arthur Koestler,

447:Most of the general considerations in the chapter on 'The Evolution of Ideas' equally apply to the evolution of art. In both fields the truly original geniuses are rare compared with the enormous number of talented practitioners; the former acting as spearheads, opening up new territories, which the latter will then diligently cultivate. In both fields there are periods of crisis, of 'creative anarchy', leading to a break-through to new frontiers-followed by decades, or centuries of consolidation, orthodoxy, stagnation, and decadence-until a new crisis arises, a holy discontent, which starts the cycle again. Other parallels could be drawn: 'multiple discoveries' -the simultaneous emergence of a new style, for which the time is ripe, independently in several places; 'collective discoveries' originating in a closely knit group, clique, school, or team; 'rediscoveries'- the periodic revivals of past and forgotten forms of art; lastly 'cross-fertilizations' between seemingly distant provinces of science and art. To quote a single example: the rediscovery of the treatise on conic sections by Apollonius of Perga, dating from the fourth century B.C., gave the ellipse to Kepler who built on it a new astronomy-and to Guarini, who introduced new vistas into architecture. ~ Arthur Koestler,

448:The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapers, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow , for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession, dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. The Communist purges, as the word 'purge' indicates, were understood as operations of social hygiene, to prepare mankind for the golden age of the classless society. The gas chambers and crematoria worked for the advent of a different version of the millennium. Heinrich Eichmann (as Hannah Ahrendt, reporting on his trial, has pointed out) was not a monster or a sadist, but a conscientious bureaucrat, who considered it his duty to carry out his orders and believed in obedience as the supreme virtue; far from being a sadist, he felt physically sick on the only occasion when he watched the Zircon gas at work. ~ Arthur Koestler,

449:So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. ~ Arthur Koestler,

450:What had they done to Bogrov? What had they done to this sturdy sailor, to draw this childish whimpering from his throat? Had Arlova whimpered in the same way when she was dragged along the corridor? Rubashov sat up and leant his forehead against the wall behind which No. 402 slept; he was afraid he was going to be sick again. Up till now, he had never imagined Arlova’s death in such detail. It had always been for him an abstract occurrence; it had left him with a feeling of strong uneasiness, but he had never doubted the logical rightness of his behaviour. Now, in the nausea which turned his stomach and drove the wet perspiration from his forehead, his past mode of thought seemed lunacy. The whimpering of Bogrov unbalanced the logical equation. Up till now Arlova had been a factor in this equation, a small factor compared to what was at stake. But the equation no longer stood. The vision of Arlova’s legs in their high-heeled shoes trailing along the corridor upset the mathematical equilibrium. The unimportant factor had grown to the immeasurable, the absolute; Bogrov’s whining, the inhuman sound of the voice which had called out his name, the hollow beat of the drumming, filled his ears; they smothered the thin voice of reason, covered it as the surf covers the gurgling of the drowning. ~ Arthur Koestler,

451:The concept of internal selection, of a hierarchy of controls which eliminate the consequences of harmful gene-mutations and co-ordinates the effects of useful mutations, is the missing link in orthodoxy theory between the 'atoms' of heredity and the living stream of evolution. Without that link, neither of them makes sense. There can be no doubt that random mutations do occur: they can be observed in the laboratory. There can be no doubt that Darwinian selection is a powerful force. But in between these two events, between the chemical changes in a gene and the appearance of the finished product as a newcomer on the evolutionary stage, there is a whole hierarchy of internal processes at work which impose strict limitations on the range of possible mutations and thus considerably reduce the importance of the chance factor. We might say that the monkey works at a typewriter which the manufacturers have programmed to print only syllables which exist in our language, but not nonsense syllables. If a nonsense syllable occurs, the machine will automatically erase it. To pursue the metaphor, we would have to populate the higher levels of the hierarchy with proof-readers and then editors, whose task is no longer elimination, but correction, self-repair and co-ordination-as in the example of the mutated eye. ~ Arthur Koestler,

452:He shivered. A picture appeared in his mind’s eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party. They sat at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees; bearded and earnest, they gazed into the photographer’s lens. Above each head was a small circle, enclosing a number corresponding to a name printed underneath. All were solemn, only the old man who was presiding had a sly and amused look in his slit Tartar eyes. Rubashov sat second to his right, with his pince-nez on his nose. No. 1 sat somewhere at the lower end of the table, four square and heavy. They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled. Where were they? Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each received a charge of lead. Some in the forehead, some in the back of the neck. Only two or three of them were left over, scattered throughout the world, worn out. And himself; and No. 1. ~ Arthur Koestler,

453:Not only the portraits on the walls, but also the shelves in the library were thinned out. The disappearance of certain books and brochures happened discretely, usually the day after the arrival of a new message from above. Rubashov made his sarcastic commentaries on it while dictating to Arlova, who received them in silence. Most of the works on foreign trade and currency disappeared from the shelves – their author, the People’s Commissar for Finance, had just been arrested; also nearly all old Party Congress reports treating the same subject; most books and reference-books on the history and antecedents of the Revolution; most works by living authors on problems of birth control; the manuals on the structure of the People’s Army; treatises on trade unionism and the right to strike in the People’s State; practically every study of the problems of political constitution more than two years old, and, finally, even the volumes of the Encyclopedia published by the Academy – a new revised edition being promised shortly.
New books arrived, too: the classics of social science appeared with new footnotes and commentaries, the old histories were replaced by new histories, the old memoirs of dead revolutionary leaders were replaced by new memoirs of the same defunct. Rubashov remarked jokingly to Arlova that the only thing left to be done was to publish a new and revised edition of the back numbers of all newspapers. ~ Arthur Koestler,

454:It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. Some historians wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime.
The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation. ~ Arthur Koestler,

455:Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one’s own navel, to turn up one’s eyes and humbly offer the back of one’s neck to Gletkin’s revolver—that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is ananachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. ...” He felt for the bottle behind him and poured out an other glass. Rubashov noticed that the bottle was already half empty. You also could do with a little solace, he thought.

“The greatest criminals in history,” Ivanov went on, “are not of the type Nero and Fouché, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy. Gandhi’s inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is. ~ Arthur Koestler,

456:We have seen quite a few cats being let out of the bag- the mathematical mind, which is supposed to have such a dry, logical, rational texture. As a last example in this chapter I shall quote the dramatic case of Friedrich August von Kekule', Professor of Chemistry in Ghent, who, one afternoon in 1865, fell asleep and dreamt what was probably the most important dream in history since Joseph's seven fat and seven lean cows:

I turned my chair to the fire and dozed, he relates. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke...Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.

The serpent biting its own tail gave Kekule' the clue to a discovery which has been called 'the most brilliant piece of prediction to be found in the whole range of organic chemistry' and which, in fact, is one of the cornerstones of modern science. Put in a somewhat simplified manner, it consisted in the revolutionary proposal that the molecules of certain important organic compounds are not open structures but closed chains or 'rings'-like the snake swallowing its tail. ~ Arthur Koestler,

457:I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants.

Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal? ~ Arthur Koestler,

458:Lastly, he hit on the idea of transferring the observer's position into the centre of the world, and to examine the variations in angular velocity, regardless of distance, as seen from the sun. And lo! it worked.

The results were even more gratifying than he had expected. Saturn, for instance, when farthest away from the sun, in its aphelion, moves at the rate of 106 seconds arc per day; when closest to the sun, and its speed is at maximum, at 135 seconds arc per day. The ratio between the two extreme velocities is 106 to 135, which only differs by two seconds from 4:5. - the major third. With similar, very small deviations (which were all perfectly explained away at the end), the ratio of Jupiter's slowest to its fastest motion is a minor third, Mars' the quint, and so forth. So much for each planet considered by itself. But when he compared the extreme angular velocities of pairs of different planets, the results were even marvellous:

"At the first glance the Sun of Harmony broke in all its clarity through the clouds."

The extreme values yield in fact the intervals of the complete scale. But not enough: if we start with the outermost planet, Saturn, in the aphelion, the scale will be in the major key; if we start with Saturn in the perihelion, it will be in the minor key. Lastly, if several planets are simultaneously at the extreme points of their respective orbits, the result is a motet where Saturn and Jupiter represent the bass, Mars the tenor, Earth and Venus the contralto, Mercury the soprano. On some occasions all six can be heard together: ~ Arthur Koestler,

459:These autonomous, self-regulating properties of holons within the growing embryo are a vital safeguard; they ensure that whatever accidental hazards arise during development, the end-product will be according to norm. In view of the millions and millions of cells which divide, differentiate, and move about in the constantly changing environment of fluids and neighbouring tissues-Waddington called it 'the epigenetic landscape'-it must be assumed that no two embryos, not even identical twins, are formed in exactly the same way. The self-regulating mechanisms which correct deviations from the norm and guarantee, so to speak, the end-result, have been compared to the homeostatic feedback devices in the adult organism-so biologists speak of 'developmental homeostasis'. The future individual is potentially predetermined in the chromosomes of the fertilised egg; but to translate this blueprint into the finished product, billions of specialized cells have to be fabricated and moulded into an integrated structure. The mind boggles at the idea that the genes of that one fertilised egg should contain built-in provisions for each and every particular contingency which every single one of its fifty-six generations of daughter cells might encounter in the process. However, the problem becomes a little less baffling if we replace the concept of the 'genetic blueprint', which implies a plan to be rigidly copied, by the concept of a genetic canon of rules which are fixed, but leave room for alternative choices, i.e., flexible strategies guided by feedbacks and pointers from the environment. But how can this formula be applied to the development of the embryo? ~ Arthur Koestler,

460:At the risk of repetitiveness I must once more mention here the Pythagoreans, the chief engineers of that epoch-making change. I have spoken in more detail elsewhere of the inspired methods by which, in their religious order, they transformed the Orphic mystery cult into a religion which considered mathematical and astronomical studies as the main forms of divine worship and prayer. The physical intoxication which had accompanied the Bacchic rites was superseded by the mental intoxication derived from philo-sophia, the love of knowledge. It was one of the many key concepts they coined and which are still basic units in our verbal currency. The cliche' about the 'mysteries of nature' originates in the revolutionary innovation of applying the word referring to the secret rites of the worshippers of Orpheus, to the devotions of stargazing. 'Pure science' is another of their coinages; it signified not merely a contrast to the 'applied' sciences, but also that the contemplation of the new mysteria was regarded as a means of purifying the soul by its immersion in the eternal. Finally, 'theorizing' comes from Theoria, again a word of Orphic origin, meaning a state of fervent contemplation and participation in the sacred rites (thea spectacle, theoris spectator, audience). Contemplation of the 'divine dance of numbers' which held both the secrets of music and of the celestial motions became the link in the mystic union between human thought and the anima mundi. Its perfect symbol was the Harmony of the Spheres-the Pythagorean Scale, whose musical intervals corresponded to the intervals between the planetary orbits; it went on reverberating through 'soft stillness and the night' right into the poetry of the Elizabethans, and into the astronomy of Kepler. ~ Arthur Koestler,

461:When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them. ~ Clive James,

462:The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first. So the question now ran: Was such an operation justified? Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of “mankind”; but, applied to “man” in the singular, to the cipher 2—4, the real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity. As a boy, he had believed that in working for the Party he would find an answer to all questions of this sort. The work had lasted forty years, and right at the start he had forgotten the question for whose sake he had embarked on it. Now the forty years were over, and he returned to the boy’s original perplexity. The Party had taken all he had to give and never supplied him with the answer. And neither did the silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they might be. And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called “ecstasy” and saints “contemplation”; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the “oceanic sense”. And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness. ~ Arthur Koestler,

463:We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died.

It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while.

The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it.

As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.

Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive. ~ Arthur Koestler,

464: ¿Qué tenían en común todos esos individuos? «No se distinguían por ningún rango u oficio.» Desempeñaban las más variadas ocupaciones. No eran partidarios fanáticos del régimen. Era la gente que, cuando me sentía perdido y desesperado, hacía que volviera a recuperar la fe en la Unión Soviética. Creaban a su alrededor pequeñas islas de orden y dignidad en medio de un océano de caos y absurdidad. Fuera cual fuese el ámbito en el que trabajaban, su influencia se transmitía a su entorno. Y es el conjunto de esas islas humanas, diseminadas por todo el Imperio soviético, lo que mantiene la coherencia de su estructura e impide que se desintegre. Esos hombres, sean o no comunistas, son «patriotas soviéticos» en el sentido con que esa palabra se usó al principio en la Revolución francesa. No son ni héroes ni santos, y todas sus virtudes cívicas van siempre en contra del régimen al que sirven. Están motivados por un grave sentido de responsabilidad en un país donde todo el mundo teme y elude la responsabilidad; tienen iniciativa y criterio independiente donde la obediencia ciega es la norma; son leales y entregados a sus semejantes en un mundo donde se espera lealtad solo hacia los superiores y entrega solo al Estado. Tienen honor personal y una dignidad de comportamiento inconsciente donde estas palabras son objeto de escarnio. Aunque hay miles de ellos, constituyen una pequeña minoría, y son siempre las primeras víctimas de cada nueva purga. Aun así, no desaparecen. Los que conocí en Rusia tenían en su mayoría treinta y poco años, y pertenecían a la generación posrevolucionaria. Actualmente vuelvo a encontrar el mismo tipo de personas entre los emigrados rusos de la posguerra, que pertenecen a una generación posterior. Esos hombres rectos, entregados, enérgicos y audaces fueron y son la columna vertebral de un régimen que niega todos los valores que representan. Como comunista, daba su existencia por sentado, ya que creía que eran el producto de la educación revolucionaria, ese «nuevo tipo de hombre» cuyo advenimiento había predicho Marx. Hoy día me doy cuenta de que su existencia es prácticamente un milagro, de que han llegado a ser lo que son no a causa de, sino a pesar de su educación: un triunfo de la indestructible sustancia humana sobre el entorno deshumanizador. ~ Arthur Koestler,

465:The Case of the Eyeless Fly

The fruit fly has a mutant gene which is recessive, i.e., when paired with a normal gene, has no discernible effect (it will be remembered that genes operate in pairs, each gene in the pair being derived from one parent). But if two of these mutant genes are paired in the fertilised egg, the offspring will be an eyeless fly. If now a pure stock of eyeless flies is made to inbreed, then the whole stock will have only the 'eyeless' mutant gene, because no normal gene can enter the stock to bring light into their darkness. Nevertheless, within a few generations, flies appear in the inbred 'eyeless' stock with eyes that are perfectly normal. The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is that the other members of the gene-complex have been 'reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise for the missing normal eye-forming gene.' Now re-shuffling, as every poker player knows, is a randomising process. No biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds of millions of years. Nor does the concept of natural selection provide the slightest help in this case. The re-combination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan which includes the rules of genetic self-repair after certain types of damage by deleterious mutations. But such co-ordinative controls can only operate on levels higher than that of individual genes. Once more we are driven to the conclusion that the genetic code is not an architect's blueprint; that the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, closely knit, self-regulating micro-hierarchy; and that mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels. This micro-hierarchy controls the pre-natal skills of the embryo, which enable it to reach its goal, regardless of the hazards it may encounter during development. But phylogeny is a sequence of ontogenies, and thus we are confronted with the profound question: is the mechanism of phylogeny also endowed with some kind of evolutionary instruction booklet? Is there a strategy of the evolutionary process comparable to the 'strategy of the genes'-to the 'directiveness' of ontogeny (as E.S. Russell has called it)? ~ Arthur Koestler,

466:Entirely my own opinion,” said Ivanov. “I am glad that we have reached the heart of the matter soon. In other words: you are convinced that “we” – that is to say, the Party, the State and the masses behind it – no longer represent the interests of the Revolution.”
“I should leave the masses out of it,” said Rubashov. […] “Leave the masses out of it, “ he repeated. “You understand nothing about them. Nor, probably, do I any more. Once, when the great “we” still existed, we understood them as no one had ever understood them before. We had penetrated into their depths, we worked in the amorphous raw material of history itself…” […] “At that time,” Rubashov went on, “we were called the Party of the Plebs. What did the others know of history? Passing ripples, little eddies and breaking waves. They wondered at the changing forms of the surface and could not explain them. But we had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were the first to discover her laws of motion. We had discovered the laws of her inertia, of the slow changing of her molecular structure, and of her sudden eruptions. That was the greatness of our doctrine. The Jacobins were moralists; we were empirics. We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever men have known about mankind; that is why our revolution succeeded. And now you have buried it all again….” […] “Well,” said Rubashov, “one more makes no difference. Everything is buried: the men, their wisdom and their hopes. You killed the “We”; you destroyed it. Do you really maintain that the masses are still behind you? Other usurpers in Europe pretend the same thing with as much right as you….” […] “Forgive my pompousness,” he went on, “but do you really believe the people are still behind you? It bears you, dumb and resigned, as it bears others in other countries, but there is no response in their depths. The masses have become deaf and dumb again, the great silent x of history, indifferent as the sea carrying the ships. Every passing light is reflected on its surface, but underneath is darkness and silence. A long time ago we stirred up the depths, but that is over. In other words” – he paused and put on his pince-nez – “in those days we made history; now you make politics. That’s the whole difference.” […] "A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people - one does not work out x, but operates with it as if one knew it. In our case, x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize x for what it stands for in the equation."

"Pretty," said Ivanov. "But unfortunately rather abstract. To return to more tangible things: you mean, therefore, that "We" - namely, Party and State - no longer represent the interests of the Revolution, of the masses or, if you like, the progress of humanity."
"This time you have grasped it," said Rubashov smiling. Ivanov did not answer his smile. ~ Arthur Koestler,

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