each hath one world, and is one

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No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.

No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium.


—Ernst Cassirer
Philosopher (1874 - 1945)

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Our conscious now—what William James dubbed the “specious present"—is actually an interval of about three seconds. That is the span over which our brains knit up arriving sense data into a unified experience.

—Jim Holt
When Einstein Walked with Gödel

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And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere. 

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.


—John Donne 1572 – 1631
The Good Morrow

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