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Scepticism regarding the Nature of GodPage 4The activity of the mind increases and intensifies continually, from sense-impression - the most passive stage - to forming the thing-concept, going on to forming the manifoldness of things; and this happens in such a way that, at each stage of building the picture of a consistent experience, the preceding stages appear as fixed and 'given'. The process of the work of consciousness needed to form the now secured layers of the experience, layers in which everything 'runs according to expectation', is now forgotten; the end-product of what was the raw material, the sense impressions and the mind's moulding now appears as material 'given' in its entirety. That roughly speaking, describes the frame of experience in daily life. It appears as a 'given', as if, with its systematic building that we see as normal expectations, the mind has simply been following an objective reality. In the next stage, the last reached so far, in the stage of experience in science, in scientifically formulated experience, the activity of the mind widens considerably, well beyond the spiritual work it invested in the more elementary layers of experience. Here, that which is given has to be laboriously assembled. And it then becomes obvious that constructing a picture of reality out of elements of something already termed 'given' and 'finding out' what is the given at this higher level, is actually one and the same activity: finding is constructing and constructing is finding. Indeed, the act of finding and constructing is nothing other than filling the gaps of the 'given'. Now, scientific experience deals with 'gaps' that are far greater and wider than daily life experience, Science's enclaves are within that which is already available to be judged as 'given' and are the result, to some extent, of not being in the right order in that which is available. Just as the pieces of a puzzle, thrown at random, show gaps where they are not in the correct order and will connect to one another without breaks if they are placed in the correct order, so the already achieved pieces of pre scientific experience will begin to show a systematic order once science succeeds in finding or constructing the context of greater wholes of experience, thereby eliminating that which may have earlier been considered as 'not given', i.e. the discontinuity in experience. That which is not given is, of course, always the subject of every scientific problem; it is the same as that which is not yet known. Once it is known or constructed, a gap is filled. Clearly, the problem of the correct order of pre-scientific or scientific data of experience always includes the possibility that certain data are missing altogether, in the same way that certain pieces in a puzzle may be missing. The most passive, least active, behaviour of the mind, the recording of sense impressions, corresponds to the narrowest range of experience. Pre-scientific experience covers a comparatively far wider range, and science tends to comprise partial wholes; these can already be brought to a closer relation with the all embracing whole, 'the world'. The activity of the mind would need to increase proportionately to the scope of the wider experience. If we look for concepts that denote this increase of mental activity, parallel to the increasing range of experience, we would find them in those distinct faculties of consciousness that are characterised by ever increasing 'creativity', under the names: sensing, perceiving, thinking, imagining. |
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